Home / Field guides / Branding & Design
Field guide · Branding & DesignBranding & Design: a field guide.
How we would build an identity, in order — including the parts you should keep for yourself.
Written to be used.
Some of the people who read this will close it and build their own identity. That is a good outcome, and it is part of why the guide exists. A founder with one product, one language and a clear head can get further alone today than at any point in the last twenty years, and the tools to do it cost almost nothing.
What follows is the order we work in, the decision made at each stage, and the places where identity work quietly goes wrong. Nothing is withheld. The method was never the secret — the difficulty has always been holding a set of decisions steady across two writing systems, a dozen suppliers and several years, while the business underneath them keeps changing.
You can generate the work. You cannot delegate the outcome.
What you can genuinely do yourself.
- Explore visual territory in an evening
- Longlist and screen names yourself
- Write the brand brief yourself
- Set an accessible palette and scale
- Automate resizing, templates and social variants
- Work through the sequence in order
- Metallic finish specified for every medium
- Arabic and Latin designed as equals
- Named decision rights over departures
If you sell one product, in one language, through one channel, and you can hold the whole brand in your head — you do not need us at all. Draw it yourself, keep the fee, and spend it on the product.
Where the general answer stops being useful.
Not because it is wrong. Because it is general, and this is a contested problem against named competitors who were handed the same advice.
“Design a luxury logo for a Dubai wellness brand — minimal, gold, timeless.”
It is a competent answer, and frequently a better-looking one than the brief deserved.
What the decision requiresGold is not a colour; it is a finish. A metallic identity needs three parallel specifications — a metallic ink for foil and signage, a flat print equivalent, and a screen equivalent — plus a written rule for the moment foil is unavailable, which is most moments. The brands that look expensive on a box and cheap on an invoice are almost always the ones that specified gold once and assumed it would travel.
“Write a brand guidelines document for my company.”
It is a sound skeleton, and a better starting brief than most agencies are given.
What the decision requiresGuidelines have three audiences who cannot share one file. The in-house marketer needs a single page they can hold in their head; the printer needs a production spec with spot values, minimum sizes and bleeds; the developer needs importable tokens, not screenshots of colours. And the clause that actually decides whether the system survives is not a rule at all — it is the line naming who may approve an exception, and how fast they must answer.
“Suggest an Arabic typeface to pair with my Latin brand font.”
The shortlist is sound, and the pairing logic is the one a designer would start from.
What the decision requiresArabic and Latin do not share a baseline, and matching x-heights is the mistake that gives a translated brand away. Set at the same point size, most Arabic faces read smaller and sit tighter, so they need an optical size uplift and noticeably more line height before the two languages feel like one voice. Harder still: Arabic has neither italic nor small caps, so every hierarchy you built on emphasis collapses in the Arabic layout — a parallel hierarchy made from weight and scale alone has to be decided before the first bilingual page is designed, not retrofitted after the English site ships.
What a year of doing it alone usually looks like.
- Design and approve at hero sizeDetail closes up at small sizesRedrawing the mark after it is in use
- A slim palette, chosen wellThe team improvises error and disabled statesSlightly different blues and no way to choose
- Launch the English identity firstArabic squeezed into an unprepared gridReads as a translation; the market notices quietly
- Commission a careful, handsome guidelines documentMaking anything takes longer with itRebuilding it around a real Tuesday afternoon
- Install the identity before the trademark searchA prior registration in your trading classReprinting, reinstalling and relicensing at the wrong moment
If you run it yourself, run it in this order.
- Before drawingWrite the commercial decision downEvery later argument about colour is this argument in disguise
- At the outsetSettle naming and architectureRenaming after launch costs more than redesigning; clearance runs longest
- ExplorationExplore widely, then narrowA route you cannot argue for fails its first hostile meeting
- Before committingTest survivors under constraintCheaper to fail here than after the signage is ordered
- BuildingBuild the system, not artefactsRule card, production spec and developer tokens serve different readers
- Launch and afterTake ownership, govern the exceptionsBrands decay because nobody was permitted to say no
Six workstreams, drawn as one machine.
Six things have to be true at the same time for an identity to hold.
What the PDF adds to this.
- —The six workstreams in full — what each one actually contains, not just what it is called.
- —One line item opened into twelve decisions — the part that decides the result.
- —The shape of a mandate — scope, cadence and what the work honestly asks of you.
- —The written argument behind every diagram on this page, in full.
Run it yourself.
Or hand it to someone whose name is on the result.
The tasks became cheap; who answers for the number at the end of the quarter did not change. We will tell you honestly if you are not a fit.
Request a Growth Audit