Most businesses do not have a brand problem. They have a consistency problem. The sign out front is one green, the truck is a different green, the website went blue somewhere along the way, and the invoice is whatever the accounting software shipped with. None of it is wrong on its own. Together it reads as four small companies instead of one that has been doing this for years. A refresh fixes the system, not the drawing: one mark, one palette, one type scale, and written rules so the next person who touches it cannot pull it back apart.
Not a logo on a white square. The whole system on one board: the colours and what each is for, the type scale and where each size lives, and the mark sitting on five surfaces a real business has to print.
Weekly maintenance, seasonal cleanups, and the beds nobody else wants to touch.
Every surface pulls from the same five colours and the same five type sizes. Nothing on this board was decided twice, which is the entire point. Flip the ground and the mark still holds, because it was drawn to survive both.
Illustration only. Alderfield Landscapes is an invented business.
Every drift starts as a small reasonable choice made by somebody trying to help. Three of them account for almost all of it.
The original logo lives on a laptop that got replaced. What circulates now is a screenshot of a screenshot, so every new sign, shirt and flyer traces a slightly worse copy.
The sign shop matched by eye, the shirt vendor picked from a catalogue, and the website used whatever the theme shipped with. Three greens, none of them the green.
There was a right way to use the mark, but it lived in one person's head. The moment somebody else made a flyer, the head was not in the room.
A mark on its own has no defence. Rules give it one, in plain language, so the sign shop, the shirt vendor and whoever builds the next flyer all land in the same place without asking.
A measured margin around the mark that nothing else may enter, expressed in a unit that scales, so it holds on a business card and on the side of a truck.
The smallest size the full lockup survives, plus the point where you switch to the mark alone. This is why the mark gets drawn to work without the words in the first place.
Embroidery, engraving, a fax from a supplier, a black and white newspaper. If the mark only works in full colour it will get redrawn by somebody else the first time it cannot be.
Which grounds it can live on, how much contrast it needs, and the quiet corner rule for busy images. Prevents the version with a white box crudely knocked out behind it.
Do not stretch it, do not recolour it, do not add a drop shadow, do not set the wordmark in a font it does not own, do not rotate it to fit an awkward space.
Vector masters, flat exports at working sizes, one colour and reversed versions, favicon and social crops, and the colour values in the formats screen and print each need.
The rules exist so the brand can survive people who were not in the room when it was made. That is the real test. Not whether it looks good in the presentation, but whether it still looks like itself two years later when a vendor you have never met is laying out a flyer at four in the afternoon.
Plenty of refreshes end with a beautiful document and a business that still looks the same everywhere it counts. Ours ends where the brand is seen.
The five colours land in the stylesheet as named tokens, so changing one changes it everywhere at once instead of in forty places by hand.
Headline, section, lede, body and label ship as real styles. Nobody has to guess a size again, because there are only five and each has a job.
Nav lockup, favicon, social crop and the reversed version for dark sections, cut to the right dimensions rather than squeezed from one oversized file.
Header, buttons and signature match the site, so a confirmation email reads as the same business the customer just bought from.
The documents a customer reads most carefully are usually the ones left on the software default. They get the mark, the type and the colours like everything else.
Print ready files in the formats vendors ask for, with the one colour version already drawn, so nobody has to improvise on your behalf.
Six things, all of them usable by somebody who is not a designer.
A primary lockup, a stacked version for square spaces, and the mark alone for anywhere the words will not fit. Drawn as vector, so it never softens no matter how large it goes.
A small set of colours with a stated job each, given in the values screens need and the values printers need, so the green on the sign matches the green on the site.
Two faces at most, at a fixed set of sizes with weights and spacing decided. Five choices instead of infinite ones, which is what makes later documents fast to lay out.
Clear space, minimum size, one colour use, backgrounds and the short list of things that break it. Written for a vendor to follow, not for a design critique.
The system shown applied, not described. Site header, card, avatar, signature, sign. Seeing it live is what tells you whether it holds before anything gets printed.
Vector masters plus flat exports at the sizes people keep asking for, one colour and reversed versions, favicon and social crops, organised so the right file is obvious.
Most of the work is deciding. The drawing is what happens once the deciding is done.
Every version of the mark still in circulation, every colour in use, the sign, the truck, the invoice. You usually find out here how many variants are running.
What it should feel like to the person deciding whether to call. One sentence, agreed before anything gets drawn, because that sentence settles every argument later.
Mark, palette and type built together and shown on real surfaces rather than a white square. If it does not hold on the sign and the avatar, it goes back.
Into the site, the emails and the documents, then the file pack and the rules to you. From that point the brand does not depend on anyone remembering.
A logo on its own drifts within a year, because the next person who needs a flyer has nothing to follow. If the goal is a mark and nothing else we will say so honestly and keep it small. If the goal is looking like one business everywhere, that is a system, and the difference in cost is smaller than the difference in outcome.
An animated mark is a great opener for a site or a video, and it assumes a mark already worth animating. A refresh is what decides that mark, the colours around it and the rules underneath it. Order matters: the system first, then the motion, otherwise you animate something you are about to change.
If people know you by a colour or a shape, that equity gets identified early and carried forward on purpose. A refresh is not obligated to be a break. Plenty of them are the same recognisable thing, drawn properly, made consistent, and finally given rules so it stops sliding.
The system can ship into an existing site as colours, type and swapped assets. Sometimes that is enough. Other times the site is the reason the brand looks tired and the honest answer is that a new mark on old layout does not read as new. We say which one you are looking at before you spend anything.
Vector masters, not just flat exports. If you ever work with someone else, or bring it in house, everything they need to keep going is already in your hands. Nothing about the handover is designed to make leaving difficult.
The sign, the invoice, the old flyer, whichever one makes you wince. That is usually the fastest way to see whether this is a mark problem or a system problem, and we will tell you which before you commit to anything.
One mark · one palette · one set of rules