Corporate Design

We start by listing where the brand actually shows up: stationery, quotes and invoices, vehicle lettering, trade fair stands, packaging, product labels, job ads, presentations, the website and the shop. That list decides what the corporate design has to cover. A manufacturer needs different specifications than a service company that mostly appears online.

Next come the building blocks. The logo gets its variants for positive, negative and single color use, plus clear space and a minimum size. The color system has to hold up in every space you need: RGB and HEX for screens, CMYK for print, spot colors for finishing, RAL references for paint and signage. Typography arrives with licensing sorted for desktop, web and applications. On top of that come the grid, spacing, shapes and rules for imagery.

You receive both the manual that explains the rules and the files your team works with. Logo packages as SVG, EPS and PNG, templates for Office and layout software, print-ready stationery and, where it makes sense, color and type values in a form development can adopt directly. One short rule covers how to deal with cases the manual does not show.

The most common trigger is drift. Over the years, presentations, ads and data sheets pile up across departments, each with its own typeface and its own shade of blue. At some point nobody can tell they belong to the same company. A corporate design clears that up and states the rules concretely enough that people can apply them without asking.

Other typical starting points: a change of company name, a merger, a new business area with its own audience, entry into further markets, or an appearance that no longer competes for skilled staff. An acquisition counts too, because two visual worlds then sit side by side and someone has to decide whether they merge or stay apart.

Starting with the corporate design is the wrong move while positioning, audiences and core messages are still open. You would be designing a statement that changes shortly afterwards. Brand identity belongs first in that case. And if a single campaign needs a face of its own without touching the underlying rules, that is art direction rather than a new corporate design.

Rulebooks rarely fail on the concept. They fail on the cases nobody planned for. The manual shows the logo on white; in reality it sits on a photograph, on a three centimeter giveaway or embroidered onto a polo shirt. So we decide early how the brand looks when only one color is available or the space is too small for the wordmark.

Two further obstacles are technical. Type licenses often cover desktop use only, while web and app use has to be licensed separately. And color palettes that look good on paper fall apart on screen as soon as legibility matters: WCAG asks for a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for body text and 3 to 1 for large type and interface elements. Noticing that during build means correcting the house color after the fact. So we check the palette against those values right away.