Today, “AI Lab” has become generic category language—used interchangeably with internal research units (e.g., “the OpenAI lab,” “Google AI Lab”, “WiRED AI Lab”), corporate R&D teams, university departments, and media newsletters.

I realize that shift affects my brand equity and the strategic paths I take going forward... and it has been a consideration of mine pretty strongly over the past year.

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The Strategic Friction

• Search & Discoverability Noise: Organic search for “AI Lab” or “AI LAB” is now dominated by enterprise announcements, academic research papers, and generic industry roundups. In the mix you will find my Substack (a top ‘100 in Design’ publication with 3 years of weekly posting history), my articles, and a few of my books... but they are only sprinkled.

• Category Confusion: Prospective corporate clients or workshop attendees may assume I am a software development shop, an incubator, or an internal research team rather than an educational and consultative practice focused on creative workflow integration. Reasonable to assume.

• Loss of Distinctive IP: A generic term doesn’t communicate my specific methodology, human-centric philosophy, or unique point of view before someone enters my ecosystem.

Having done Branding for nearly 30 years... I realized I needed to do a Rebrand Assessment.

With that in mind, I recognize that a total rebrand is costly in terms of established equity, backlink authority, and existing community recognition. That said, the challenge then is:

How might I leverage what exists, without diluting the story of the brand?

Strategies I could apply:

1 • Modifier / Anchor

I could retain ‘AI LAB’ as part of the name, but modify it. Like ‘AI LAB Studio’ or ‘The Human AI LAB’, or anchor it with my name (which is sort of what I have been doing: ‘Brian Sykes | AI LAB’) or my framework.

2 • Brand Evolution (Pivot)

I could shift fully to some sort of evocative or proprietary brand name that reflects Creative Control and Human Agency... This requires a long rebuild of brand equity from scratch.

3 • Keep & Rely on Sub-brands

I could simply keep ‘AI LAB’ as the umbrella entity, and let my proprietary newsletters, workshops, and frameworks carry the distinctions. I already do this in part - but it does not really address the name dilution I have experienced.

I realize that leaving ‘AI LAB’ naked and unmodified, works against me. I love the idea of ‘AI LAB’ - because to me it signals commercial level productivity, experimentation, active learning, and practical application. I did not feel I should abandon the name or idea, but it needs some distinctive qualification that would signal human-driven creative execution attached to me (Brian Sykes) rather than software development.

To me, “Brian Sykes | AI LAB” (Founder Anchor) is immediately the strongest and most pragmatic move. If you have followed any length of time, you have seen that in my posts on Linked and often even in my Substack.

• Solves the dilution: This turns a generic noun phrase into a recognized personal methodology and practice… no just the ‘AI LAB’, but it is mine!

• High enterprise trust: Corporate clients, agencies, and workshop organizers hire the specific practitioner and thinker, not an anonymous lab.

• Preserves equity: I don’t lose any existing recognition or continuity around AI LAB; I simply put your name on the door as the anchor.

The Identity

I thought on this for a bit - and came up with the following:

From a long time branding guy - let me tell you what should be working against me…

• The ‘Dropping’ baseline on the right — where “• AI LAB •” arcs downward, while “BRIAN SYKES” sits on a flat, solid baseline. This give an impression that it is sagging on the right.

• There is a visual wedge (or what people might call ‘trapped white space’) between my name and the beaker. Since the shapes are not squared off, the line-up feels off and unbalanced.

• The “• AI LAB •” arc functions like this odd, stand-alone badge glued to the side of what otherwise is a horizontal wordmark. This creates two competing alignment systems (linear + radial).

This is an Eminem trick - tell you what the problem is before you start dissing on it. But, there is a reason behind every bit of what I just pointed out. Let me show you.

In a logo, everyone that includes a beaker or glass - does a flat one, sitting solidly on the surface. Because… that makes sense. It is the reasonable thing that SHOULD be done. That is what reality, gravity, and a million other logos will point out. But I intentionally did not do it that way.

Why? Well, there is a lot about AI and the [Hu]man element that does not make sense, that does not 'sit well' with creatives. I understand and embrace that. It is not all perfect, not all equally balanced and even. it is intentionally misaligned.

AI does feel like it 'dips below the line' in reality right here and now. It does not fit in the way everything else can seemingly fit into a ‘nice container’ — boxed just so. AI does not play by all the traditional rules. Neither do humans either (technically).

I wanted to capture a bit of that in the logo itself.

Traditional identity design rules prioritize resolving tension — squaring the grid, leveling baselines, and harmonizing geometry. But what I am doing, isn't about fitting generative tech into a safe, sterile corporate box; it's about navigating the unstable, kinetic boundary where human intuition meets an unpredictable tool.

