Everything you do—the way you think, the way you remember, the way you connect with people, the way you understand the world—is a story. A growing body of research shows that our species thinks and learns in stories. They are the simplest building block in our understanding of reality and the connection between two points. The poet Muriel Rukeyzer once wrote that “the universe is made of stories, not atoms,” and for the past decade, we’ve been building our design practice to explore and amplify this philosophy because we believe in the expansive potential of storytelling to help people get somewhere new.
The amount of information we are flooded with daily is incomprehensible. In 2010, we produced two trillion gigabytes of data. By 2025, we will be producing over 181 trillion. Combined with the nuanced and complex social systems we live in and the enormous global changes affecting our planet, a clear path forward is almost impossible to imagine. To gain sustained momentum with excitement and clarity, we must harness that universal human tradition: storytelling.
We don’t believe in branding, at least not in the traditional sense. Branding is for cows, not people, and in today’s pluralistic communications landscape, the need to marry performance with purpose is instrumental. Stories help do just that. They create transformation through insight, provide coherence where there’s complexity, and lead with emotion to be memorable. The best are more than words. They’re images, logos, films, books, websites, spaces, and workshops. We design all of these things using a simple approach that helps industry leaders transform their businesses, inspire thousands of people to get excited about their work, and create delightful experiences that have empowered people across continents.
B stands for Brave
I stands for Imaginative
G stands for Guiding
Ken Tanenbaum, Vice-Chairman, Kilmer Van Nostrand Ltd.
