Building Brand Identity That Actually Connects With People

Where I Come From, Blending Was Normal I grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, where French balconies overlooked street vendors crouched on iconic red and blue plastic stools. Catholic churches shared the skyline with Buddhist temples. Colonial post offices faced shopping malls with digital billboards. Chanel boutiques stood just down the block from smoky charcoal grills and plastic tables sticky with fish sauce. None of it felt curated. No one called it fusion. It just existed. Not as contrast, but as rhythm. It didn’t need to explain itself. It just worked. That was my first education in coexistence. I didn’t have a word for it, but it became a way of seeing. Dislocation Was My Teacher When I moved to the U.S, that rhythm fell apart. I stopped blending in. I became the difference. Vietnamese. International. Other. But belonging came in fragments. I lived with a host family in South Carolina who treated me like their own. I watched college football I didn’t understand. I joined rivalries I didn’t grow up with. We said grace before meals, and I called them Mom and Dad. That didn’t erase the distance, but it softened it. It taught me that closeness didn’t always require fluency. That even partial connection can be enough to feel held. Naming the Feeling Years later, in an art history class, I studied Gandharan sculpture. Buddhist icons carved with Greek features. Draped in togas. Poised in contrapposto. I stopped. That was it. I had seen this before. Then came Phat Diem Cathedral. A Catholic church in Vietnam built in the form of a traditional pagoda. Wooden beams and tile roofs surrounding a marble altar. No collision. No contradiction. Just form meeting form. Just two systems living in the same space. That’s when the word came. Giao. From Recognition to Practice Giao means intersection. But to me, it became more than a word. It became method. A way to approach complexity without reducing it. A way to design that listens before it answers. It changed how I made things. I stopped treating design as a fixed outcome. I started treating it as a response. Something shaped by context, conversation, and co-creation. Giao taught me to stay open. To hold tension. To design not for resolution, but for relationship. QART QART didn’t begin as a business plan. It came from living inside Giao for long enough that it had to take shape. A studio that works with brands and people who move between contexts. Heritage and ambition. Memory and change. We don’t simplify identities. We build systems that hold them. We design in the in-between. Between tradition and strategy. Between aesthetics and ethics. Between where you come from and where you’re going.

I didn’t grow up with art in the way most people imagine. I studied instruments. I went to an art school. But art never felt like it was mine. It stayed at a distance. Abstract. Decorative. A kind of background noise. My world was numbers. Logic. Clean dashboards. I trained myself to bring order to chaos. To transform raw data into patterns people could understand. That kind of clarity was satisfying. But over time, something about it felt incomplete. Like the story was too clean. Too quiet. As a kid, I loved puzzles. I liked knowing when things fit. When a number balanced. When a rule held. In college, that turned into an obsession with systems - how things could be structured to function, to scale, to deliver insight. I studied business intelligence, built predictive models, and spent hours refining visualizations that could turn noise into signal. I learned how to measure everything, and how to remove everything that couldn’t be measured. That worked. Until it didn’t. That changed when I discovered Giao. I came across Giao through two projects: Menta and Bro. What caught me wasn’t the final design or the surface aesthetic. It was the process behind the work. The layers of decisions. The unfinished edges. The willingness to show what was still becoming. There was a kind of honesty in it. A sense that the work was listening, not just speaking. For the first time, I saw art not as decoration but as communication. Not as outcome, but as dialogue. That’s when it clicked. What Giao explored through design was not far from what I do with data. When I build a dashboard or model, it moves through its own arc. Cleaning. Structuring. Visualizing. If I do it well, it doesn’t just present information. It communicates. It resonates. Before Giao, I saw my work as purely functional. Charts existed to perform. But afterwards, I started to notice how much of my work was emotional. A forecast isn’t useful if it overwhelms. A report isn’t successful if no one trusts it. Every dataset is trying to say something. My job is to help it say it well. That reframing changed how I worked. Now, when I design a system or visualization, I ask different questions. Who is going to see this first? Where will their eyes land? Will the rhythm feel intuitive? Can they follow the logic without getting lost? Does it guide them? Does it respect them? I think about empathy and logic as one task. I think about space, silence, and sequence. I think about what it means to design something that helps people feel less confused, less overwhelmed, more understood. One of the first times I applied this mindset was in a project for a startup’s finance team. I had already built a reporting tool - projected runway, burn rate, cash flow pacing. It was all accurate. But something about it felt… sharp. Flat. Cold. I reworked the layout. Reduced noise. Reordered insights to follow a more natural progression. I gave the interface space to breathe, and used language that acknowledged ambiguity instead of pretending it wasn’t there. When I presented it, the feedback wasn’t about the numbers. It was about the feeling. “It’s easier to trust.” “It’s less intimidating.” “This makes me want to keep looking.” That’s what Giao gave me. A new lens for the work I already do. A way of seeing that includes care. Giao didn’t make me an artist. It helped me realize I already was one. I used to think art had nothing to do with my life. But Giao showed me it was always there. Not in galleries. Not in museums. But in the code I write. In the models I build. In the questions I ask. In the way I try to bring meaning into view. All it took was learning how to see.