• The Tilted Flask: It stops being an off-axis icon and becomes an active pour or an unstable reaction. A beaker sitting flat is inert; a beaker tilted is in the middle of an experiment. It captures the volatility of creative exploration.

• The Broken Baseline: Letting “• AI LAB •” dip beneath the solid floor of my name, visually communicates that AI destabilizes the ground plane. It resists the clean, linear grid precisely because generative workflows don’t operate in straight lines, or clean boxes of traditional design.

• The Tension Between Name and Lab: The contrast between the rigid, structural block of “BRIAN SYKES” and the dynamic, arced, bubbling beaker creates an immediate dialogue: the solid foundation of human experience holding space for an unruly, bubbling experiment. The stable, and secure element - that is my name!

If the core philosophy is that AI doesn't neatly fit the conventional mold—and that human creative agency lives in that very friction—I feel this mark tells that story honestly. It feels like an active studio workspace rather than a sanitized tech badge. And it addresses my earliest concern with the now genericized name - ‘AI LAB’.

What do you think?

Note, that just as with other logo lockups, I can still work with standalone elements when creating assets. The bubbling beaker is sufficient for something like a shirt icon - without using the entire name - and it still correlates to the brand.

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Then Chris Hill — HumblePod, We Built This Brand, and current president of AMA Knoxville — asked the one question he closes with:

“What is the brand you currently most admire, and why?”

I said — JoshCavalier.ai.

Which is a suspicious answer, since I designed it.

I said that part out loud too. Because the honest version takes longer than a podcast outro allows, and it has almost nothing to do with the logo.

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The studio that was getting the details right

Thirty years ago I was teaching as an Adobe Certified Instructor for The Avenue Group out of Charlotte.

Somewhere in that orbit I noticed a small training studio called Interactive Fun — later Lodestone Digital. Nothing about it was loud. It was just... correct. The kind of correct you only notice if you do this for a living. Somebody there was making decisions about Learning and Development and how it gets delivered, that most shops weren’t bothering to make.

So I reached out, and asked whether there was room in his stable of Adobe and Macromedia trainers for one more.

Josh took me out for sushi.

We talked about contract work over the widest assortment of excellent rolls, and I started almost immediately. That handshake ran close to a decade.

Thirty years later, he’s one of the people I’ve known longest in this industry — and one of the very few I’ve actually had the privilege to work with at multiple points along the continuum of 30 years.

Every Friday, for years

Then AI showed up, and we started talking every Friday.

Not a scheduled call in the corporate sense. A standing one. Every week: what did you see, what did you break, what tool lied to you, what’s actually working. Observations, tools, problems uncovered. Years of that.

Those Fridays are partly where his book came from — Applying AI, published with ATD Press, and it launched exactly as well as it deserved to.

We stopped a couple months ago as we both were on the road now — Trish and I somewhere in the middle of Are We There Yet, Josh gone in his own direction with family activities, training opportunities, and speaking engagements — and the Fridays (between us) just went quiet. We promised to pick them back up once we both got more settled in routine.

I miss them more than I expected to.

“What should it look like?”

The book was about to land. He was going all-in on JoshCavalier.ai — full course direction, his whole practice under his own name.

So he asked me the question clients ask: what should the brand look like, and what story does it need to tell?

Here’s what I shared with him up front: there was nothing to invent.

The mission was already there. The philosophy was already there. Josh had been living it out loud on Friday calls for years and all the time in between. My whole job was to take the things that matched who Josh was, what he was doing, where he was heading - and capture it in a brand system that matched the core.

I’ll walk you through exactly how that went — the discovery, the dead ends, the three marks, where a 19th-century Zen painting came into it — starting with the next post.

Not here. Here I want to answer Chris’s actual question from the end of today’t interview.

Why it’s my favorite brand?

Because nothing in it is claimed… most brands write a check the company can’t cash. The deck might say enthusiastically - “innovative and human-centered,” and then you meet them, and they’re neither. There’s a gap between the outside and the inside, and every one of us can feel that gap in about thirty seconds.

JoshCavalier.ai has no gap.
When you get Josh, you get Josh.

The brand says he’s serious about the ethics of this thing — he is, and he was before it was a marketing position. It says he’s teaching, not selling — he is. It says human and AI belong in a loop together rather than one replacing the other — he’s believed that since long before I put it on a page.

I love the design. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.

But to me, that’s not the test. The test isn’t whether a brand is beautiful. It’s whether it’s accurate.

