About
the Brand Punk
Hi, I'm Chad Mullins.
The Brand Punk is my studio, and I am the only person in it. I help small businesses say what only they can say, starting with the first screen of their website.
Why brand.
Brand is what they say about you when you're not around. Every business has one, whether or not anyone chose it. For most small businesses the website chooses it for them, and the website says what every competitor's website says: quality, service, passion, a free quote.
Twenty of my twenty-five working years have been spent on brand, and the pattern I keep meeting is the same one. A good business with a real difference, and a homepage that hides the difference behind the words everyone uses. The customer who would have chosen them never finds out why.
That is the whole job, as I see it. Find the thing only you can say, and put it where a stranger meets you first. Small, specific, and worth more than any redesign.
What I have done.
I have built apps and websites for twenty-five years. I started by designing software for an engineering team in a hospital, then spent the early web at an agency beside world-class designers, when every page was hand-built in HTML, CSS, Flash and JavaScript. I co-founded a brand and web agency, which is where I learned that a brand is a great deal more than a logo. I was creative director at Slacker Radio, running brand and marketing and a full redesign across Android, iOS and the web. For the last ten years I was a staff designer and brand strategist at ServiceNow, guiding brand direction on the platform, running user studies and writing the guidelines its design systems follow.
How I work.
I do the work myself. The free Teardown runs on a system I built and keep tuning. When you buy a Repair, I read every line before it goes out. When we build a Blueprint, I am the one interviewing you and writing it. There is no account manager and no handoff, which is why the studio stays small.