Brand Insights

Brand Insights is the editorial channel where Inkbot Design publishes thinking that exists outside the service structure — commentary on significant rebrands, analysis of shifts in the B2B marketing landscape, observations on how artificial intelligence is changing the practice of brand strategy and visual identity, and the occasional opinion piece on what the industry is getting badly wrong.

The branding industry generates a lot of noise. Trend reports are written by trend analysts rather than by project executors. Opinions are shaped by what generates engagement rather than by what is true. Awards that reward visual novelty over strategic rigour.

Brand Insights is the counter to that — a space for the kind of thinking that develops when you have 17+ years of agency practice to draw on and no particular incentive to tell people what they want to hear.

Stuart Crawford writes from Belfast, where Inkbot Design has operated since its founding, and from client engagements across 21 countries. The perspective is always practitioner-first: what is actually happening in brand strategy, what is working, what is failing, and why.

If you want polished takes from someone who observes the industry from the outside, there are plenty of those available.

If you want the view from inside a working branding agency that has run strategy workshops, designed identity systems, and managed global rebrands in the same week, this is it.