In the Wake of Brands: De-Enregisterment and Re-Enregisterment

Abstract

Branding is frequently examined as a form of enregisterment. However, for freelance illustrators whose styles contribute (sometimes unintentionally) to such projects, branding also weakens their personal connection to their work. Drawing on a plagiarism feud between an illustrator and a branding agency, I show how illustrators tend to construe style as a person-indexing register, tied to biographical experience, while designers treat the same repertoire as a persona-indexing resource, available to typify genres, markets, or voices. The paper thus characterizes branding as a cycle of “de-enregisterment” and “re-enregisterment” through which styles are delinked from their person-indexing qualities and typified to be relinked to the brand’s personality. Tracing styles across this cycle reveals that branding, when analyzed from the perspective of the workers like freelance illustrators, entails the erosion of indexical ties as much as their creation.