Graphic design that still works when we are not in the room

What graphic design means on this page

Graphic design is a broad term, and studios tend to use it to describe whatever they happen to sell. Here it means the visual system a business runs on — the identity itself, and the applied work that comes out of it: a pitch deck, a brochure, a piece of packaging, and the fourteen social posts somebody has to make next week whether or not a designer is free. It does not mean interface design; that is UI/UX design, which is about how a thing behaves under load, in error and on a poor connection, and it belongs on its own page alongside website design.

The most useful thing to understand before commissioning any of this is that the logo is the smallest part of it. Whether a brand still looks like itself in two years depends on the unglamorous scaffolding — whether the colour was specified for ink as well as for screens, whether the typefaces are licensed for every place they now appear, whether anyone can find the vector originals, and whether the rules are short enough to be read.

The identity is a system, not a mark

An identity that consists of a logo and a hex code will drift, because every subsequent decision has to be improvised by whoever is making the artefact at the time. A system removes those improvisations by deciding, once, the things that recur: how type is scaled and paired, how much space surrounds things, how photography is treated, and what happens when the only available space is a 32-pixel square. Three parts of it cause almost all the trouble later.

Colour has to survive more than one colour space

Colour has to work on a backlit screen, in ink on paper, and often on a substrate that is neither — moulded plastic, woven fabric, cut vinyl. Screen colour is additive and can produce a saturated orange that looks superb on a phone. Print is subtractive, mixed from cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and cannot reach a large part of that range. A palette approved on a monitor and then converted to CMYK by an export dialogue at the last minute is precisely how a company ends up with a signature colour that comes back from the printer looking dull and faintly brown. The fix is not clever: choose the print build deliberately, look at it on the actual stock, and accept that the screen and print versions may differ slightly on purpose.

Spot colours — the Pantone Matching System — exist where consistency across substrates matters more than cost: a mark that must look identical on a box, a carrier bag and a van. Two things are worth knowing before you specify one. You cannot judge a spot colour on a screen; you need the physical guide, and printed guides fade with age and light, which is why print shops replace theirs. And Pantone’s colour libraries were removed from Adobe’s applications, so current references now depend on the separate Pantone Connect extension — meaning a spot specification quietly commits everyone who touches your artwork to that subscription. It is often still the right call. It should be a decision rather than a discovery.

Type is a licence before it is a typeface

Choosing a typeface is the enjoyable part. Licensing it is the part that produces an awkward email eighteen months later.

Font licences are sold by use, and the categories do not overlap. A desktop licence covers artwork made on a computer and does not cover a website, an application, an ebook or broadcast. Web licences are commonly tiered by monthly pageviews, application licences by installs or by title, and some foundries exclude use inside a logo altogether unless an extended licence is bought. Fonts served through a subscription are tied to that subscription staying active, which matters a great deal when the licence holder is the agency rather than you.

Faces released under the SIL Open Font License avoid most of this. They can be used commercially, embedded, and used in a logo without attribution; the restrictions are mainly on selling the font itself and on reusing a reserved font name for a modified version. That is why an open licence is frequently right for the workhorse text face even when the display face is licensed commercially. Either way, licences should be bought in your name and written down. We specify and advise; you own.

A mark that is drawn is not a mark that is cleared

Designing a distinctive logo does not establish that you are free to use it. Those are two separate pieces of work and only one of them is design. Registration is handled by an intellectual property office, which examines the application against existing marks, publishes it for a period during which others can oppose it, and grants protection that is territorial — a UK registration covers the UK and the Isle of Man and nothing beyond. If a name or mark is commercially load-bearing, run clearance with a solicitor or attorney in parallel, and before the packaging is printed rather than after.

Guidelines people actually follow

Most brand guidelines fail for the same reason: they were written to be admired at the point of delivery rather than used at the point of need. A hundred-page document with a philosophy section is a beautiful artefact and a poor instruction manual.

The test is simple. Can a marketing coordinator, at half past four on a Friday with no designer available, work out how to lay out a two-column A4 flyer and get it right?

