Brand
You win the room every time you are in it. The job of a brand is to do that when you are not there: on a page, in an inbox, in a search result someone opened at eleven at night.
Brand Strategy
Positioning first: who you are for, what you are genuinely better at, and the reason to choose you over the competent alternative down the road.
It is a short document, not a workshop industry. The decisions are made by the people who have to live with them, which is why this takes weeks rather than quarters.
- Positioning and audience
- Proposition and proof
- Naming and architecture
- Competitive differentiation
Visual Identity
The system (mark, type, colour, layout, art direction) designed at the sizes it will be used at, starting with a phone screen and a favicon.
Distinctive enough to be recognised, disciplined enough that your team can apply it without a designer in the room.
- Logo and mark
- Typography and colour
- Art direction
- Application and templates
Verbal Identity
How the business sounds: the way you explain what you do, the words you use for the things only you have names for, and the register you write in when something has gone wrong.
Made concrete with worked examples (a homepage, an outreach email, a support reply) because a list of tone adjectives has never helped anyone write a sentence.
- Tone of voice
- Messaging framework
- Naming and terminology
- Worked examples
Guidelines
The rules written down, short enough that people read them: what to do, what not to do, and the files to do it with.
A refresh takes two to three weeks. A full build, four to six. Then it is yours: the source files come with it.
- Brand guidelines
- Asset library and templates
- Team onboarding
- Source files handed over