A Return, Not an Exhibition I didn’t plan for Phat Diem to be shown in the cathedral it was named after. I made it in Providence, RI, working in silence, carrying images from a trip I had taken months earlier. I had walked through the cathedral as a visitor then - measuring, sketching, recording. Not with a show in mind, but with questions. Quiet ones. Questions about place, identity, authorship. When the work returned to that cathedral, it wasn’t a display. It was a return to the source of the question. A Work Made of Opposites Phat Diem is a two-part drawing. Charcoal, ink, and gold leaf - three materials chosen not for style but for meaning. Charcoal for what is temporary. Ink for what is stable. Gold leaf for what is sacred. The first panel shows the exterior of the cathedral. It’s drawn from below, with a compressed perspective that pushes the viewer’s gaze upward. The composition is heavy at the bottom, but the top is all white space - an open field of nothingness that refuses to resolve. You have to step closer. You have to tilt your head. It doesn’t present. It invites. The second panel is the opposite. The interior corridor of the cathedral is rendered in full depth - dark, narrow, unambiguous. You aren’t invited. You’re directed. The hallway leads straight toward a gold altar. No negative space. No ambiguity. You are inside the ritual now, and it moves you forward whether you’re ready or not. Architecture, Material, and Memory The contradiction is everywhere. The building is Catholic in function, but Buddhist in form. The altar shines in gold, but the walls are covered in ink and soot. The viewer is allowed to stand freely between the two panels, but cannot avoid being pulled by their direction. This wasn’t accidental. It was how I experienced the space. First from outside - curious, open, unthreatened. Then inside - suddenly conscious of hierarchy, formality, tradition I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t paint this to teach. I painted it to record. Not what I saw, but what I felt. Confusion. Reverence. Distance. And a kind of recognition that didn’t need language. The Day It Came Back When I brought the work back to the cathedral, I expected formality. Instead, I was met with quiet warmth. We hung the pieces without ceremony. Just two panels, quietly resting against the walls that had shaped them. Visitors passed. Some looked. Some didn’t. One older man paused for a long time, hands behind his back, saying nothing. That was enough. The work wasn’t asking for attention. It was making space. In that moment, I knew: the work wasn’t made for this cathedral. It was made because of it. And it wasn’t complete until it came back. Not an Answer, but a Frame I didn’t create Phat Diem as a major work. I made it while trying to answer smaller, quieter questions. It came after a trip through Hue and Ninh Binh, during a time when I was searching for something I couldn’t yet name. Each panel was an attempt - not to explain, but to hold the questions I was already living with: Where am I standing? Who am I between these layers of identity? Am I charcoal, soft, erasable? Or gold, fixed, absolute? What does it mean to create when you’re still unsure where you belong? These drawings didn’t answer those questions. They held them. And they gave others a place to ask their own. If someone stands between those two panels and feels the urge to ask something of themselves, that’s enough. That’s what the work is for. What Giao Looks Like in Practice Before this trip, Giao was an idea. A method. A framework I wrote about. But here, it became embodied. Giao is not just a concept of blending or coexistence. It’s a practice of returning. Of allowing contradictions to share space without forcing them into harmony. Giao is what happens when something made from memory finds its way back to origin. Not to be approved. But to be recognized. The Work Continues I used to think completion happened when the last mark dried. When the surface was resolved. Now I know some works are only finished when they return. When they re-enter the place that shaped their beginning. Phat Diem didn’t end when I signed my name. It ended when it met the space that made it possible. Or maybe it didn’t end at all. Maybe it just entered its next phase.

