Brand Identity

Identity work begins where the brand concept ends: with the question of how a decided attitude becomes visible and audible. We develop the mark in every variant daily work demands, meaning positive and negative, single-colour, with a defined clear space, minimum sizes and versions that hold up as a favicon and an app icon.

Alongside that comes a colour system with values for screen and print, fixed pairings for text on background, and contrast ratios checked against the WCAG requirements. Typography is not simply chosen but built as a set of styles, from body copy down to the labels on small controls, including the web licence and the loading behaviour.

The system also covers an icon set at a consistent stroke weight, an image style with examples and explicit counter-examples, layout grids for recurring formats, and the verbal side: wordmark, use of the claim, binding spellings.

It is delivered as a manual, as open source files and as design tokens that developers can work with directly, together with the reference applications everything is later measured against: website, stationery, social formats and the documents the shop sends out.

The obvious trigger is a relaunch, where every page is being rebuilt anyway. Just as common is the slow version of the problem: presentations, adverts, packaging and website come from different years and different suppliers, and nobody can say which version is the valid one.

Building a system also pays off when many people produce material, for instance sales offices, retail partners or a rotating cast of freelancers. Without a system, variants appear that nobody ever approved. After a merger or a change of name, identity work is part of the job regardless.

A third trigger is technical. Once a site has to meet accessibility requirements, contrast ratios, type sizes and focus states become binding, and older visual identities simply have no answer for them.

It is not the right step when a single campaign is coming up. Art direction within the existing rules covers that. Nor does it make sense while it is still open how many brands the company intends to run. That question belongs first, otherwise you design a system for a structure that is still moving.

A manual delivered as a PDF governs print reliably and digital hardly at all. For an identity to survive daily operation it has to reach the code: as design tokens, as CSS variables, in the WordPress theme through theme.json, and as a component library with states for focus, error, disabled and loading.

The usual failure points are well known. The corporate typeface is licensed for print only and may not be served from the site. Colour pairings from the manual break the contrast requirements the moment they are used for text. The logo exists as an EPS but not as a clean SVG. And there is no specification for dark mode, which operating systems now request automatically.

Then there are the places no manual covers: confirmation and dispatch emails from the shop, invoices, return labels, empty baskets, error pages. That is exactly where customers notice whether a brand is being carried through, and exactly where a specification is most often missing.

Finally it needs a named person who approves and a single place where the valid files live. Without both, variants from old presentations are back in circulation within months.