I recently finished Blake Howard’s new book “Radically Relevant“, I encourage you to pick up a copy. I easily consider Matchstic, the company he cofounded, to be one of the top branding companies in the country. Anything that comes from Blake is bound to be fantastic, and this book is no exception.
The book is a bit pricy at $35 for a fairly small paperback, but it’s by far the best-designed book I’ve ever read (no surprise there). You can’t get this on Kindle or anywhere else — you can only get the real book directly from Matchstic.
Matchstic
Beyond the overall branding direction and inspiration that Blake provided in the book, I noticed that he didn’t shy away from directly referencing Matchstic. It was always done in a tasteful and helpful way, generally giving some context to a point that he was making, but it seems that writers often shy away from directly referencing their own company.
We’ve all certainly seen it done poorly, in a spammy fashion, but it seems quite often people will only make vague references to their own company in books that they write. I’ve not been shy about referencing GreenMellen on here when appropriate, but at times I still wondered if I should. The fact that Blake so freely (yet carefully) referenced Matchstic in his book made me feel better about that direction.
If you have any interest in branding, whether it’s for your own company or something that you do for others, I highly recommend checking out his book.
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