Words like “vibe”, “aesthetic”, “core, “era”, “lore”, “coded”, and “pilled” are thrown around a lot these days. These words speak to the visual, digital time we live in. They speak to the way any entity, be it an individual or a company or an organization or a movement, presents itself in the flesh as well as through the screen. These words all have to do with branding. Let’s break down these hot terms.

An entity’s vibe is the experience of color, texture, tone, wording, lines, urgency and energy that another feels when engaging with the entity. An entity’s aesthetic is the way those things merge into a look that reminds people of a broader cultural movement. If your aesthetic is “business stock photo”, then your core may be corporate-core. Linkedin-core. If core is added to the end of a word, it means the entity has some levity and a lot of self-awareness/consciousness around how it presents itself. Their look is likely on purpose once it has become “a core —as in—”What core is this?”

An “era” is no longer just a geographical time-frame. An era is a period of time an entity (again, this can be an individual, company, organization or movement) goes through, while aligned with certain vibes, aesthetics and cores. “I’m in my diet coke era”, is a sentence which signifies my alignment not only with the behavior of drinking diet coke, but with all the cultural understories that drinking diet coke signifies- an adultness, a hot femaleness, a time of self-examination and sobriety, a period of refined tastes, a period of nostalgia, a period of nearness to consumer culture which might alert one to my near religious surrender to mass marketing and American life.

As an entity moves through Eras, it gets Lore. Lore is a word I learned while coming to worship Brigid, a pagan goddess. To understand her, I had to read up on her lore, literally the fragments of writing about her from centuries-old tomes. Lore has come to mean something else in our time. Lore is the accrued stories and narrative background behind an entity, the tales which relate it to other entities and detail its struggles and triumphs. You will likely need to “get familiar with the lore” of an entity to understand its background. “The Lore” also covers cultural reverberations and conversations had about the entity in places the entity does not control.

An entity can be [insert word]-coded. I heard my cousin say, “Pickle Ball is kinda Republican-coded.” This means that the entity, Pickle Ball, a pretty new sporting sensation (albeit originating in 1965 on the Island I grew up on-Bainbridge Island) lives in the cultural imagination with a certain political undertone. If an entity can be called [whatever]-coded, this means that others have a sense of what the entity represents without the entity saying it out loud or overtly. That people can find “the coding” below an entity’s outer expressions speaks to the time we live in, the era, of digital codes and coders, but also of paranoia. People are poking around for something else going on under the surface, such as financial backers who have certain agendas or nepotism or cult behavior. To label things “-coded” is an offshoot of Eve Sedgwick’s “paranoid listening”, or the paranoid style. There is always a conspiracy under the shiny surface…

An entity, but usually an individual person, can be [something]-pilled. This takes -coded to the next level, insinuating that below the surface below the surface, the individual behind the entity or the expression is taking metaphorical pills which align it to a certain conspiratorial agenda. “Coconut-pilled” is a phrase used right now to describe new converts’ enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. “Trad-pilled” describes individual Catholics and Catholic converts who believe in reviving traditional Catholic practices, like Traditional Latin Mass and other more arcane aspects of the religion. The “-pilled” thing comes from “red-pilled”, a phrase that describes young men on reddit who are mad at women and think of themselves as societal victims, or “involuntary celibates” (incels).

To be “red-pilled” in the first place comes from this little movie that came out in 1999. A little cinematic experience called “The Matrix”. In this movie, our hero Neo chooses to take the Red Pill and learn the truth about reality (IT’S A MATRIX.) He could have just taken the Blue Pill and remained suspended in the illusion which everyone else lives within. But he takes the Red Pill. He sees the truth. And this action on the part of a nice man character in a 1999 movie made by two trans women sisters impacts all of us to this day.

Like it or not, branding must occur for an entity to be successful. A consistent, thorough, and authentic vibe and aesthetic experience must be committed to, so that the lore can build, so that eras can form. An Entity must put on the show in the digital age, in every appropriate venue, in person and online, to convince the audience they are real, even though the audience knows deep down that a thing is all coding anyway and the mundane world can be obliterated if the right pill is swallowed.

So, it’s a weird time to do brandscaping, but I love to do it. I love to bring out the truth and beauty of an entity, and tell its story in the most authentic way possible. We are all humans after all, and we respond to the humanity in others. That’s my guiding light as a Brandscaper, to make the humanity of a entity shine through. The vibes and the lore will come naturally.

To harness the power of your vibes and aesthetics, you’ll need to have “Branding Guidelines“. I create these for clients and help you stay within the authentic lines of your brand. Please get in contact today so we can make this happen for you!

All images by Pablo Picasso, pablopicasso.org