Brand Identity Design. For new brands, rebrands and awkward in-between brands.
To be a successful brand in a world full of brands, the first priority is to be recognised. The second is to be remembered.
We’re a brand identity agency in Manchester, designing new visual identities and rebranding existing ones. Logos are involved, naturally. But so are colours, typefaces, photography, illustration, graphic devices, motion and all the other things that make a brand recognisable.
For new brands, we build everything from scratch. A rebrand is trickier. There may be years of equity tied up in what you have, so throwing the baby out with the bathwater is rarely a good idea. And that’s good advice in general.
Talk to us about your brand identity
New brand or one that needs rethinking? We’d love to help.
Building the bits that people remember
There’s no point catching someone’s eye if they can’t remember which brand caught it. We create identities that make the connection stick.
In reality, a recognisable brand identity comes from everything working together. As a specialist brand design agency, we look for visual systems with relevance behind them. Meaningful design trumps superficial aesthetics every time.
For Manchester Building Society, that meant avoiding the familiar Manchester shorthand and looking at the place itself. The map of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs became the basis of the logo and a visual system that could stretch across branches, advertising, digital and everything in between.
Importantly, a good rebrand agency knows what not to change, so we’re meticulous about what should go, what should stay, and what deserves a little more attention. With DCYPHER, the brand needed to move into a more premium beauty space. The technology behind the product was one of its most interesting qualities, so we put it front and centre.
If you need help with brand naming and creation, give us a shout. If you need the words to work a little harder, check out our copywriting pedigree. And if your product needs to stand out on a shelf, have a look at our packaging design.
Fancy an identity nobody can mistake for anyone else?
Tell us what you’re working with and we’ll tell you what we’d do.
The identity parade
From close to being delisted to being instantly unignorable across a busy bar. We rebranded Spin Doctor for Joseph Holt (who saw a 400% lift in sales) and rooted it in a world of newspapers: tabloid typography, ripped paper, registration marks and a load of nonsense.
A coffee brand created from scratch. It all started with a reason for being and a point of view on the world. From there, we named it, developed its custom typeface and visual identity, then let it loose across coffee bags, boxes, website, serveware and merch.
How do you make a hundred-year-old building society feel unmistakably Greater Manchester without reaching for a bee? We started with the ten boroughs. Their geography became the logo and the basis of a colourful identity designed to represent the whole place, not the usual few postcodes.
Brave, bold and brilliant listeners, Sergeant Walnuts have been a joy to work with. They thought deeply about the brief and helped deliver our promise. From the beginning, they brought energy, optimism and colour to our category, creating a brand identity as vibrant, diverse, and full of potential as the place it represents.
Andrew Nicholson
Head of Brand, Manchester Building Society
Let’s build a brand that leaves its mark
Get in touch and tell us where your brand is at.