So the guidelines we write are organised by situation rather than by principle. What the logo does when space is tight. Which colour pairings are safe for body text and which are decorative only, with the measured ratios shown next to them. What to do when a photograph has no quiet area for a headline. Correct and incorrect examples side by side, because a rule stated abstractly is a rule everyone interprets differently. And they are short, because the length of a guidelines document is inversely related to the number of people who finish it.

The applied work: collateral, decks and campaign creative

An identity earns its cost in application. This is the volume work — brochures, one-pagers, reports, signage, exhibition graphics, sales sheets — and the useful question is not whether we can design each item, but how the twentieth one gets made without us.

The answer is templates, built in the tools your team genuinely uses. There is an unhelpful tradition of designing an immaculate system in professional software and then watching people rebuild it badly in whatever is installed on their laptop. If your team works in PowerPoint or Canva, the template belongs there too, with type styles and colours locked so the output stays coherent without supervision. It is worth knowing what those tools cannot do — reliable colour management and true spot colour among them — which is why anything heading for a press still goes to the printer as production artwork rather than as a shared link.

Presentation and pitch decks

A deck is usually the most-seen and least-designed thing a company produces. The problem is rarely decoration; it is that the slides carry too much and the argument is buried inside them. Useful deck design fixes the structure first — one idea per slide, a consistent hierarchy, charts that state their conclusion in the title — and only then applies the visual system. Alongside the deck we build the master layouts, so the next fifty slides made by somebody else still look like the first ten.

Social and campaign creative

Campaign creative is a systems problem wearing a graphics costume: many sizes, many placements, short lifespans, no time. What helps is a set of layouts that survive cropping to square, portrait and story ratios, with safe areas defined so a headline never disappears under a platform interface element, and a small library of adaptable components rather than one hand-made post that cannot be repeated. That sits close to social media marketing, where creative and distribution are decided in the same conversation.

Packaging and print production artwork

Packaging is where design meets manufacturing tolerance, and it is unforgiving. Artwork is built onto a dieline supplied by the converter — the flat cutting and folding template for that specific structure — so panels land where they should once the pack is glued and folded. Barcodes need their specified quiet zones. Legally required text has minimum sizes in some categories. Ink behaves differently on uncoated board than on coated stock, and a colour signed off on a screen may need adjusting for the substrate it will actually sit on.

For any printed item, the production file is a deliverable in its own right rather than an export at the end: the bleed allowance your printer states, trim marks, embedded fonts, images at adequate resolution, transparency handled predictably, and a stated output intent describing the intended printing condition. Industry preflight specifications exist for exactly this exchange, and a printer who supplies one has done you a favour. The alternative is the familiar loop in which files bounce back and forth and nobody can say whose fault it is.

Motion, and when it earns its place

Animation is worth doing when it explains something a static image cannot, or when a platform demonstrably rewards it. It is not worth doing because the software is open.

For interface and web use, vector formats such as Lottie usually beat video: they scale without loss, weigh far less than the equivalent video file, and can be recoloured without being remade. For social feeds, exported video with captions burned in is the pragmatic choice, since most feeds play silently. Whatever the format, animated brand assets ship with a reduced or static alternative, because operating systems expose a reduced-motion preference and people who set it generally have a reason involving nausea or migraine rather than taste.

Contrast, legibility and the logo exemption

Accessibility in brand work is mostly a question of colour and size, and there is one nuance that catches people out.

Logotypes are explicitly exempt from the contrast requirements in WCAG, so a pale mark on a pale background does not fail an audit. But the exemption is narrower than it sounds: the moment that wordmark is also the link back to the homepage, or the brand colour is used for body copy, buttons or form fields, it no longer applies. Body text needs a ratio of at least 4.5:1, large text 3:1, and interface components and meaningful graphics 3:1 against whatever sits next to them.

This is why so many organisations end up with a primary colour they cannot actually use for text. We would rather establish that while the palette is still a set of swatches than after it has reached a website, a report template and a signage system. So contrast is measured during the palette stage, tints and darker variants are defined for the pairings that fail, and the numbers go into the guidelines where anyone can check them without asking us.

