B/HOLD Design Alliance's 5 Senses design framework
B/HOLD Design Alliance's 5 Senses design framework

B/HOLD

Design Alliance’s 5 Senses design framework

Tonnie Chamblee + Greg deSantis

Your brand strategy distills your promise – what you believe, how you operate, and why it matters – into a clear, compelling blueprint. But your strategy doesn’t live in a slide deck. It lives in the world. It lives in every experience you create.

Design is how that strategy becomes real. It’s how abstract values become tangible interactions. It’s how the brand feels to someone walking through your office or scrolling your website. Design is how the brand thinking shows up.

At Design Alliance, we’ve spent years answering a deceptively simple question: What makes a design unforgettable? What makes it resonate in a way that’s not just beautiful or functional, but personal, like something you’ve known all along, but are only now seeing clearly?

To answer this question, we’ve developed a framework we call B/HOLD. It’s Design Alliance’s internal process for ensuring every client deliverable brings the brand strategy to life with clarity, emotion, and impact. It’s part process and part philosophy. It’s how we translate strategy into a sensory experience and bring ideas to life across emails, websites, physical spaces, and full-scale national campaigns.

B/HOLD is an acronym for five ‘senses’ that, when layered together, create the kind of experience people don’t just notice, but remember:

  • Sense of Beauty,
  • Sense of History,
  • Sense of Order,
  • Sense of Luxury,
  • and Sense of Drama.
Quotation Mark

At Design Alliance, we’ve spent years answering a deceptively simple question: What makes a design unforgettable?

A Sense of Beauty:
Beauty isn’t about decoration, it’s about refinement. Our brains are hardwired to seek symmetry, balance, and proportion. We’re drawn to what feels whole and harmonious, even if we can’t explain why.

In design, beauty invites participation. It elevates the everyday and signals that something is worthy of attention. Whether ornate or minimal, the goal is the same: to inspire a shift in perception. To help people see the familiar in a new light. When every element – color, typography, pacing, language – works together with clarity and grace, beauty emerges. And with it, trust.

A Sense of History:
History is context. We live in a culture obsessed with the next big thing. But often, what moves us most deeply is the feeling of continuity, the idea that what we’re experiencing is part of something larger, something enduring.

Great design acknowledges its context. It uses connection, metaphor, and style to root itself in meaning. Whether it’s the architectural language of a building or the tone of voice in a brand’s storytelling, history helps orient us. It gives texture and weight to an otherwise ephemeral experience. Design that honors context doesn’t just look right, it feels right. Familiar, yet fresh.

A Sense of Order:
Chaos is exhausting. The human mind craves pattern and clarity. We’re busy. We want to be able to instantly identify what matters, so we don’t have to spend time decoding visual clutter.

A well-ordered design does more than look organized; it communicates. It guides the eye, calms the mind, and frees the viewer to focus. Good order is invisible; it feels obvious in hindsight. You don’t notice it because everything just works. Every hierarchy, every transition, and every spatial relationship serves a purpose. There’s an almost musical rhythm to it, an underlying choreography that lets the message unfold, beat by beat.

A Sense of Luxury:
Luxury isn’t about gold trim or expensive materials. It’s about care. It’s about intention. It’s the unmistakable feeling that someone took their time. That every element was considered, not just completed.

Luxury in design is revealed through precision and restraint. It’s the quiet confidence of not trying too hard. When something feels luxurious, it tells the viewer, ‘You matter.’ It shows respect for their intelligence, their time, and their taste. No shortcuts. No assumptions. Just the right detail, in the right place, for the right reason.

A Sense of Drama:
And then there’s drama, that flash of something unexpected. A twist. A moment that breaks the rhythm and draws you in. It makes you notice. It makes you remember.

Drama is where logic meets emotion. It’s the contrast that makes harmony sing. A pop of color where you least expect it. A bold image, a clever phrase, a surprising transition. Drama keeps the experience alive, dynamic, and layered. It gives people something to discover, and a reason to return. Because great design doesn’t reveal itself all at once. It rewards curiosity.

Quotation Mark

The five senses: Beauty, History, Order, Luxury, Drama, are a way of ensuring that every brand experience, no matter how big or small, connects with people on multiple levels.

From Promise to Presence

Brand strategy gives you your voice. Design gives you your presence.

It’s easy to think of strategy as the thinking and design as the doing. But the truth is more dynamic than that. Design is how strategy evolves. It’s how your ideas step out into the world and earn their place in someone else’s life.

Taken together, these five senses: Beauty, History, Order, Luxury, Drama, are a way of thinking. A way of seeing. A way of ensuring that every brand experience, no matter how big or small, connects with people on multiple levels: intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically.

Because in the end, strategy means nothing if it lives only on paper.

It becomes real when it moves through beauty, finds its place in history, arranges its content in order, respects its audience through luxury, and isn’t afraid to surprise us with a little drama.

Composed with human insight, creativity, and perspective, and developed with AI assistance.

 

C O N T A C T

Tonnie Chamblee

CoFounder, Brand Strategist

Email Tonnie:

tchamblee@designalliance.com

Text Tonnie:

571.213.2434

 

 

Greg deSantis

CoFounder, Brand Strategist

Email Greg:

greg.desantis@gmail.com

Text Greg:

310.383.2850

 

950 North Washington Street

3rd Floor

Alexandria VA 22314-2393

© Copyright 2025,
Design Alliance Holdings, LLC

Design Alliance is a US Registered Trademark of Design Alliance, LLC.

 

C O N T A C T

Tonnie Chamblee

CoFounder, Brand Strategist

Email Tonnie:

tchamblee@designalliance.com

Text Tonnie:

571.213.2434

 

 

Greg deSantis

CoFounder, Brand Strategist

Email Greg:

greg.desantis@gmail.com

Text Greg:

310.383.2850

 

950 North Washington Street

3rd Floor

Alexandria VA 22314-2393

© Copyright 2025,
Design Alliance Holdings, LLC

Design Alliance is a US Registered Trademark of Design Alliance, LLC.

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