Let's TalkLet's TalkIdentity systems your team can actually apply - built for the things you make weekly, not just for the launch presentation.
Brand projects are expensive to begin and awkward to abandon halfway. So we show you the thinking first - one concept direction, presented and talked through against the places your brand actually appears, with the reasoning behind every decision. You decide about the rest with a real direction in front of you rather than a mood board. The finished artwork comes once the project starts.
The failures we see repeatedly, and what each one actually costs.
A long guidelines file covering logo exclusion zones and colour theory, with no template for the promotional post someone has to make on Thursday. It is technically complete and practically unusable, and the brand drifts within a year because ignoring it is easier than applying it.
The new identity launches, and eighteen months later the previous lockup is still on the invoice template, the trade stand and two live ad accounts. Nobody owned the rollout, so the rebrand became an addition rather than a replacement - and a customer meets whichever generation of the brand they happen to land on.
A brand is mostly applied by whoever is making an ad, an email or a deck that afternoon. If the system assumes design skill, it will be applied badly or not at all - which is a design failure rather than a discipline failure.
Working files withheld, fonts licensed to the agency, templates that only open in software you do not have. This is a commercial arrangement disguised as a technical one, and it is common enough that it is worth asking any studio directly.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
The actual output - which formats, which channels, who produces them. The system is designed around that rather than around a launch presentation.
Every variant in use and every place it appears, before anything new is made. This is what turns a rollout into a replacement rather than one more layer on top.
Editable templates for the weekly assets, so applying the brand is the easier path for someone who is not a designer.
Written for the person making the email header on a Thursday, not for another designer. Shorter, more specific, actually used.
Working files, fonts, templates and documentation, all yours. You should be able to leave without a conversation.
A category launch, which is the hardest branding brief - buyers had no established frame of reference to place the offering in. The identity had to be legible at speed to people encountering the category for the first time, and it was tested in paid media rather than in a review room. Zero to regional market leader in a new category, with the surviving assets chosen on performance rather than on which version the room preferred.
Read the full case studyThe guidelines cover the things we make every week. Every previous brand book we owned covered the logo and then stopped being useful.
Seeing the direction on our actual ads rather than a mood board made the decision take an afternoon instead of a month.
Same team designs the brand and runs the media, so the ads and the site finally look like the same company.
Four to eight weeks for a full identity system. The first direction lands much sooner, which is the point of doing one piece first.
Yes, all of it, at every stage. Including a guideline document your team can apply without coming back to us for permission.
Usually, yes, and it is often the right approach. An evolution that keeps your existing equity beats a clean-slate rebrand for most established businesses.
Yes. It is better when we do both because the design gets tested against real performance data, but it is not a requirement.
The identity system, the working files, and templates for the things your team produces every week - ad formats, email headers, social assets, documents. Plus documentation written for whoever will apply it rather than for another designer. Everything is yours outright and nothing requires us to change it later. If leaving us would make your brand harder to use, we have built it wrong.
Weeks rather than months for most businesses, and the length is usually decided by how quickly decisions get made rather than by the work. A long timeline is frequently a sign of a process designed around approval stages rather than around producing something. We will tell you what is actually blocking the schedule if it is your side, which is a slightly awkward conversation and better than quietly extending.
This is one part of a bigger service. Here is the whole of it, and the closest neighbours.
Tell us what you are running today and what is not working. We will tell you honestly whether branding & guidelines is the right thing to fix first - and if it is not, what is.