1. What Schema Really Does For A Framer Site Schema is how you tell search engines what each page is about, who made it, and how it connects to the rest of the site. Think of it as a second content model: titles, images, authors, dates, and tags, written in a format machines can read. For a creative or portfolio style Framer site, you usually need only a few types used well: WebSite and Organization for the whole site ItemPage or WebPage for individual pages Article or BlogPosting for news and essays Product and VisualArtwork for works and prints Person for artists and authors BreadcrumbList for the navigation path 2. Map Your Framer CMS Fields To Schema I started with SchemaRabbit, let it generate an audit, and realized I did not actually understand schema. After two days reading docs and rebuilding everything in Framer, I switched to native JSON LD so I could tie schema directly to CMS fields instead of editing page by page. Use your CMS collection as the single source of truth and let schema mirror it. For a blog page like Giao.News, a clean mapping looks like this: <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Blog", "@id": "https://qart.gallery/giao-news/#blog", "url": "https://qart.gallery/giao-news", "name": "Giao.News | Articles on Art, Design & Culture by QART", "description": "Editorial hub for essays that connect Giao, design practice, art, and cultural memory.", "publisher": { "@id": "https://qart.gallery/#organization" } } </script> You define the JSON LD once on the CMS template, then Framer fills values from fields for every entry. 3. A Simple Pattern For Article Pages Each article page only needs three core pieces of schema wired together: An ItemPage that points to the article as mainEntity An Article with headline, description, image, author, datePublished, url A BreadcrumbList with three items: Home, Giao.News, Current article In Framer you can inject this JSON LD with a code component, pulling values from the CMS fields you mapped above. 4. Why I Moved Off SchemaRabbit For Framer SchemaRabbit was great as an audit tool and starting point. It caught issues and suggested types, although sometimes misclassifying pages, for example recommending Article or ProfilePage on a Product style layout. Where it broke for my workflow: it did not support Framer dynamic CMS fields inside the schema. If I wanted ItemPage, VisualArtwork, and BreadcrumbList on every product or artwork page, I would have had to update schema manually for each URL instead of defining it once on the collection template. For a CMS heavy site, that does not scale. Now I use tools like SchemaRabbit as mirrors. I implement schema in Framer, run an audit, and only use the feedback to refine my content model and page structure. 5. Quick Checklist Before You Ship A Page For any Framer CMS template ask: Does the page have one clear main type (Article, Product, VisualArtwork, or WebPage) Do url, H1, and headline all describe the same thing Are images defined in design and in image fields in schema Does a BreadcrumbList reflect real navigation Is schema defined once at the template level, not copied per page Does the page pass Rich Results Test without errors If you can answer yes, your schema is already in a strong place, even before chasing advanced rich result tricks.

Brand Identity Starts With Position, Not Design Most businesses approach brand identity backwards. They start with visual concepts before they understand what those visuals need to communicate. This produces logos and color palettes that look polished but do not mean anything. Real brand identity begins with strategic positioning. You need to answer where you sit in the market, who you serve, what problem you solve better than anyone else, and what emotional experience you want to create. Strategic positioning is not a tagline or a mission statement. It is a filter for every decision you make. When you know your position, you can evaluate whether a partnership makes sense, whether a new product fits, whether a marketing message lands. Without that framework, brand identity becomes a collection of random choices held together by aesthetic preference rather than strategic intent. Visual Systems Create Recognition, Not Just Style A logo is not a brand identity. A color palette is not a brand identity. These are components of a visual system, and that system only works when it is designed to function across contexts. Your brand identity needs to perform in a social media avatar, on a website header, in a presentation deck, on a product label, and in a physical space. The best visual systems are built on a small number of strong decisions repeated with discipline. Choose one or two typefaces and use them everywhere. Define a core color palette and resist the urge to expand it. Establish a photographic style or illustration approach and apply it consistently. Recognition happens through repetition. Every time someone encounters your brand and sees the same signals, those signals become more deeply associated with you. Brand Identity Lives in Behavior, Not Just Assets You can design the most sophisticated visual identity in the world, but if your team does not understand how to use it or why it matters, it will fall apart in practice. Brand identity is not something you hand off to a marketing department. It is a shared language that everyone in the organization needs to speak. Guidelines should be a teaching tool that helps people understand the reasoning behind your brand identity. Explain why you chose certain colors and what emotions they convey. Give people principles they can apply, not just templates they can fill in. When your team understands the why, they can make good brand decisions even in situations you did not plan for. Positioning Shapes Everything That Comes After Brand positioning is the strategic decision about what space you will occupy in your customer's mind. Strong positioning is specific, defensible, and meaningful to your target audience. It answers the question, when someone needs what you offer, why should you be the obvious choice? Finding your position requires understanding not just what you do well, but what you do differently. Differentiation is not about being better at everything. It is about being the best choice for a specific type of customer or a specific need. Strong positioning picks a side. It says, we are for this kind of person who values this particular thing, and if that is not you, we are probably not the right fit. Brand Identity Evolves Through Use, Not Through Overhaul Brand identity is not something you create once and lock in a vault. It is a living system that improves through application. You learn what works by using it in real contexts with real customers. You discover which messages resonate and which fall flat. When evolution is necessary, it should feel like a refinement of what already exists, not a departure from it. The brands people trust most are ones that remain recognizably themselves even as they mature. The core stays intact while the execution becomes more sophisticated. Commit to the identity you create, use it with discipline, and refine it based on real feedback.

