When your small business branding needs to catch up to your business

I work with small and growing businesses that are ready for their branding to catch up with the excellent work they do. That might mean:

DIY beginnings feel outdated

Your company is now established, but the visual identity is still the “we just needed to put something out there” version.

The business has changed

Services, audiences, positioning, ambitions, or competitors are different than they were a few years ago.

The brand looks like everyone else

The industry has a formula for how things look, and sticking to it closely isn’t helping anymore.

The marketing has become a patchwork

Different people, platforms, and vendors have added their own pieces over time. Everything works ok, but none of it feels like it belongs together.

I help businesses figure out what their brand needs to say, then turn that thinking into a visual identity that feels distinctive and appropriate. So the outside of the business matches the inside.

Your business has a personality. Let’s reveal it.

If your company has been around for a bit, you’re probably looking for more than just “make our branding look professional.” The more interesting question is:

What does your version of professional look like?

Authoritative? Cheeky? Premium? Relaxed? Do you have a cherished legacy you love to play up, or are you on the leading edge of whatever your thing is? Can it be both? How do you strike a balance between ideas that might look contradictory on the surface?

When we strike the right balance, your brand identity can set expectations, establish a point of view, and help the right people recognize that this business is for them.

Figuring out what we need to say

When I work with a small business, I want to understand what makes them tick before I start crafting visuals. What do customers love about the company? What makes it different? What has changed over time? What should people understand immediately, and what’s ok for them to gradually learn?

What would be some wrong messages to send? Is there a reputation we need to correct?

I ask questions, listen carefully, look for patterns, and pull out the ideas that have the most potential. Then I translate those ideas into the visual language of the brand: typography, color, imagery, graphic elements, and layouts.

Jessica was able to evolve our brand, aesthetic, tone, and voice from a misaligned, rough-and-tumble setup to an intelligent identity system that spoke incredibly true to the heart of our company.

—Dan Arbello, Chromatic

I’ve been designing identities for a couple decades, and I love figuring out what makes a business interesting, and then making it visible in a brand system.

An identity system will make your life easier

Once the identity is figured out, you shouldn’t have to reinvent the visual style every time you make a presentation, publish a social post, send a proposal, update the website, or create a new piece of marketing. A good identity gives everyone good ingredients to work from.

The marketing team knows which typefaces and colors to use. They know what the imagery should feel like. The logo is flexible enough to work well in lots of different situations. All the pieces of the business look like they belong to the same company.

When the brand needs to catch up

If your small business has evolved but the visual identity hasn’t, it may be time for a refresh.

We’ll figure out what’s working, what’s not, and what your brand needs to say now.

Get started