Files, formats and what a handover should include

A handover consisting of a PDF and a folder of PNGs is not a handover. It is a hostage situation with better manners.

Vector artwork — SVG for digital use, EPS and PDF for print and fabrication — is the master form of any logo, because it scales without loss and can be resupplied in a single colour for embroidery, etching or a one-colour press. Raster formats have their place for photography and complex texture, but a mark that exists only as a raster file has already lost the ability to be used at an unpredictable size. One trap is worth naming: an SVG can reference a typeface by name instead of storing outlines, and will then render in a substitute face on any machine that does not have it installed. Logos are supplied with the lettering converted to outlines for exactly that reason.

The rest of a good handover is organisational rather than technical: layered working files, exports in the formats people will actually ask for, a written list of licences and who holds them, and an asset library structured so the correct file is easier to find than a superseded one. Most brand drift is not designers disagreeing with each other. It is somebody using the wrong file because it was the one they could find.

Existing brand, or start again

Most enquiries that arrive asking for a rebrand need a system rather than a new identity. Recognition has real value, and replacing a mark customers already know in order to solve a consistency problem is expensive in a way that never appears on the invoice.

Extending an existing brand is right when the mark is sound but the system around it is thin: no rules for digital, no accessible colour pairings, no templates, no defined roles for type. That work is quicker and less disruptive than it sounds, and it usually resolves the symptom people actually complained about.

Starting again is right when the identity misrepresents the business — after a change of market, a merger, or a strategy shift that leaves the visual language describing a company that no longer exists — or where there is a genuine legal or trade mark problem. Where the current mark carries real equity, the honest middle path is evolution: keep the recognisable asset and rebuild everything around it.

Revisions, and how to keep them from going in circles

Revision rounds go wrong for a structural reason rather than a personal one. Feedback arrives as preference, from several people, at different times, measured against no agreed criterion. “I am not sure about the blue” cannot be actioned, and three contradictory versions of it cannot be reconciled at all.

What works is unglamorous. One consolidated set of feedback per round, from a named decision-maker who has gathered the internal views first. Comments phrased against the brief — what the design has to achieve — rather than against taste. Earlier decisions treated as settled unless there is a stated reason to reopen them, because a project that revisits the logo during the packaging stage has no end state. We will also push back when a change would break something the brief asked for, and say why. Agreeing to everything is the fastest route to a weak result and a longer schedule, and it is not a service.

What actually drives the cost

We do not publish prices, because a number produced before the scope is known is a guess that somebody eventually absorbs. The drivers are not secret, though, and knowing them lets you brief better and compare quotes on the same terms.

The number of distinct applications. This dominates everything else, and it is not the same as the number of files. A mark applied to a website and a business card is a different project from the same mark applied across stationery, a packaging range, vehicle livery, exhibition graphics and a template set. Count applications before you ask anyone to quote.

Creation versus extension. Building an identity from nothing costs considerably more than extending a sound one. If you already have a defensible mark, say so; the valuable work may be the system around it rather than a replacement for it.

Physical production. Anything printed, moulded, cut or fabricated brings dielines, proofing and manufacturer liaison with it. Digital-only work avoids that entirely.

How many people hold a veto. This is the driver nobody puts in a brief and everybody feels. A single decision-maker and a five-person committee are different projects at identical scope.

Whether the content exists. Copy, photography and illustration are inputs, not decoration. If they do not exist yet, somebody is creating them, and that is either a cost or a dependency on your calendar.

Where this sits next to the rest

Brand work rarely arrives alone. An identity usually needs somewhere to live, which is where designing the site itself picks it up and turns a fixed system into a responsive one. Campaign creative is most useful when it is planned with the channel strategy rather than after it, which is why this work runs closely alongside content marketing and paid social. And if what you are building is really a product with users and states rather than a brand with audiences, the discipline you want is interface design, not this one.

If you are not sure which of those describes your problem, tell us what is going wrong and we will say which one it is — including when the answer is that you do not need a rebrand at all.