A client of mine once called after I had given a presentation to him about his company's brand. He was calling to say we needed to change the shade of taupe we had all agreed upon for the firm's logo.

I was surprised to hear this busy man talking taupe, convinced he had more important things to attend to. I found it particularly strange because just that day, he had approved the color scheme.

As the conversation progressed, he confessed that his wife didn't like the color. She had experimented with that very shade of taupe for their living room curtains and hated it. Ignoring our strong suggestion to the contrary, the color was changed.

What does this 20 year old story have to do with anything? Most people think of branding as a pretty logo. Instead, branding embodies the entire customer experience, with the logo merely acting as the visual mark.

The brand experience should reflect the soul of the company. More important than whether or not you "really like" everything about it, your brand should represent your company's "image attributes."

Image attributes are adjectives and descriptive phrases that capture the essence of a company and their creative project. They describe the core values of an organization, the feeling that a brand should evoke or the essential goals of a Web site.

At the start of a project, I work with my clients to elucidate a set of brief terms to identify the basic precepts of their project. These image attributes become a list that we can all agree on, easy-to-remember reference points that help everyone on the team, both client and developer, stay on target throughout the process.

Developing them may be the most important exercise of the project, because it helps ensure that the final result