And I’d admire this one if a total stranger had built it, but I am honored I got to be the one to draft the visual - to match the actual human being behind it, that I count as friend.

The other question Chris asked…

Somewhere in that hour he’d also asked the one I actually started this Substack to answer:

How does AI get used in branding?

Short answer: not the way you might be picturing.

AI didn’t design Josh’s logo. AI has never had a Friday call with Josh. It doesn’t know what he sounds like when he’s annoyed at a model that won’t do what he asked. It doesn’t know the boldness to leave a steady income and venture into entrepreneurship again, when he is still paying on the loans from the last time.

Long answer takes a few posts…

We’ll start where the work actually started — before I opened a single design file.

The episode for the podcast drops in November over on HumblePod’s “We Built This Brand” podcast. I will share it here when it drops. In meantime, make sure are signed up and following so you don’t miss an episode.

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This is going to be rich… I guarantee it.

Your Logo Is Not Your Brand

Here’s something you don’t hear from branding and marketing professionals (or anybody else in the business world) when you’re starting a business:

You don’t get to decide your brand.
Your customers do.

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Marty Neumeier said it best —

Branding is the gut reaction/feeling someone has when your name crosses their mind (whether seen, read, or heard). Branding is not your logo, not your tagline, not the mission statement on your About page (that hardly anybody reads).

A brand is a reputation, and reputations are built in the space between what you promise and what you deliver.

This is the first official article in a framework I’m seeking to build here on HeadSpace Branding — a way for my readers to actually define their brand instead of guessing at it. Let’s start by clearing away some noise, and lending some clarity.

What Branding Isn’t

Three years ago, just before I closed my old agency AdJourney — my agency of 23 years, I made the video below trying to untangle this for clients who kept confusing branding with the stuff that just sits on top of it. The video was a FREE Zoom Workshop, and watching it feels a bit like a step back in time. You do not have to watch it (it’s over an hour), but I’ll share some insights here from this video.

A logo is a symbol, that’s all. You can change it tomorrow and the brand underneath doesn’t move… but because a logo is often associated with the represented brand, it bears with it, the ‘gut feelings’ the brand has. Much like the American Flag is not a living thing, but it symbolizes the ideals (and shortcomings) of the United States.

Your product isn’t your brand either. In fact, neither is your promise — though you’d better keep it. “Impressions” aren’t your brand (though often people confuse being seen a lot, to be their branding). But being seen a thousand times by people who feel nothing about you, is just noise with a bigger budget.

None of that is the thing itself. It’s packaging around the thing. The shell that holds the ideal. All the things branding and marketing agencies do - are not the brand.

What Branding Actually Is

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that make someone choose you over the guy next door — even when he’s cheaper.

It lives in the customer’s gut, not your brand guidelines PDF.

Which means your job isn’t to announce a brand. It’s to earn one, on purpose, instead of letting it happen to you by accident.

Here’s how.

The Six Attributes That Help Define a Brand

Most businesses skip straight to a tagline. That’s backwards. Or they try to get a visually compelling logo - and that is misplaced eye-candy.

Before you write a single word of marketing copy, or develop your first marketing push - you need clarity on six things. For each one, brainstorm 3–5 keywords. Then — and this is the hard part — cut it down to the single word that’s most true for the brand.

1 • Culture. How do your customers and your own employees actually describe working with you? If your internal team can’t say it in one sentence, your customers never will either.

2 • Customer. Who is your ideal customer, specifically? Not “everyone.” A name, a life stage, a specific frustration.

3 • Voice. If your brand were a person at a dinner party, or on a stage with an audience, or in a private conversation with a new individual - how would it talk? Formal? Irreverent? Blunt?

4 • Feel. What does someone feel in their body when they use what you sell? Relief? Calm? A sense of finally being taken seriously?

5 • Impact. What tangibly changes in someone’s life because they chose you? Not a vibe — a result.

6 • X Factor. What’s the thing no competitor can copy? The unexpected detail. The one moment that makes someone tell a friend about you unprompted.

Six words. That’s the whole brand, distilled.

Turning Six Words Into One Sentence

Once you’ve got your words, drop them into this:

[Business Name] provides [Product/Service] to a specific kind of [Customer] in a certain kind of [Culture] with a certain kind of [Voice], helping them feel [Feel] and delivering a tangible [Impact].

That sentence becomes your filter. Every headline, every hire, every design decision gets run through it. If it doesn’t match the sentence, it doesn’t go out the door.

“Everyone” Is Not a Customer

Here’s where most brands quietly fail. They niche down on paper with bold proclamations of singular focus, and then turn around and write marketing for “everyone” anyway. Why? because niching down feels like leaving money on the table.