UX Design Begins With Understanding Real Users, Not Imagined Ones Most web design fails because it is built around assumptions. Designers assume users will read instructions, notice subtle cues, or understand industry jargon. They assume behavior they want to see instead of observing behavior that actually happens. Good UX design starts by replacing assumptions with evidence. User research does not have to be elaborate. Watch real people try to use your site while they explain what they are thinking. Review analytics to see where people abandon tasks, which pages they skip, how they actually navigate. This research often reveals that users have completely different mental models than designers expected. Interface Clarity Comes From Hierarchy and Consistent Patterns People do not read websites. They scan. They look for signposts that tell them where to focus attention and what actions they can take. Visual hierarchy is not decoration. It is a functional tool that guides attention toward what users need to see first, second, and third. Consistent patterns reduce cognitive load by letting users predict how things will behave. Once someone learns that blue underlined text is a link on your site, they should not encounter blue underlined text that is not a link. Consistency means users can transfer learning from one part of your site to another. Web Accessibility Improves Experience for Everyone Accessible design is simply good design. When you make your site work for people using screen readers, you create clear semantic structure that also helps search engines. When you ensure sufficient color contrast, you make text readable for people with low vision and people using devices outdoors. Build experiences that work across different abilities, devices, and contexts. Include alt text for images. Use proper heading structure. Make sure form fields have clear labels. These practices benefit everyone, not just users with disabilities. User Flows Should Match How People Actually Think Most designers create flows that make sense from the business or technical perspective but ignore how users actually think. Good user flows start with the user's goal and remove everything that does not directly support it. Each additional step or decision point increases the chance they will abandon the task. People expect to provide shipping information before payment details, not after. They expect to see what they are buying before they commit to it. When you violate these expectations, you create confusion even if your way is technically efficient. Testing Reveals What Design Reviews Cannot You can analyze your design endlessly and still miss critical UX problems because you know too much. Watching users encounter your design for the first time reveals issues you would never predict. Give someone a specific task and watch them try to complete it. Do not help. Just observe where they hesitate, what they click, what they misunderstand. Test early and test often. Test rough prototypes and sketches. Each round of testing helps you catch problems when they are still cheap to fix. The cost of fixing a UX issue in design is minimal. The cost of fixing it after launch is highest of all.

Impressionism Emerged From Frustration With Academic Control The Paris Salon controlled which art was seen, sold, and respected in 19th century France. This jury accepted only work that met strict academic standards. Paintings needed precise drawing, smooth blended brushwork, and subjects from history, mythology, or literature. This system trained artists to paint what was valued rather than what interested them. A group of young artists grew frustrated with these constraints. They wanted to paint modern life, not ancient myths. They wanted to capture the way light actually looked at specific moments. When the Salon repeatedly rejected their work, they organized their own exhibition in 1874. Critics mocked the work, and one critic used the term Impressionism as an insult. The artists embraced it. Painting Outdoors Changed Everything About Technique Impressionists tried to complete paintings outdoors, capturing not just the scene but the specific light and atmosphere of that moment. This decision transformed technique. You cannot blend colors slowly when light changes every few minutes. You cannot rework passages endlessly when you need to finish before weather shifts. This urgency produced Impressionism's characteristic look. Brushstrokes stayed visible because there was no time for smooth blending. Colors were mixed less on the palette and more through optical mixing. Compositions became more spontaneous. The paintings looked unfinished by academic standards because they captured process rather than hiding it. Color Theory Became a Central Impressionist Innovation Impressionists studied how light and color actually work rather than following established painting recipes. They observed that shadows contain reflected light and complementary hues. They noticed that objects take on colors from their surroundings. They saw that pure colors placed next to each other create vibrancy that premixed colors cannot achieve. They worked on white grounds, avoided black and earth tones, and painted shadows with blues and purples instead of brown. They used complementary colors to create contrast and make elements appear more vivid. This colorist approach influenced every movement that followed, from Post Impressionism through Abstract Expressionism. Impressionism Redefined What Painting Could Represent Academic painting aimed for timeless, universal statements. Impressionism embraced the temporary, the specific, the subjective. A Monet painting of haystacks was about how haystacks looked at 7 AM in October with particular weather conditions. The painting captured a moment that would never repeat exactly. Impressionist compositions used cropping learned from photography, cutting off figures at edges and creating asymmetrical arrangements. They embraced unusual viewpoints. These choices made paintings feel spontaneous and observational rather than constructed. This elevation of subjective experience over objective truth became a defining principle of modern art. The Movement's Impact Extends Far Beyond Its Historical Period Impressionism lasted roughly two decades as a coherent movement, but its influence never ended. Post Impressionists took Impressionist principles as starting points for their own innovations. Twentieth century movements continued questioning problems Impressionism first raised about color, brushwork, and the relationship between observation and expression. The assumption that artists can develop personal visual languages rather than following universal standards comes from Impressionism's break with academic authority. Understanding Impressionism helps you understand everything that came after, from Cubism's fragmented space to Abstract Expressionism's gestural brushwork.

