Corporate Brand Identity
A complete visual identity system — logo, brand guidelines, print collateral, and a digital asset library — for a professional services firm entering a competitive UK market.
Results
The Challenge
The client was a newly incorporated UK professional services firm with ambitious growth plans but no visual identity to speak of. Their existing materials consisted of a generic WordPress template and a logo created in Canva. They were preparing for a series of client pitches and industry events and needed a brand that communicated credibility, expertise, and trust from first glance.
Our Solution
We ran a three-session brand discovery process to extract the firm's values, target audience, and competitive positioning. From this we developed five distinct logo directions, refined the chosen direction through two rounds of feedback, and built a comprehensive brand system: primary and secondary logo marks, a typographic hierarchy, a colour palette with accessibility-compliant contrast ratios, and a photography style guide.
Brand Discovery
Before opening Illustrator, we spent two sessions with the founding partners understanding who they were trying to reach, what they stood for, and how they wanted to be perceived relative to the established firms they were competing against. The answer was clear: authoritative but approachable, modern but not trendy, confident without arrogance. These four adjectives drove every decision that followed.
Logo Design
We presented five logo directions: a wordmark, a monogram, an abstract mark, a geometric emblem, and a hybrid. The chosen direction was a refined wordmark with a custom letterform that created a subtle visual device — immediately recognisable at small sizes on a business card, and striking at large scale on presentation materials. The final mark was delivered in horizontal, stacked, and icon-only variants.
Colour and Typography
The colour palette centred on a deep navy and warm gold — conveying established authority with a contemporary warmth. All colour combinations were tested for WCAG AA accessibility compliance. The typographic system used a single type family across weights, creating hierarchy without visual noise. Variable font files were supplied for digital use, with web-safe fallbacks documented.
Collateral
The design system was applied across business cards, letterheads, email signatures, PowerPoint templates, folder covers, and a suite of social media templates in Figma. Print files were supplied press-ready with bleed, crop marks, and CMYK colour profiles. Digital files were supplied in RGB for screen use.
Outcome
The client launched their new brand at an industry awards dinner six weeks after the project began. Within three months, they reported that the pitch win rate had improved significantly, with several clients specifically mentioning the professionalism of their materials. The brand guidelines document has since been used to onboard two junior designers internally.
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