But it’s the opposite. The specific customer is the one willing to skip your competitor and pay you instead. The vague customer was never going to buy from anyone. Never market to the vague guy - he does not need what you are selling, no matter how loudly you try to convince him.

So build an actual person. Give them a name so your internal team can related to them. People like — Active Andy, Overwhelmed Olivia, whoever fits. Someday I will share a few of these produced for clients that you can glean from!

Then fill in:

• Demographics — the basic data

• Descriptive summary — where they are in life right now

• Keywords — the exact words they type into Google, not the words you’d prefer they used

• Attitudes & pain points — what’s actually keeping them up at night

• The solution — how your brand meets that specific pain, in their language

Now, write their story; not your story — theirs. Put them in the scene: a problem, a moment of friction, and a solution that shows up right when they need it.

If you can’t picture the exact person having that exact moment, the persona isn’t finished yet. This is also where AI can help with the visualizing - craft a character to inhabit the persona you develop, so Active Any has a face, not just a name and description.

Marketing Is Just Clear and Effective Communication

Strip away the jargon and marketing is one thing: the communication of ideas and feelings in order to get a desired response. (Learned that in Freshman Speech Class applied to the purpose of speech, but found it very applicable to Marketing).

That’s it. If nobody’s responding the way you want, you haven’t marketed — you’ve just made noise.

So give every piece of your brand a job description. Your website has one job. Your Instagram bio has one job. Your logo has one job. Treat each one like an employee with a performance review. If it’s not producing the desired response, it’s not doing its job — no matter how good it looks.

You’re the Guide, Not the Hero

Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework nails the last piece: your customer is the hero of the story. Not you.

They have a problem. They’re the character walking into the theater. Your brand is the guide who hands them what they need to beat it — the mentor, not the main character.

Every brand that’s easy to love follows this shape. The customer stays the hero. You just make sure they win.

That’s the full frame: six words, one sentence, one customer, one job description per asset, one story where they’re the hero (and how your brand helped them achieve it).

Next in this series: how to actually stress-test your one-sentence brand description against real customer behavior — because the version you write on day one is never the version that survives contact with the market.

“How much does a logo cost?”

Good question, but I believe it’s the wrong one.

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It got me thinking about the question I’ve actually been asking — and answering with clients — for thirty years. It’s not about cost. It’s not even about design, not really.
It’s this:

Most business owners can’t answer that cleanly, and the ones who think they can are often wrong.

The gap nobody’s measuring

Here’s a test I run before I ever open a design file.

I ask the founder who they are. Then, separately, I ask their employees who they think the company is. Then I ask a handful of actual customers what they’d say the brand delivers.

Three answers, and they usually they don’t line up.

That gap — between how you see yourself, how your people describe you, and how the market experiences you — is the actual thing branding exists to close. Not the logo. The logo is just the flag you plant once the gap is closed.

A pretty flag on the wrong hill doesn’t help anyone.

Design isn’t the deliverable. Clarity is.

A lot of very talented designers will read that same “how much does a logo cost” framing and nod along. Tiers, budgets, craft, judgment — it’s a comfortable argument, because it ends with “good design is worth the money,” and every designer wants to believe that.

It may be. But it’s not the whole truth.

I don’t sit down to just make something beautiful. I sit down to figure out what a brand is actually trying to be to the people it needs — and then I build a visual system honest enough to say it out loud. Typography, color, imagery, the story underneath all of it. Every piece is in service of one thing: closing that gap.

If the gap doesn’t close — if the brand ends up performing a version of itself that it simply isn’t — it eventually gets found out. Customers notice when a brand isn’t who it says it is. That’s not a design failure, that’s a trust failure, and no amount of craft repairs it.

Where AI actually fits in this

I use AI constantly in my process now. Not as a design tool — I’m not asking it to hand me a finished logo. I use it more like a conversational member of staff: something to brainstorm against, to build supporting visuals with, to help a client feel a direction before they have to commit to it.

That last part matters more than it sounds like it should.

I’ve started calling the thing AI helps me close the Mirror Gap — the space between what someone says they want (”make it feel calming,” “I want it bold but approachable”) and what they actually mean, which they usually can’t articulate until they see it. AI hasn’t replaced the thirty years of judgment that closes that gap. It’s sharpened it. It lets me show a client three directions as a mood board and a short film with music, instead of three boards of swatches — and suddenly they’re not guessing anymore. They’re pointing and saying — “That one. That’s the feeling.”

That’s not a shortcut to the solution. It’s a clearer window into a solution that was already earned the slow way.

