What Actually Happens During a Brand Refresh? (And How Is A Refresh Different from a Rebrand?)

Jon Račinskas
Aug 10
6 min read

Updated: Aug 18

A basketball court with the IST mascot at the centre. — The gym at The International School of Texas bearing its new "Trailcat" mascot.

Brand refreshes have a reputation for taking forever. (Usually that’s because there are too many people involved, nobody knows who has authority to make a decision, or the organization starts designing before agreeing on what it’s trying to communicate.)

A recent brand refresh for the International School of Texas took about three months from beginning to end, which is pretty much spot-on.

The design work itself wasn’t what consumed most of that time. Much of the schedule came from deliberately building opportunities for stakeholders and the board to review, respond, and approve the work as it developed.

Here’s what those three months actually looked like:

First, a quick distinction: rebrand or refresh?

The terms rebrand and brand refresh tend to get used interchangeably, but they describe different problems.

A brand refresh makes an existing brand more relevant, coherent, or useful without fundamentally changing what the organization stands for. Maybe the visual identity hasn’t kept pace with the business, messaging has become inconsistent, or ten years of growth has produced seventeen slightly different PowerPoint templates and nobody knows which blue is the real blue. The underlying brand still has value. It needs alignment and a better system around it.

A rebrand goes deeper. It makes sense when something fundamental has changed: the organization has repositioned itself, entered a radically different market, merged with another company, outgrown a reputation that’s holding it back, or discovered that its existing identity represents a business that effectively no longer exists.

Think of renovating a house versus moving.

If the house still works but the kitchen is from 1997 and everyone has somehow accumulated a different key, refresh it. If you’ve had three children and you’re living in a one-bedroom condo, choosing a nicer shade of paint isn’t going to solve the problem.

IST needed the renovation. After ten years of rapid growth, there was plenty of equity worth preserving. The opportunity was to clarify what the organization had become, bring its stakeholders back into alignment, and give them a brand system capable of supporting the next ten years.

First, figure out why you’re changing anything

IST was approaching its tenth anniversary after a period of rapid growth. Over those ten years, the organization had evolved considerably, and some misalignment had naturally developed along the way.

They wanted to mark the anniversary with a refreshed identity, but they also needed something more practical: agreement about who they were, a more coherent visual system, and a library of brand assets their team could actually use.

So we began with a survey.

The brand survey gave stakeholders an opportunity to describe IST independently before anyone entered a room together. That distinction matters. Group discussions can quickly gravitate toward the loudest voice or the most senior person in the room. Individual responses gave us a much better picture of where perceptions genuinely overlapped and where they diverged. Those responses became the raw material for the next stage.

Get everyone in the room

Because IST wanted to move quickly, we held the Brand Alignment Workshop in person in Austin.

About a dozen stakeholders joined us in a conference room for a four-hour working session. We began by exploring what we’d learned from the survey, including areas where the group was already remarkably aligned and others where their answers revealed meaningful differences. That gave the conversation something concrete to work from.

Over the course of the workshop, we explored the organization’s purpose, audiences, personality, values, ambitions, and the experience it wanted to create for students and families. It's important to note that the goal wasn’t unanimous agreement about every adjective. We needed enough shared clarity that future decisions could be evaluated against something more useful than personal taste.

By the end of four hours, we had considerably more than a pile of Post-it notes. We had a strategic brief created with the people who would ultimately need to approve the work. That makes the next part much easier.

Two weeks later, show your thinking

At the conclusion of the workshop, we committed to returning with a response deck within two weeks.

That deadline matters. Workshops generate energy, and leaving everyone waiting six weeks while a creative team disappears behind a curtain is a wonderful way to kill it.

The response deck summarized what we’d heard, distilled the strategic direction, and began translating those conclusions into early visual territories. These weren’t finished brand concepts presented with a dramatic flourish. They were evidence that we had listened, understood the brief, and begun exploring how those ideas might become visible.

We reviewed the work with a smaller group of key stakeholders and took their feedback into the next round.

