In THE ECHO, Erik Herrström makes a case against Pinterest-led design — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

THE ECHO is Erik Herrström’s debut book, a 218-page paperback that lays out a three-phase framework for building brands that shape culture rather than chase it. Across Immerse, Create and Impact, it covers the work that happens before any visual decision is made, the move from insight to identity, and what it takes for a brand to register in the world it enters. Herrström, Founder & Creative Director at STUDIO HERRSTRÖM, draws on more than 20 years of building brands across music, lifestyle and technology, his time as Brand Design Director at Spotify, alongside contributions from 18 leaders working at MTV, Marshall, Boiler Room, Universal Music, Nothing, Crush Music and elsewhere.

Designers, Herrström argues, have been starting projects on curated reference platforms like Pinterest, Are.na, Savee and Cosmos, which means thousands of people are circling the same images at the same time. The work that comes out of that loop looks competent and on-brief, but with no reason to be remembered. He calls it “aesthetic alignment,” and the book is structured to give designers a way out of it. THE ECHO went through three structural rewrites across 15 months of evenings and weekends, with chapters added, removed and reordered as the manuscript took shape. “I underestimated the project,” Herrström admits. “The book evolved so much from what I had in mind initially. I added chapters, deleted them again, briefed the illustrator on ideas that I later decided not to use, and changed the entire structure of the book at least three times.”

His argument cuts against the speed of the new tools that are so accessible and fast. Anyone can now generate a polished brand world in minutes, but the book pushes designers back towards groundwork: asking clients which cultural tension they are responding to, what their non-consensus belief about their category is, who would actually care if their brand disappeared tomorrow. Research should start nowhere near inspiration platforms and move through Reddit, Substacks, Discord servers, interviews with cultural front figures and type treatments studied through Google Street View.

The Immerse phase the book opens with is built on that thinking. One of its clearest illustrations comes from Fabiana Pacini, who was Head of Global Marketing at Boiler Room at the time of the interview. “I call people on the ground, and I just eat their ear for two hours, so I can figure out which venues we need to be in, which artists we want to talk about,” Pacini tells Herrström. For the Boiler Room x Ballantine’s True Music show in Luanda, the capital of Angola, her team learned through local fixers that Instagram wasn’t the route and ran ads on the radio and in shopping centres instead, with someone driving around the city on a scooter handing out printed tickets. A second perspective Herrström keeps returning to comes from Jonathan Daniel, founder of management company Crush Music, who works with Miley Cyrus and Green Day. Daniel often cites a teaching from the Chinese philosopher Laozi: direction over speed. Keep moving the way you mean to go, and you will get there; take shortcuts, and you may never arrive.

Herrström’s own path into this way of thinking started early. The first website he built with his dad, around the age of 12, set a vibrant blue background behind a picture of a car, a random GIF and the line ‘Hi, I'm Erik. I’m 12 years old.’ At 16, he completed his first paid project, a site for the accounting firm where his father worked. At around 18, he came across the work of a Swedish designer in New York making campaigns for Nike that pulled photography, typography and colour into something he couldn’t reach with Photoshop. That work stayed open on his second screen throughout his early career, including his time at Hyper Island. After graduating, he posted his portfolio to X, navigated some visa setbacks, and flew to New York to join R/GA as an intern on the redesign of nike.com. Once that project wrapped and he moved onto Nike brand campaigns, his new boss turned out to be Rasmus Wängelin, the Swedish designer he had been studying for years.

Wängelin managed him for more than seven years across R/GA and then Spotify, where he is Global Head of Brand Design, and writes the foreword to THE ECHO. Inside sit the case studies that anchor the Impact phase, including the work Herrström has done with the estates of David Bowie, Whitney Houston and Elvis Presley. For Presley, Herrström led the team in reintroducing the King of Rock & Roll to a new generation, with renewed engagement registered across streaming and YouTube. “Designing for a legacy artist also teaches you to pay attention in a different way,” he reflects. “You have to study how they expressed themselves through design, communication, sound, image, performance and behaviour. The details matter because the audience already has a deep emotional relationship with the artist. If something feels wrong, they will notice.”

The book itself has been designed to be carried. “It needed to be something people could take with them, refer back to and actually use,” Herrström tells us. Printed on Holmen Trend 80gsm chosen after several dozen samples and test prints for a natural, slightly textured surface that still holds strong print results and keeps the weight down. A matching ‘Findings' bookmark ships with each copy, inviting readers to note pages and thoughts they want to come back to.

Typography moves in step with the studio’s own rebrand, which ran in parallel. STUDIO HERRSTRÖM works with the Mix and Sans cuts from Displaay’s Season collection, and for the book Herrström expanded into the Serif cuts for body copy, improving readability and giving the long-form reading more weight.

An early piece of beta-reader feedback shaped one of the interior’s clearest decisions. Readers said it sometimes wasn’t clear when Herrström was speaking and when a contributor was, so the interior now uses a distinct yellow to mark the ‘Insider Perspectives,’ bringing the other voices in visibly.

Matouš Marťák’s illustrations run alongside the writing, drawn to support the case studies and the framework, and a layer of digital content extends the work for readers who want more context around the projects discussed. THE ECHO shipped to 44 countries in the three weeks after its launch, with responses arriving from senior design leaders and from younger designers still finding their footing. “That has been very rewarding, because it makes me feel that THE ECHO might be more than a framework or a book. Maybe it is part of a larger conversation our industry is ready to have,” Herrström concludes.