05Branding
Identity thatholds up onscreen first.
Your brand is experienced on a phone long before anyone sees it anywhere else. Most identity work is still designed the other way round, and it shows the moment it reaches a website.
01The problem
Designed for the slide, not the screen
A great deal of identity work is presented as a beautiful document and then falls apart in use. The logo needs clear space that a mobile header cannot give it. The typeface has one weight and no italic. The palette fails contrast requirements the moment it becomes body text. The whole system assumes a print context that no longer dominates.
Identity built for digital starts from the constraints: small sizes, variable contexts, motion, accessibility, and the fact that most of what people see of your brand is text. Get it right there and it extends outwards to print easily. The reverse is much harder.
02What it involves
What the work actually is
- Positioning
- What you are, who for, and what you are deliberately not. The words come before the visuals because they decide them.
- Naming support
- Where a name is needed or needs revisiting — generated against real criteria, and checked for availability before anyone falls in love.
- Identity system
- Wordmark, marks and their behaviour across the contexts you actually use, including the constrained ones.
- Typography
- A type system with the weights and sizes the real content needs, licensed properly for web use.
- Colour
- A palette that passes WCAG contrast as text, not only as decoration — checked, not eyeballed.
- Guidelines
- Short, usable, and about decisions rather than rules. A hundred-page document nobody opens is not governance.
03How it runs
How the work runs
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01
Position
Who you are for and against. This is the part that makes the visual decisions obvious later, and skipping it is why identity projects stall.
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02
Visual language
Directions explored as real applications — a screen, a header, a document — rather than as logos floating on white.
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03
Build the system
Type scale, colour tokens, spacing and marks resolved as a system with contrast and small-size legibility tested.
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04
Document & extend
Guidelines written for the people who will use them, then extended to whatever else you need it on.
04What you get
What you end up with
- A written positioning statement
- Wordmark and marks, with usage across real contexts
- A licensed type system and colour tokens that pass AA
- Short, usable guidelines
- Source files you own outright
05Related work
Where this shows up
06Honestly
When this is the wrong service
If you need a logo and nothing else, this is more than you need and we will say so rather than sell you a system. If your identity is settled and the problem is the website, start there.
Probably better: Web DesignStart a project
07Questions
Branding — common questions
01 Do I get a logo and nothing else?
No, and if a logo is genuinely all you want then we are the wrong studio — you would be paying for thinking you do not need. What you get is a system: positioning, type, colour and marks that work together.
02 Can you rebrand without redesigning the website?
Yes, though the two usually want doing together — a new identity applied to an old layout tends to reveal why the layout was the problem.
03 Who owns the result?
You do, outright, including source files. There is no licensing arrangement on your own identity.
04 Do you handle print as well?
The system is built digital-first and then extended to print, signage or packaging as needed. That order is deliberate and it is easier than the other way round.
08Also relevant