“Make it look more premium.”
I hear this more than almost anything else. In briefs, in first conversations, in follow-up emails where a founder is trying to articulate why they’re not quite happy with where the brand is.
It sounds like a design directive. It isn’t.
It’s usually a founder who has lost confidence in their brand and hasn’t yet found the language to name what’s wrong. So they reach for a word that sits close to what they’re feeling. Premium. Elevated. More polished. More considered.
What they get from most designers is a new logo with thinner lines, a slightly darker palette, and maybe a serif where there was a sans-serif. Something that looks like it costs more.
Sometimes that’s enough. Often it isn’t. Because the problem wasn’t ever about the visual. It was about something underneath it — and that thing is still there when the new logo launches.
What ‘premium’ is actually about
Premium is a feeling. And feelings don’t come from typefaces.
They come from consistency — does the brand show up the same way every time, across every touchpoint? From clarity — does it immediately communicate who this is for and why it matters? From confidence — does it commit to a position, or does it hedge and try to please everyone?
Most brands that don’t feel premium have a problem with one of those three things. Usually more than one.
A founder who says “make it look more premium” is often saying: we’ve lost our confidence in what we stand for. Or: we’ve grown and the brand hasn’t kept up. Or: we’re not winning the clients we should be winning, and we suspect the brand is part of why.
Those are not visual problems. They’re strategic problems. And designing over them — putting a new coat of visual paint on an uncertain foundation — doesn’t fix them. It just gives the uncertainty a more expensive appearance.
The cost of answering the surface question
I’ve seen it go wrong. A brand refresh commissioned because the visual identity felt dated. A new identity delivered. Clean, contemporary, well-executed. Launched.
Three months later, the founder was back. The brand still didn’t feel right. The same problem was there — just wearing better clothes.
What the refresh hadn’t done was establish what the business actually stood for. It hadn’t sharpened the positioning or clarified who the brand was really for. It had looked at the question “what should this look like?” when the real question was “what is this actually saying?”
Answering the surface question gives you a better-looking version of the same confusion.
The brief that says “more premium” is almost always a brief that needs unpacking. What specifically isn’t working? What does premium mean in the context of your particular market and your particular clients? What would have to be true for you to feel confident in your brand again?
Those are the questions worth sitting with. And the answers usually lead somewhere much more interesting than a refined colour palette. You can read more about why strategy has to come before visual identity at pattendesign.co.uk/brand-strategy-before-logo/
What changes when you find the real brief
When a conversation moves from “make it look more premium” to what’s actually underneath, something shifts.
The founder gets specific. Instead of premium, they describe a feeling — I want our clients to feel like they’re working with the best firm in the room. Instead of polished, they describe a dynamic — I want the brand to do enough of the selling that I don’t have to explain ourselves at every pitch.
Those are real briefs. Those are things I can actually work with.
The design that comes out of that conversation looks different from the design that comes out of “more premium.” It’s still visually elevated — but it’s elevated because it’s built on a clear position, not because someone spent more on the typeface.
It also tends to last longer. Because it’s solving the actual problem, not the surface symptom.
The founders I’ve worked with who came in with “more premium” and were willing to dig for what was underneath it — those are often the most useful projects. Because the gap between where they were and where they needed to be was real, and closing it made a genuine difference to the business.
The gap between “more premium” and “clearly the right choice for this specific client” is the gap where brand strategy lives.
For more on what that strategic process looks like and what it produces, pattendesign.co.uk/brand-strategy-playbook/ walks through the full approach. And if you’re wondering whether you need strategy before you start design work, pattendesign.co.uk/do-you-really-need-a-brand-strategy/ is a useful place to start.
