Capabilities / Brand and identity
Brand and identity design.Made to be used.
There are four versions of your logo in circulation and nobody is quite sure which is right. The guidelines exist somewhere, and nobody has opened them since the day they were delivered.
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A short reel of an identity in use goes here: signage, livery, a document and a screen.
Designed to survivethe people using it.
A brand is not the thing in the presentation. It is what your team can actually produce on a Tuesday afternoon without stopping to ask anybody.
We look at what you already put out
The quotes, the vans, the email signatures, the site. That is your brand whether anybody designed it or not, and it is usually closer to right than the last deck was.
We design for the hardest case first
A mark that holds up on a thirty-tonne truck and at sixteen pixels. If it only works on a white slide then it is not finished, it is presented.
We hand over things people can use
Templates and files in the tools your team already has open, plus one page anybody can read. Not a ninety-slide document that gets forwarded once.
What we build here
Three pieces, usually all three.
People ring up about the first one. It is normally the third that decides whether any of it is still standing in two years.
Identity design
The mark, the type, the colours and how they behave together. The part everybody thinks of as the brand, and roughly a third of the work.
Brand strategy
What you stand for, who it is for, and what you are prepared to say no to. Not a workshop for the sake of one: the answers are what make every later decision quick.
Design systems
Components, templates and rules, in the tools your team already uses, so the brand still looks like itself forty documents and two years later.
A brand that gets used.Or it is just artwork.
Most identity work fails quietly. Nothing is wrong with it - it simply stops being applied, because applying it turned out to be harder than not bothering.
Four things are what stop that:
It works at the worst size
On a van, on a favicon, embroidered, stamped in one colour, on a bad photocopy. Everything works at 400 pixels on a white background.
Files people can open
Not only the studio's working files. The formats your printer, your web team and your office all need, named clearly enough that anybody can pick the right one.
Rules short enough to read
One page somebody can take in before a meeting. A ninety-slide document is not a standard, it is a place decisions go to be forgotten.
Accessible by default
Contrast that passes, type sizes that hold up, colours that still work for somebody who cannot tell two of them apart. A brand should not have to be broken to be usable.
How it works
Fewer, bigger decisions.
A typical piece of identity work looks like:
One call
What you have, what has changed about the business since it was made, and what you would want somebody to think in the first two seconds.
Two routes
Not eight. Two properly developed directions with the reasoning behind each, so the decision is about which way to go rather than which one you like today.
One system
Everything built out from whichever you pick, applied to the things you actually produce, and handed over in the tools your team already uses.
When you are ready
Send us the four logos.
Show us what is in circulation and where it is being used. We will tell you whether this is a tidy-up or a rebuild, and they are very different pieces of work.
Before you ask
The questions we always get asked.
We only need a logo. Can you just do that?
Yes, and sometimes that genuinely is the job. It is worth knowing that a mark on its own tends to come back within the year, because the questions it does not answer - what the type is, what the colours are, what happens on a dark background - are the ones that come up every week.
How many concepts do we get?
Two, developed properly. Showing eight is a way of handing the work back to you, and it turns a decision about direction into a decision about taste, which is where committees end up choosing the third one nobody minds.
Do we have to change everything at once?
No, and it is usually cheaper not to. We would normally put the new identity on the things that get seen most and let the rest change as it is reprinted or replaced, rather than skipping a van's worth of livery.
What if we mostly like what we have?
Then say so early, because a considered tidy-up is a fraction of the cost of a rebuild and it is the right answer more often than agencies admit. Plenty of brands need the system around them rather than a new mark.
Will our team be able to keep it consistent?
That is what the third piece of work is for. Templates in the tools they already use and one readable page beats an eloquent PDF, because consistency is decided by whichever option is quickest at four o'clock on a Friday.
How long does it take?
Less than software, and the variable is almost never the design. It is how quickly decisions come back, which is why we show two routes rather than eight.
No pitch, no deck
Tell us what isactually happening.
Describe the mess in your own words. We will say what we think is going on underneath it, and whether there is anything we could usefully do about it.
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