The next few issues

I’m about to walk you through exactly what this looks like start to finish — the early conversations, the mood boards, the moment a client chooses a direction, the execution — using a real project I built for a friend, Josh. It’s a good example of a brand finding itself in real time, and I think you’ll get more out of watching it unfold than you would from me describing it in the abstract.

That starts next issue.

So, where does that leave you?

If you’re a business owner sitting with a brand that doesn’t quite say what you need it to say — and you’re ready to have an honest conversation about what that would take to fix — that’s a conversation I’m glad to have.

If you’re a creative professional who does this work and feels the ground shifting under you because of AI and Fiverr and everything in between — cinch the belt on what you actually deliver that neither of those can touch. If you need help getting clarity on that for your own business, I do consulting for that too.

If you’re here to argue that a well-designed logo is the point — I’m not going to spend this newsletter trying to talk you out of something you’re not open to reconsidering. That’s not my job, and it’s not why I’m writing.

If you’re just curious and want to keep watching this unfold — subscribe, it’s free, and stick around. I write two other Substacks you might like as well: AI LAB, on using AI as a creative amplifier rather than a shortcut, and Are We There Yet, which is a different story entirely…

Either way — who are you, and what do you deliver?
Worth sitting with that one before you ever think about a logo.

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A long time coming…

In 1996, I graduated college. Thirty years ago this year.

Three years later, in 1999, I had just quit a Marketing Director position for a Ingraham Time Products (a clock manufacturing business that started in the early 1800s, that had been acquired by Salton Maxim (known for the George Foreman Grill)) that wanted to move me to Milwaukee. I didn’t want to go because my first son, Jonathan was in the womb ready to enter the world that August - and I wanted to be ‘near family’ with my NEW family. I remember it clearly, because that’s the same year I launched AdJourney — the branding and marketing design studio that would become my life’s work for the next 23 years. New son on the way (with 4 more that followed quickly after), and a new business on the table. I didn’t know yet which one would teach me more about patience.

Around the same time, I was also an Adobe and Macromedia Certified Instructor. I taught the standard curriculum — the PeachPit Press books formula, the official way software was “supposed” to be used — but I always drifted from the script. The real value wasn’t in the button-by-button walkthrough. It was in showing people genuine workflows: how the tools actually got used, from the hip, on real projects with real deadlines and real clients who didn’t care which menu you clicked, only whether the thing worked.

That instinct — show the actual process, not the polished version of it — is the same instinct behind this Substack.

Over the next 23 years, AdJourney did almost everything a design studio can do. Logos, catalogs, websites, interactive multimedia DVDs, brochures, print and broadcast advertising, billboards, radio and TV spots, packaging, full magazine production. Clients ranged from manufacturing and medical to government and service-based businesses — every kind of brand problem, in every kind of industry, for over two decades.

Then in 2022, I pivoted. I closed AdJourney to go all-in on AI, launching what became the AI LAB — helping fellow creative professionals get their footing in the biggest shift our industry has seen since desktop publishing.

But branding never actually left. It’s the thing I came up doing, the thing I still think in. So quietly, without much fanfare, I kept a small side venture alive: HeadSpace Branding. I’ve taken on a genuinely small handful of projects under that name — very selective, by design — because I wanted to keep my hand in the work I love, on my own terms.

What’s changed is how that work gets made. I now build brands with AI sitting alongside me as support staff — for creative exploration, for execution, for moving faster through the territory that used to take days. But I’m still the one steering. I am still the one creating. Every decision about what a brand means, what it should feel like, and why — that’s still entirely human, entirely mine. AI hasn’t replaced the creative director. It’s given the creative director a faster set of hands.

That’s the story I haven’t told publicly until now. This Substack is where I start telling it.

What to expect

One post a week. High-level, not high-volume — I’d rather you read one thing closely than skim five.

• Brand teardowns — pulling apart brands you already know, figuring out what’s actually working (or not) and why

• Real project walkthroughs — actual HeadSpace Branding work, case by case, showing the thinking behind the choices

• Where AI helped, and where it couldn’t — the specific, named moments in a project where a tool did the exploring or amplifying, and where only human judgment would do

• Occasional dispatches from further back in the AdJourney years — 23 years leaves a lot of stories (and experience) to reference

One more thing

HeadSpace Branding doesn’t even have a website yet. That’s not an oversight — it’s the next chapter, and you’re going to watch it happen in real time.

I only take on a small number of branding projects a year. This Substack is, in a sense, the front door to that — so if you’re building something and curious what an AI-augmented, human-led process actually looks like up close, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe, and let’s get into it.