Designer Ben Pieratt has created a striking new brand. Now he needs to find a product.

If you pay attention to the world of branding, you've seen this story play out a million times. An organization decides its visual look could use a change. A creative agency comes in and gets to know the 'essence' or the 'DNA' or whatever of the client. Later, a new logo and trade dress is unveiled. Breathless press releases come out explaining the meaning behind every line, shade, and curve. Cynics and critics weigh in, pronouncing the thing a triumph or a disaster.

Hessian is like that, except there's no "there" there. It's a brand unhinged from any particular product. Pieratt — co-founder of Svpply (with Eric Jacobsen) as well as its former CEO — thinks it could be the beginning of a new design business. He's designed Hessian.tv, a site to show off Hessian's features, and for $18,000 he's prepared to sell the complete creation to a client.

Hessian's humble inspirations. On the right, an infographic by Richard Hess. On the left, a block sculpture made by Pieratt's son. Image courtesy Ben Pieratt

Pieratt says that Hessian started as a an idea for a T-shirt company, named in honor of designer Richard Hess. "Then one day my son built a bridge out of blocks that looked exactly like some sort of low-poly uberman." From the collision of those two elements, Hessian was born.

The Whole BrandToday, a complete brand identity is about much, much more than an logo, a color scheme and some typefaces. Here's everything you get if you buy Hessian. - Name

URL

Twitter account

Tumblr account

20+ logo & other designs

10+ t-shirt designs

8 repeating patterns

1 website theme

1 app user interface theme

5 app icons

Brand book w/ guiding principles

30 hours custom design time (for transitioning the brand to buyer's needs)

"I had no choice but to work on Hessian," says Pieratt. "As a designer, I've only just started to understand how important it is to follow and act on the ideas and work that inspire you. Hessian was something I felt a strong need to work on, and as I gave into it, my understanding of the opportunity and the market-at-large grew along with it."

The larger market, says Pieratt is for designers and creative problem solvers to identify needs and niches in the market. "We have concepts that we know are valid and worthwhile, and not only that but we instinctually know how they should be launched, how they should look, how they should work, and who their target audience should be," he wrote in a blog post explaining the reasons behind the project.

On the other hand, designers aren't always the best at running companies. Pieratt says that his experience at Svpply taught him that being in charge of a company requires a separate set of skills that designers often don't have and don't want to have. "Inversely, there are oceans of MBAs, managers and entrepreneurs out there who are passionate and talented at the actual building and leading of companies, but may not actually be great at identifying worthwhile problem/solutions in the market."

Here, a lot of the colors of the Hessian brand come together to be a website template. Image courtesy Ben Pieratt

Hessian, then, is a prototype for a new marketplace of ideas that Pieratt is calling Mined. "Mined is a marketplace intent on liberating the content that lays dormant in the minds of the creative industry," he says. "Hessian is an early peek at what that looks like."

Pieratt says that the response to Hessian has been surprising, garnering positive attention on Twitter and Kottke. This puts him in an odd position. The better known Hessian becomes, the more likely someone who'd want to buy it will see it. But the better known it becomes, the more it will represent itself instead of the product to which the buyer would want it attached.

There's no elegant way around this, Pieratt says. But it can act as a vanguard for future designs that he or other creatives might make available. "In that sense, Hessian is as much a marketing stunt for a mentality as it is a genuine attempt to make some money."

Hessian blasts through the memescape. Image courtesy Ben Pieratt

It's appropriate that the way Pieratt chose to introduce the brand was with a strange origin story. "I'd been struggling with how to justify a lot of the aesthetic choices I'd been making, and once I saw this narrative peeking out at me from behind some of the designs, I knew that going full meta with it and presenting it as a story about the birth of an idea would solve a lot of my problems."

Like any good prototype, Hessian allows its creator to spread his wings and its development was as much about Pieratt learning what works as the final product. "As a designer and pseudo-entrepreneur who wants to get really good at launching new things, Hessian was an opportunity for me to really stretch my limits about what is interesting and what will carry with an audience," he says.

As he's worked on the project Pieratt has ended up encountering another pitfall. With great effort comes great fondness.

"In all honesty, I'm secretly hoping it doesn't sell at all. It's become a bit of a bonding point between my kid and I. I'd be bummed to see it go. Though I could certainly use the dough."