Kaelynn Crume

Why some brands live long, happy lives.

Building a brand is one process. Keeping it alive is another. Brand standards — guidelines for your brand’s design and messaging elements — help to ensure your brand thrives in the world for the long term, Kaelynn says. “You think of Starbucks or Apple, and you think of their user base and how obsessed they are with the brand. That’s the ultimate goal, to create something people relate to.” It takes time and consistency for that affinity to build.

But a great brand needs more than good maintenance to endure. It also requires space for new ways to tell its story.

“Apple is constantly looking at what their audience wants and catering to that while maintaining their brand vision – their large umbrella ideas.”

Kaelynn says:

User experience for human users.

It’s not necessarily easy to achieve, but user experience is a simple concept. It’s about creating products, or experiences, that meet the exact needs of the people using them.

Design and user experience should go hand in hand, Kaelynn says: “Humans are humans, and they behave peculiarly. Your goal is to make whatever you’re making as human-friendly as you can.”

That requires a deep understanding of people’s needs and wants, abilities and limitations, behaviors and tendencies. On a website, UX could mean moving buttons changing their colors until easy to see and intuitive to use. “It’s using our tools to celebrate human behavior rather than forcing change in human behavior,” Kaelynn says.

On collaboration and trust.

Kaelynn works closely and creatively with co-workers and clients. She knows collaboration falls apart without trust.

“If you lose someone’s trust, it’s hard to get back,” she says. “If you run into issues, the solution is to be direct and open — 99.9% of the time, if someone’s being mean to you, it’s not because they’re mad at you. It’s because they’ve got crap going on in their lives.”