Brand Identity

Two to three hours, your core team and ours at one table — founder included, UX and brand included. Everything said there gets clustered into the communication framework: values, goals, convictions.

That foundation never gets lost again — it lives, literally, in the brand guidelines.

We’ve seen too many eighty-page brand strategies nobody reads. Our deliverable is deliberately compact: the essence on one page, the depth behind it, and a presentation that makes it land internally.

A strategy only works when everyone can retell it.

Not every brand needs a restart. Sometimes a refresh is more honest than a rebrand — because throwing away fifteen years of built-up recognition has a price nobody names upfront.

We’ve advised clients against a full rebrand and given them a stronger refresh instead. We’d rather have that conversation before the project than after.

The brand comes to life on the website, in the templates, down to event materials — applied by the team that designed it.

What clients tell us afterwards: “we finally understand who we are ourselves” — and that sales and marketing can work with it from day one.

A brand identity is the visible part of a brand: the logo, typography, colour, imagery and tone that make an organisation recognisable. Underneath sits a set of decisions — what you stand for, for whom, and why it matters.

The identity makes those decisions visible and repeatable. Done well, it means every touchpoint — website, deck, campaign — tells the same story, without anyone having to police it.

A visual identity is the visible layer: logo, typography, colour, imagery. A brand identity is broader — it also covers voice, tone and the behaviour behind the visuals. In practice the two terms overlap, and most organisations use them interchangeably.

We design both in one movement: the visual system and the verbal one, so they reinforce each other. An identity that looks right but reads wrong doesn’t hold — and the other way around.

The core is the visual system: logo and mark, typography, colour, imagery direction, and the brand guidelines that hold it all together — communication framework included, so the thinking behind the design travels with it. Depending on scope, we add naming, tone of voice, presentation templates, and a design system for digital.

We agree the scope per phase at the start, so you see what each part of the work delivers before it begins — and what can wait for a later phase.

A logo is one element — the signature. The brand identity is the system around it: the typography, the colour, the imagery, the rules that make everything you publish recognisably yours.

A logo on its own changes little. The system around it decides whether the organisation is recognisable at a glance, on every channel, for years. That’s where the real work sits.

Corporate identity is the older term, and in practice it usually points at the visual layer: the logo, the stationery, the house style an organisation applies across its materials. Brand identity is the broader, current term — it includes that visual layer, plus the voice, tone and behaviour that carry it.

The distinction matters less than the consistency. Whichever term your organisation uses, the question is the same: does everything you publish feel recognisably like one organisation? That’s what we design for.

The foundation stands in two to three weeks — through the Mars Methodology, our fixed first phase. A brand identity typically takes six to ten weeks from there; a project that includes the website runs ten to sixteen.

We plan the timeline in phases at the start. The biggest delays are rarely in the design itself, but in internal decision-making — so we plan for that from day one.

That depends on the scope: an identity with guidelines asks for different work than an identity plus website plus campaign. Early in the conversation we share an estimate per phase, so you see what each part of the work costs before it begins.

For most organisations an identity is an investment they make every five years or more. We’d rather help you spend that money where it actually makes a difference than push for the most expensive version of the work.

Both. Often an identity isn’t wrong — it’s unfinished. A digital layer is missing, the guidelines don’t cover everyday practice, or the system has expanded over the years until no one can explain it.

In those cases we strengthen what’s there instead of starting over. And when the identity no longer fits who you’ve become, we say so honestly — a refresh on the wrong foundation is money spent twice.

The same way: one story, recognisable on every format. Most of our work lives on screens — websites, campaigns, presentations, social — and where print plays a role, we design it in the same visual language.

That’s why we design identities as systems rather than fixed artwork. A system adapts to a format it hasn’t met yet; a fixed design breaks.

Yes. The same team that designs the identity applies it: to the website, to the templates your team uses every day, to the campaign that follows.

That’s deliberate. Most identities don’t fail in the design phase — they fail in application, when the work is handed to a team that wasn’t part of the thinking. By keeping design and application in one team, nothing gets lost in handover.

Three things make our work as a branding agency different.

One: a deliberately compact team of seniors who’ve been in this for fifteen to twenty years. For you that means: fewer questions upfront, faster to the core, and no junior learning their trade on your project.

Two: we start with what you want to say, not with how it should look. Most of the identities we rebuild were designed before the direction was clear — we start from the other side.

Three: we make complex innovation easier to understand for the entire group of readers around an organisation. The engineer, the marketing manager, the CEO, the CFO — each reads the same identity differently. We make sure it works for all of them.

That focus means choosing, too: high-volume B2C isn’t our work. And the proof it holds: ninety per cent of our clients stay after the first project. Volume isn’t our position. Depth is.