Then iterate, with receipts

Over the following weeks, I met with that stakeholder group three more times. Each presentation began by showing where we’d been at the previous meeting, what we’d heard from them, and how the work had changed in response.

That little bit of documentation is surprisingly important. Brand projects can develop a strange form of collective amnesia. Someone remembers asking for something they didn’t ask for. Someone else forgets why a decision was made. A direction that everyone enthusiastically supported two weeks ago suddenly feels as though it appeared mysteriously overnight.

Showing the progression keeps the process grounded: here’s where we were, here’s what you told us, and here’s where we are now.

By the fourth review, we weren’t unveiling a surprise. We were asking for signoff on a system the stakeholders had already helped shape.

That dramatically reduces the possibility of the dreaded final-meeting grenade.

Approval isn’t the end

Once the identity was approved, we spent another two weeks building the infrastructure around it.

IST didn’t need a folder containing some logos and a PDF telling everyone not to stretch them. They needed tools.

We created a brand locker containing the assets their team would use regularly, along with a comprehensive brand guideline explaining how the system worked, which assets to use, and when to use them.

I also built a library of Canva templates for common communications. That was an intentional operational decision. A good brand system shouldn’t create permanent dependency on the designer who created it. IST’s team needed to be able to produce everyday materials themselves without hiring a designer every time someone needed a graphic.

The refresh also gave IST something they’d been particularly excited about: a proper athletics identity. That included my first mascot design. The illustrated mascot eventually escaped the Adobe ecosystem entirely and became an actual physical mascot for pep rallies, colour-matched to the graphic identity.

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about spending months discussing brand strategy and eventually seeing your work walking around a gymnasium with an enormous head. I consider that a successful deployment.

So, how long does a brand refresh take?

For IST, roughly three months. A smaller organization with fewer decision-makers could move faster. A larger organization with multiple approval layers could take considerably longer.

Our process looked roughly like this:

Brand survey → four-hour alignment workshop → two-week strategic and creative response → four stakeholder reviews → approval → two weeks of production and implementation.

Board approvals extended the overall timeline, but they also ensured the organization was comfortable with the direction before we invested heavily in implementation.

The important variable isn’t how quickly a designer can produce concepts. It’s how quickly an organization can make good decisions.

What does a brand refresh actually deliver?

The visible answer is an identity system: logo, typography, colour, imagery, athletics branding, mascot, templates, guidelines, and all the other pieces people traditionally associate with branding.

But there’s also a less visible deliverable: organizational clarity. IST entered the process after ten years of growth with differing ideas about parts of its identity. The survey and workshop gave those differences somewhere productive to surface. The iterative design process then gave leadership something tangible against which to test the decisions we’d made together.

By the time the brand guidelines were delivered, the organization had both a visual system and a shared understanding of why that system looked and behaved the way it did.

IST team uniforms — Concept team uniforms.

What does something like this cost?

There are plenty of ways to structure a brand engagement. For IST, we separated the initial Brand Alignment Workshop from the ongoing creative engagement. The workshop had its own fee, and once we’d established the scope and direction of the work, we negotiated a monthly retainer rather than assigning a fixed project rate to the entire refresh.

I like this model when the boundaries of an engagement are likely to evolve. A brand project has a habit of revealing needs nobody anticipated at the beginning. A conversation about identity becomes a conversation about athletics. Athletics needs a mascot. The communications team needs templates. Someone realizes nobody knows which logo belongs on what.

A retainer gave us room to respond to those needs as they emerged without turning every new idea into a change order.

That model isn’t right for every engagement. Sometimes a tightly scoped project fee makes considerably more sense. The commercial structure should reflect the nature of the problem rather than forcing every client through the same purchasing model.

A brand refresh is a decision-making process

Looking back at the three months, relatively little of the process involved sitting alone trying to make things look nice.

Most of it involved asking questions, listening, identifying disagreement, establishing criteria, presenting ideas, gathering feedback, documenting decisions, iterating, gaining approval, and finally building tools that allowed the organization to carry the work forward without me.

That’s the part of branding clients rarely see when they look at the finished identity.

The logo may be the most visible artifact of the process. Most of the work happened in the decisions that made it possible.