Cultural Identity in Design Is Not About Decoration Most design that claims cultural identity treats culture as surface treatment. A brand uses patterns from a traditional textile. A restaurant interior includes artifacts from the owner's home country. These gestures often come from good intentions, but they reduce living cultures to aesthetic resources. This approach misses the point entirely and often causes harm by stripping cultural elements from their context and meaning. Real cultural identity in design goes deeper than visual references. It emerges from values, worldviews, and ways of organizing information and space. When you design with authentic cultural identity, you are building systems that honor how a culture thinks, communicates, and makes meaning. Giao provides a framework for this deeper work because it starts from the position that cultures are complete systems, not collections of assets. Coexistence Allows Cultures to Remain Distinct While Sharing Space The dominant design paradigm assumes unity through synthesis. When different cultural elements meet, the goal is integration, creating a cohesive whole where differences blend together. This works for some contexts, but it fails when the differences matter. Synthesis erases specificity. For people navigating multiple cultural identities, especially migrants and diaspora communities, synthesis feels like a demand to assimilate. Giao offers an alternative through coexistence. Instead of blending elements, you place them in dialogue. You create space where different cultural logics can operate simultaneously. You design systems flexible enough to hold multiple truths. This is harder than synthesis because it requires managing complexity rather than reducing it. Cultural Storytelling Requires Listening Before Speaking Every culture has its own narrative traditions, its own sense of what stories matter and how they should be told. Western storytelling privileges individual heroes, clear conflicts, and resolution. Other traditions emphasize collective experience, cyclical time, or open ended narratives. When designers tell cultural stories without understanding these traditions, they impose foreign narrative structures that distort the stories they are trying to tell. Authentic cultural storytelling in design starts with listening. You listen to how community members tell their own stories. You learn what is meant for public sharing and what is private or sacred. This listening period is not research to extract information. It is relationship building that earns the right to participate in storytelling at all. Cross Cultural Design Demands Accountability, Not Just Awareness Many designers have become more aware of cultural appropriation, recognizing that taking cultural elements without permission causes harm. Awareness is progress, but it is not enough. Awareness without accountability often produces overcorrection, where designers avoid engaging with any culture but their own. The answer to appropriation is not segregation. It is respectful, accountable cross cultural collaboration. Accountability means crediting sources explicitly and compensating cultural consultants fairly. It means accepting correction when you get things wrong and changing course rather than defending your intent. It means asking who benefits from the work and ensuring those benefits flow to the communities being represented. Most importantly, it means accepting that some cultural elements should not be used by outsiders at all. Giao Shows That Complexity Is Not a Problem to Solve Western design education trains designers to find the elegant solution, the simple answer that cuts through complexity. This works for many problems. But this bias toward simplification becomes destructive when applied to cultural identity. Some things are complex because reality is complex. Some identities resist easy explanation because they do not fit existing categories. Giao embraces complexity as material, not obstacle. When you design through Giao, you build systems sophisticated enough to hold what is actually there. This might mean visual identities with multiple lockups for different contexts rather than one universal logo. The goal is not to eliminate complexity but to make it navigable. Complexity designed well does not feel overwhelming. It feels rich.