The story and philosophy behind Firm87.

Learning to Look

One of my earliest memories of design comes from the back seat of a car. I must have been three or four years old. It was dark outside, my parents were sitting in front of me, and as we drove through the night I noticed these bright blue signs along the road. I believe they were bus stop signs: deep blue backgrounds with thick white lettering, illuminated against the darkness. For some reason, they fascinated me. The same thing happened with illuminated billboards. Bright colors, fluorescent tubes and giant advertisements stood out against the night. I obviously didn’t know anything about graphic design, advertising or branding at that age. I just knew that certain images demanded my attention and, somehow, I remembered them.

At home, television introduced me to another world of visual communication. There were commercials such as Melk, de Witte Motor, but especially MTV. I loved watching MTV because its logo seemed to reinvent itself constantly. The colors, textures and artwork could change completely, yet somehow it was always unmistakably MTV. Looking back, that was probably one of my earliest encounters with the idea of a flexible brand identity. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. I was just a kid watching television, but I understood the effect.

Then there were the worlds of X-Men, Spider-Man and Transformers, alongside shows such as The A-Team, M*A*S*H, Cheers and Perfect Strangers. Characters, title sequences, typography, symbols and logos became part of the way I experienced those worlds. A strong visual identity could make an entire universe feel real.

By the time I was six or seven, I had discovered something else: I could draw, and I loved it. I drew characters, action figures, robots and whatever else came into my head. Eventually, I started inventing things of my own: brands, shoes, games, robots, cartoon series, logos and entire fictional properties. Whenever my birthday or Sinterklaas came around, I wanted drawing materials. Then I would disappear into my room and work on concepts. Most of that early work is unfortunately gone today, but the instinct behind it never disappeared. I wanted to create worlds of my own, and somewhere along the way I began to understand something that still influences my work today: branding can be the foundation of an entire universe.

The Kid Who Wouldn’t Stop Drawing

School was a different story. According to my teachers, I was capable of doing well, but in reality I consistently performed below what they believed I could do. The problem was simple: I was much more interested in what was happening inside my head than what was written on the blackboard. My schoolbooks became sketchbooks, filled with characters, logos, brand names, lettering, scribbles and ideas, usually squeezed between, underneath or straight across the actual assignments.

It didn’t exactly make me the ideal student. I got poor grades, detention and came dangerously close to being kicked out of school more than once. I could be a difficult kid. Very difficult, if I’m being fair. Underneath all that frustration, however, was something I didn’t yet know how to explain. I wanted to create, and the traditional school system wasn’t giving me an outlet for it. I often felt unheard and unseen, and I had no idea how something I spent so much time doing could ever become a real career.

A Very Sophisticated Career Decision

In 2003, at sixteen, I had to choose a vocational direction. I made what I can now describe as a very sophisticated career decision: I chose retail because there were a lot of girls there.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

While working at Albert Heijn, I also had to attend retail classes at ROC in Amstelveen. I disliked almost every second of going there. My mother had scolded me for being out of school, and because I was still legally required to attend, doing nothing wasn’t an option. I understood her concern, but inside I kept asking myself the same questions: Is this really my fate? Am I going to spend my life feeling unheard, unseen and unfulfilled?

My time at ROC turned out to be short. I was kicked out, and Albert Heijn subsequently withdrew my internship, although I was allowed to keep my regular job there. At the time, it felt like another failure. Looking back, it sometimes feels as if some invisible force kept pushing me out of places where I didn’t belong, even though I had no idea yet where I was supposed to end up.

Getting Closer to the Creative World

In 2004, I finally moved closer to the creative world and enrolled at MediaCollege Amsterdam, where I studied until 2006. The school itself was fine. I learned DTP, typography, typesetting, graphic software and the technical side of print production. For the first time, I was formally learning some of the tools behind the things I had been fascinated by since childhood.

The internships were a different story. I worked at Dutch Insurance Network and later at Amstelgraphics near Frederiksplein. Both experiences introduced me to a side of the graphic industry that I hadn’t imagined while spending my childhood drawing logos and inventing brands. There was very little room for creativity and a lot of pressure to perform. Instead of creating new things, I found myself following production protocols, processing existing work and trying to function within environments that often felt chaotic to me.

I hated it. Not because the technical work had no value, but because I was finally inside the graphic industry and still felt miles away from what I actually wanted to do. I didn’t want to spend my life simply preparing somebody else’s ideas for production. I wanted to be the person creating the idea in the first place.

