A new logo will not fix it
Identity, naming and design systems for businesses that already know what they are — and a first conversation about whether that is true yet.
Three ways studios get engaged
Only one of them usually needs a studio.
Something is genuinely wrong with the identity
The name is unpronounceable in the market you have grown into, the mark does not survive being small, or the system has drifted so far that three departments are effectively different companies. This is the third of enquiries that becomes work, and it is the third where a studio earns its fee.
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The positioning is unresolved
A rebrand here makes the confusion better-looking. We will spend an afternoon on it and then tell you to go away and decide what you sell first.
Somebody senior is bored
The most expensive kind, because nothing is wrong. We decline these, occasionally twice, and have never regretted it.
What we actually make
Four deliverables. Everything else is a stage on the way to one of them.
Identity
A wordmark, a type system and a colour set that survives being printed badly on a delivery box. Delivered with the drawing files rather than only the exports, because a mark you cannot reproduce is a mark you are renting.
Naming
Names with the trademark search done before you fall in love with one. Most of this work is elimination, and the useful output is the list of twelve we rejected with the reason each one fails.
Design systems
Components, rules and the document that lets somebody in-house make a poster on a Tuesday without calling us. A system nobody can operate is a retainer in disguise.
Packaging
Structure and surface, taken to a printer we have stood next to. Artwork is released with the die line, the ink list and the printer’s own proof signed off — not as a PDF and a hope.
We decline about a third of what we are asked to do
About a third of the businesses that approach a studio for a rebrand do not need one. What they have is a positioning problem, a product problem, or a sales process that loses people at the third step — and a new wordmark applied over any of those makes the problem better-looking rather than smaller. So the first conversation here is about whether design is the constraint at all, and when it is not we say so and decline the work. A studio that never declines is a studio whose recommendations mean nothing, because they were never in doubt.
Including the ones we turned down
They told us in the first meeting that our problem was that we sold the same thing as four other people, and no logo would change that. We came back two years later with an actual answer and they took the work. It was the best money we never spent.
The naming deliverable included the twelve names they rejected and exactly why each one failed the trademark search. That document was more useful to our lawyer than the name itself.
Two years on, our own team still makes everything from the system without calling them. I have paid three studios before this one and every previous system quietly became a retainer.
The first conversation is about whether you need us
Half an hour, no charge, and it ends with a straight answer. If design is not your constraint we will say what we think is, and name somebody better placed to help.