Brand identity and design. People decide how good you are before they call.
From the sign, the card, the invoice, the website, all of it at a glance and mostly unconsciously. A brand is what makes those add up to one business rather than five different ones.
Start with a planWhy it matters that it all matches.
A brand is not the logo. It is the set of decisions that make everything after the logo agree with itself, and it is worth money for reasons that have nothing to do with taste.
Nobody judges one thing at a time
People do not look at your sign, then your card, then your website and score them separately. They add everything up into one impression, usually without noticing they are doing it, and the impression is finished before anybody speaks to you. Consistency is simply what makes those pieces add up to one business instead of five loosely related ones.
Looking established is mostly looking consistent
The businesses that read as solid are rarely the ones with the cleverest mark. They are the ones where the invoice, the sign, the card and the website look like they came from the same place. That reads as a business that has its house in order, and people extend that judgment to the work itself, fairly or not.
Inconsistency costs you quietly
Nobody ever tells you that your quote looked like it came from a different company than your website. They just go with somebody else, and you never find out that was the reason. It is the cheapest kind of lost work to fix and the hardest kind to measure, which is why it goes unfixed for years.
It has to survive other people making it
Most of what carries your brand will be made by somebody who has never met us: a printer, a sign shop, whoever answers the phone and sends a quote, the next person you hire. If the decisions live in one designer's head, everything made without that designer drifts. Written down, they hold, and that document is the actual thing you are buying.
They decide from the other side of the street.
A logo is just one part.
The mark is the easy part. What makes a business look like it's been around is everything matching: the sign, the card, the invoice, the website. Four things, and businesses handed only the first one end up rebuilding the other three by accident.
The mark, in every form you need
Full color, one color, reversed, stacked and horizontal, as vector and as web files. Not one PNG that somebody has to crop for the rest of its life.
Colors and type to go with it
A short palette and a typeface pairing you can actually license, with the weights named. Enough that the next thing you make looks like the last one, without a forty page document nobody opens.
Business cards, designed and printed
The one printed thing nearly every business still hands over. We design it and we get it printed, so you are not sending a screen color to a printer and hoping.
Templates for what you send out
Quotes, invoices, letterhead and email signatures, built in the software your people already have with the brand already in them. The person making a quote at half past four uses it without being asked twice.
It should look like one business.From the sign to the invoice, without you having to think about it.
It has to work at both ends.
On a van door read at forty miles an hour, and at sixteen pixels in a browser tab. A mark that only works at one of those is half a mark, and most of the logos we are asked to fix fail at the small end: three colors, a strapline nobody can read, and a gradient that turns to mud on a sign.
So the test is applied while designing rather than after. One color, reversed out, at thumbnail size, embroidered on a shirt. If it survives those it will survive everything else you ever do with it.
Start with a planWhat we can show you, from the card to the truck.
A mark, a pattern and two blues, still in use on everything they print and drive.
The first ninety days, of a brand.
A brand is not the logo. It is the set of decisions that make everything after the logo agree with itself, so most of this is decisions.
How you sound on the phone, who you actually serve, and what the current mark is doing for you or to you. A rebrand is sometimes the wrong answer, and this is where we say so rather than after the invoice.
The logo, the type, the colors and the handful of rules that make the next thing look like it belongs. Drawn at the sizes it will really be used at, down to a favicon and a van door.
Cards, signage, the vehicle, the site, and the templates your team reaches for when we are not in the room. A brand that lives only in a PDF lasts about one quarter.
When a rebrand is the wrong answer.
A new look is the most enjoyable thing to buy and often not the most useful, so here's when we'd tell you to wait.
If people can't find you, a better logo changes nothing about that. Brand makes the businesses people do find look worth calling. Those are different problems and they have different fixes.
Most of what looks tired about a business is the colors, the type and the inconsistency, not the name. We'll tell you when the mark itself is genuinely the problem, and it is less often than you would think.
Not a competitor's mark with the colors changed, and not a stock mark ten other businesses are using. If you arrive with one of those we'll tell you what you actually have.
We really liked the way our logo turned out. I now use it on our website, business cards, checks, firm letterhead, and our exterior wall sign… you are truly talented, and are great to work with.
Nobody buys a plan they haven't seen.
Nothing here starts with a quote. It starts with a conversation about where the business is and where you want it to get to, and what it takes to close that gap, written down and yours to keep.