The Jobs I Hated Had a Purpose

At the same time, I was still working at Albert Heijn, and to be clear: I hated that job too. At the time, it felt like I had been sent in completely the wrong direction. I wanted to draw, design and create new things, while instead I found myself working in a supermarket. It took me years to understand that even this period had served a purpose. Looking back, I see it as part of my calling.

Every shift placed me inside an enormous branding environment. I was surrounded by food brands, drinks, household products, personal care, packaging, promotions, shelf displays, pricing, signage and, of course, Albert Heijn’s own visual identity. I began noticing how deliberately everything was designed. Colors weren’t simply chosen because somebody liked them, and displays weren’t placed somewhere by accident. Experts from headquarters would come in and adjust elements of the store, refining its colors, communication and presentation to influence how customers experienced the environment and moved through it.

The irony is that while I thought retail was keeping me away from the creative world, it was teaching me something fundamental about it. Design eventually has to meet a customer. A product can be excellent, but people still have to notice it, understand it, trust it, pick it up, remember it and ultimately choose it over everything surrounding it. Branding and commerce aren’t separate worlds. They need each other.

My internships taught me the other end of the process. A creative idea eventually has to become something real. Files have to work, typography has to be set correctly, artwork has to survive production, specifications matter and deadlines exist. Somebody eventually has to turn the idea into a finished product. I couldn’t appreciate those lessons at the time. I thought these experiences were keeping me away from my calling, while years later I understood that they had become part of it. Retail taught me where branding meets the customer, while DTP and production taught me what happens after the designer has finished dreaming.

The First iMac

After one conflict too many, I finally resigned from Albert Heijn in late 2006. By then I had finished MediaCollege and had saved money from working jobs such as washing dishes. I used that money to buy a refurbished Apple iMac G5.

Then I started experimenting properly. Photoshop, Illustrator, trial and error, long hours behind the screen, trying things, failing, improving and trying again. For the first time, I could sit in my room and spend my days doing what I had wanted to do for years: creating things of my own.

It felt great. I finally felt that I was moving in the right direction, although from the outside it probably didn’t look like much. My mother still didn’t really understand what I was doing in my room all day. From her perspective, I was sitting behind a computer. From mine, I was trying to build a future.

Eventually, somebody asked if I could design a logo for them. I said yes. They paid me €50, and I put my heart and soul into that logo. When it was finished, something clicked. Somebody had just paid me for something that had started as an idea in my head.

This was my thing. This was what I wanted to do.

2008

Progress isn’t a straight line. In 2008, just as I landed one of my first larger assignments, my second-hand computer gave up. My plan seemed straightforward: work, save money and buy another iMac. Unfortunately, the financial crisis was now in full swing. Assignments disappeared, businesses stopped spending and the work I expected to use to finance a replacement machine dried up. Those computers were expensive, and I simply didn’t have the money to buy another one.

Suddenly, I had work I couldn’t finish, no machine to finish it on and no money coming in to solve the problem. The momentum disappeared, and so did I for a while. After spending years trying to find a way into the creative world, I had finally found an opening and then watched it close again. That hurt more than I can properly describe.

It also became one of many lessons I would eventually learn about the difference between being able to design and being able to build a sustainable creative business. Those are not the same skill.

Learning the Business Behind the Design

For years, one of my biggest weaknesses wasn’t design. It was business. I underestimated my own work, sold myself too cheaply and spent enormous amounts of time perfecting things without properly understanding how that time should translate into value. Being talented at something doesn’t automatically teach you how to price it, position it, negotiate for it or sell it. I had to learn those things the hard way.

Over the years, computers came and went. I’ve worn out more than five iMacs and spent more late nights behind them than I could possibly count. Every machine represents another period of learning: new software, new techniques, better typography, better illustration, better production knowledge and better decisions, alongside plenty of mistakes. Like any discipline, you get better through dedication, repetition and an obsession with improving.

I also became increasingly obsessed with one particular question: what makes a logo work? I have always been bothered by bad logos, especially logos that fail to communicate what they are supposed to represent. A logo doesn’t have to be complicated or artistic, but it does have a job. It has to create recognition, represent the quality and ambition of the organization behind it and, when appropriate, command respect.

When AI Changed the Game

Years later, another major shift arrived when artificial intelligence suddenly became very good. Someone who had never touched Illustrator could type a prompt and generate something resembling a logo within seconds. I won’t pretend that didn’t affect me, because it did. Design had been part of my identity for most of my life. I had spent decades learning something that suddenly appeared to be available to anyone with a prompt, and that hit both my ego and my sense of professional identity.

