Branding & Design

A brand has to survive being built

Most brand work is judged at the size it is presented: a large logo on a clean slide, a palette laid out in generous squares, a mock-up of a shopping bag. Very little of a small brand’s life is spent at that size. It is spent at 16 pixels in a browser tab, in one colour on a shipping label, reversed out of a dark product photo, and squeezed into the header of a store on a 390-pixel phone.

An identity that only works large is not finished. So we test the small, awkward uses first, and approve the large version last. If the mark cannot be read as a favicon, it gets redrawn before anyone sees it on a poster.

The same applies to the store. A design that exists only as full-page images at one desktop width is a picture of a website, not a plan for one. Whoever builds it has to guess what happens on a phone, what the type does at every size, and what a product card looks like when the name runs to three lines. Those guesses are where budgets and timelines go.

What we design

Identity. A primary logo, a secondary mark and a favicon, drawn as vectors. A palette with values for screen and print, and a type pairing of two families at most, chosen for how they render and load on the web as much as for how they look.

Guidelines. The written rules that let someone who was never in the room use the brand correctly: clear space, minimum sizes, colour roles, the type scale, what not to do with the logo, and a short note on tone of voice. On Brand Starter this is a one-page sheet; on the larger tiers it is a full document, kept as both a PDF and a page in the Figma file.

Store and site design. Home, collection and product templates in Figma, at mobile and desktop widths, with the states that real catalogues produce — sale prices, sold-out variants, long names, empty collections. Drawn for Shopify or WordPress, depending on what the store runs on.

A full UI system. On the Full Brand System tier, a complete component library with variables for colour, type and spacing, plus packaging artwork and a social template kit built from the same system, so the box, the post and the product page all look like one business.

Why the Figma file decides the build cost

How a design file is built changes what it costs to turn into a store, and it is worth being direct about that. A file with defined variables, real components and stated breakpoints becomes a theme’s token layer and section inventory almost directly. A file that is a stack of flat images needs a developer to infer the system first — what the type scale is, what the spacing rules are, how a component behaves when its content changes. That inference is design work, done by someone who is not a designer, and it is usually billed as development.

So the files we hand over are organised the way a developer reads them. Colours, type and spacing are variables, not values typed into each layer. Repeated elements are components with their variants defined. Every template has a mobile and a desktop frame. When our own Shopify theme team builds from the file, there is no translation step between design and build, and when someone else’s team does, they get the same file.

The tests a logo has to pass

Before a mark is approved, it has to pass a short list of practical checks. It has to be legible at 16 by 16 pixels, because that is how most people will see it in a browser tab or a bookmark. It has to work in a single colour, for stamps, embossing and shipping labels. It has to work reversed, on a dark photo or a dark footer. And it has to sit comfortably in a narrow store header on a phone without shrinking to nothing.

Colour has its own test. Every pairing of text and background that the guidelines allow is checked against WCAG AA: a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for body text, and 3 to 1 for large text and interface elements such as buttons and form borders. A colour that fails is not banned outright; it is restricted in the guidelines to the sizes and uses where it passes. That is what stops a pale brand colour from becoming unreadable button text six months after launch.

When a rebrand is the wrong answer

If the store looks fine and customers still leave without buying, a new identity is rarely what fixes it. The cause is far more often a slow product page, unclear delivery costs, or a checkout with one step too many — and those are cheaper to fix and quicker to measure than a new logo. Our fixed-fee audit finds which, in writing, before you commit to a rebrand.

A rebrand also discards whatever recognition the current brand has earned. If customers already know your mark, a refresh is often the better call: redraw it cleanly, tighten the palette, choose proper type and write the rules down. The honest case for a new identity is a business that has changed what it sells or who it sells to, or a mark that simply cannot be used where the business now needs it. We will say which one we think you are at the brief.

What you get, and who owns it

On final payment, the artwork and the Figma source are yours, transferred to your account rather than held by us. You get logo files in SVG, PNG and PDF in full colour, one colour and reversed; a palette with HEX, RGB and CMYK values and the approved pairings; the type pairing, with font files or licence links; and the brand sheet or guidelines for your tier.

On the store tiers you also get the Figma templates and component library, and a walkthrough with whoever builds the theme or site, so the person writing the code hears the reasoning from the person who drew it. If they still have to guess, we did not finish the job.