In THE ECHO, Erik Herrström makes a case against Pinterest-led 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.