It also forced me to ask myself a difficult question: what am I actually selling?

If the answer was simply a logo, then the market had changed dramatically. There was no point pretending otherwise. Cheap logos had become easier to produce than ever before, and trying to compete at the bottom of that market made no sense. I had to rethink where I wanted to go, who I wanted to work for and what Firm87 was actually supposed to become.

Eventually, I realized that the answer wasn’t to compete with cheaper logos. It was to build better brands.

A generated image can look impressive, but a brand has to work. It needs positioning, character, typography, color, consistency, application, storytelling, production knowledge, marketing and judgment. Above all, it needs to connect a business with the people that business wants to reach. The skills I had collected over the years, including the ones I once thought were useless detours, suddenly made more sense together.

That realization helped redefine Firm87. I had to accept that growth also meant moving toward a different market. I still enjoy helping a small local business, but that doesn’t have to define the limits of what Firm87 can become. I want the work to travel. I want to reach companies, organizations and entrepreneurs far beyond my own neighborhood or even my own country.

Character Over Trends

I deliberately set the bar for my work high. When I create a logo or identity, I want the quality to be good enough that it could be used by a major international company or organization. Not because every client needs to become a multinational corporation, but because I don’t believe the standard of the work should depend on the size of the client.

I want my work to catch your attention in one glance. I want it to communicate authority and confidence. I want a client to be able to build on it, market with it and make money with it. Most importantly, I don’t want to create an identity that survives for six months until the next design trend arrives. I want it to last for ten years, or twenty years if we’ve done our job properly.

Trends can be useful, but character matters more. If everybody follows the same trend, eventually everybody starts looking the same. A brand needs something of its own. Something people can recognize even when the context changes. MTV taught me that before I even knew what branding was: the execution could change dramatically, but the identity underneath remained unmistakable.

What Makes a Brand Stick?

For me, Building Brands That Stick isn’t simply a slogan. It describes the standard I want my work to meet. A strong brand should catch your attention, but attention alone isn’t enough. It needs to stay in your memory. The logo needs to belong to the product, the typography needs to speak the same language, the colors need to feel intentional, and the imagery, marketing and communication need to reinforce the same identity.

Eventually, people shouldn’t need to think about it. They simply recognize it. That is when a collection of design elements becomes a brand.

The word stick is important to me because branding ultimately happens inside the mind. You can see thousands of images in a day and forget almost all of them. The successful ones leave something behind. I still remember those illuminated blue signs from the back seat of a car when I was three or four years old. I still remember the MTV logo transforming on television. Decades later, those images are still there.

That’s what I mean by stick.

A brand also has a commercial purpose. Great branding should help a business attract the right customers, communicate value, build authority and ultimately sell its products or services. If you have a great product, the identity surrounding it should represent that quality. Beautiful design without purpose isn’t enough for me. I want the work to perform.

Building Firm87

That’s the direction I’m building Firm87 toward today. The ambition is international. I want Firm87 to compete through quality, ideas and identities that can stand beside the best work in the industry. That’s a big ambition, and I know perfectly well that you don’t get there overnight. I’ve already spent most of my life moving toward it, sometimes directly and sometimes through routes I didn’t understand at the time.

Looking back, even the periods I hated contributed something. The kid drawing over his schoolwork learned to generate ideas. Retail taught me that branding eventually has to sell something. MediaCollege and those frustrating internships taught me production and technical discipline. Freelancing taught me craftsmanship. Failure taught me business. The financial crisis taught me how quickly momentum can disappear. AI forced me to reconsider what a designer should actually offer in a world where producing an image is becoming easier every day.

Today, those pieces belong to the same story.

The question is no longer simply whether I can design you a logo. The question is what you are trying to build, who you need to reach and what kind of identity will make people remember you. That’s where strategy, branding, typography, illustration, production, marketing and everything I’ve learned over the years come together.

My portfolio is online for that reason. Not to tell you what I can do, but to show you.

Ultimately, that’s what Building Brands That Stick means to me. Build something with character, purpose and an identity people recognize. Build something that represents the quality of the product, service or organization behind it. Build something that can grow without losing itself.

Most importantly, build something people remember.

If you’re building something you believe deserves to be remembered, I’d like to help you give it the identity it deserves.

Cedric
Founder & Creative Director — Firm87

I wrote this story myself. AI was just the online teacher who checked my homework before I handed it in. 😉