The 100 Images Workshop: how we decide what a brand should look like

It's a visual, participatory method. Participants face a mix of 100 images, adjectives, and positioning statements, and vote on each one. It helps quickly surface where the people in the room agree and where they don't.

It works best with up to 6 people, and who you invite matters more than how many. We ask for the people who will actually sign off on the identity. Not just the comms team, but the decision-makers who can say yes. If someone with veto power isn't in the room, their objections will surface three weeks later instead.

It started at Cooper, the American agency later acquired by DesignIt, as a way to pin down a brand's territory. We adapted it for our own practice, reshaping it for teams that need to decide fast and decide together.

Most of the work happens before anyone sets foot in the room.

Internally, we put together a first list of objectives and words. Some that could describe the brand, some that we think clearly wouldn't. Then we build the visual side: illustration references and styles, imagery in different directions, a spread of iconography, typography styles and typefaces, and references from graphic design, art, or web and UI work, depending on what the project needs.

Everything goes onto slides, gets printed, and either travels to the client or the client comes to us.

Once everything is set up in the room, clients get fifteen minutes with green and red dots. Green means it fits the brand, red means it doesn't, and there's no limit on how many they place. The only rule is to place them freely, without worrying what the person standing next to them thinks. What matters here is that everyone positions themselves.

When the fifteen minutes are up, we stop the clock and go through every slide together. Some are easy: everyone's dot landed the same color, which means we're all aligned. Others are where it gets interesting. When an image is split between red and green, we ask people to say out loud why they voted the way they did, until the room settles on one answer.

Throughout, someone is taking notes. Not just the final calls, but anything new that comes up: a word nobody had used before, an explanation of something from the brief that never quite made sense until that moment. All of it gets written down, alongside a visual map showing exactly where each word and image landed between "desired" and "not desired."

We spend a day or two digesting everything, and send it back to the client for validation, making sure what we captured actually matches what they meant and that everyone's still aligned once the dust settles.

This isn't a workshop that just raises good questions and leaves you to figure out the rest. It gives us a real answer: the words the brand should own, the visual direction it should lean toward, before we've drawn anything.

That's what makes the identity work move faster and more clearly. We're not starting from a blank page; we're starting from a room full of decisions everyone already made together.

From there, it's our job to translate that into imagery, colours, typography and illustration. The map doesn't design anything for us, but it tells us what to rule out.

Get in touch if you want to run one with your own team!