Home Brand Design
A logo, a set of colours and a typeface that hold together and still work at forty pixels wide on a phone. Taken on its own, or as the first stage of a website build.
Before anything is drawn, it is worth being clear about what the work is for.
It has to be recognised before it is read
People identify a business by shape and colour long before they read the name. That is most of what a logo is for, and it is why a wordmark set in whatever font came with the software rarely does the job.
It has to work everywhere it lands
A favicon, a social avatar, an invoice, an email signature, a sign, a van. A design that only looks right large and in one colour will fall apart in most of the places your customers actually meet it.
It has to say something true
A brand is not decoration. It sets an expectation about price, care and who you are for, and if that expectation does not match the business, it works against you rather than for you.
It has to be usable by you
The most common reason a brand drifts is that nobody could apply it. If the colours are not written down and the rules are not clear, six months later there are four shades of the same blue in circulation.
Every project is quoted individually, but this is what a brand design project normally hands over.
Brand work is available as a standalone project. If you have a website you are happy with, or no website at all, the identity can be designed, documented and handed over as its own piece of work.
More often it runs as the first stage of a website design project, and that is usually the better order. When the identity is settled first, the site is built from it: colours, type and spacing become the design system the pages are made of, rather than a logo being dropped into a layout that was designed around something else. If you are also selling online, the same applies to an ecommerce build.
A brand rarely stops at the screen. I work closely with one of Edinburgh’s main print shops, which means the printed side can be handled as part of the same job rather than left for you to arrange separately.
Artwork is prepared properly for print rather than exported from a web file and hoped for the best, so what turns up matches what you approved on screen.
A short project with a small number of real decisions in it, rather than a long one with a lot of variations.
What the business does, who it is for, who you are up against and what you want somebody to think in the first two seconds. This is most of the work, and it is why the questions come before any drawing.
A small number of genuinely different routes, each with a reason behind it, rather than fifty near-identical variations. You choose a direction to develop, not a finished thing to sign off.
The chosen route gets developed properly: how it behaves small, how it sits in one colour, how it works on a dark background, and which colour and type decisions go with it.
Everything packaged and named sensibly, with a short written guide covering the rules that matter and the mistakes worth avoiding.
Applied to the website if that is part of the project, or handed over ready for you and anyone else to use. Either way the files are yours.
Plenty of businesses do not need a rebrand. They need what they already have to be used properly: one set of colours instead of four, a decent version of the logo for small sizes, and a rule about which typeface goes where.
That is a smaller and cheaper piece of work than starting again, and I will tell you honestly which one you need. Rebranding a business that customers already recognise carries a real cost, and it is not always worth paying. If your logo is fine and the problem is the website around it, say so and we will fix that instead.
More answers are on the FAQs page.
It is quoted individually, because a single logo and a full identity applied across a website are very different pieces of work. After the first conversation you get a written, fixed quote covering exactly what is included and what you will receive.
Less than a website project. The length depends mostly on how quickly decisions come back, since the middle stage needs you to choose a direction before it can go on. You get dates at the planning stage so it is not open ended.
A small number of genuinely different directions rather than a large pile of variations on one idea. Fifty options is a way of avoiding a decision, not a way of making one. Each route comes with the thinking behind it so you are choosing on more than taste.
Yes. The finished artwork and the source files are yours, in vector and web formats, so any designer or printer can work with them in future. Nothing is held back.
Yes, and quite often that is the right answer. Fixing inconsistent colours, redrawing a logo that only exists as a low resolution image and writing down some simple rules costs far less than starting from scratch.
Not necessarily. If what you have works, the website should be built around it. If the identity is genuinely holding the business back, doing it first means the site can be built from it rather than around it. I will give you a straight answer rather than sell you both.
Tell me what you have at the moment and what is bothering you about it. I will tell you whether it needs redoing, tidying up, or leaving alone.
Or call 07905 819522, Monday to Sunday, 9am to 7pm.
