Brand Strategy & Identity Systems

Usually at one of four moments: a new brand is being built; an existing one has drifted and no longer matches what the company has become; several sub-brands, channels or products have grown apart and need one language; or the organisation has outgrown an identity that was designed for a much smaller version of itself.

The useful time to start is before the deliverables are decided. If the brief already names the assets, most of the strategic decisions have quietly been made — and they are the ones worth revisiting.

Brand problems rarely present themselves as brand problems. They arrive as symptoms: the sales team has no short answer to “what do you do”; every campaign looks like it came from a different company; the institution feels older than its audience; the product is genuinely better than the competition and nobody can tell from the outside.

Underneath is almost always the same gap — no single idea strong enough to organise everything the organisation makes.

• Positioning and the central idea — what the brand is actually claiming, in language precise enough to design against
• The visual language: logo and identity design, colour, typography, image-making, motion behaviour
• The system — how the parts behave together across channels, formats and the hands of other teams
• The governing documents: brand book, channel or product kit, usage rules that a designer three years from now can follow
• Direction of everything produced against the system while the engagement runs

Small identity work I do myself. When a system needs more — typeface customisation, motion design, illustration, 3D, a broadcast or on-air package, a build — I bring in the specialists it requires and direct them. The team is assembled around the problem rather than inherited from a roster, and the responsibility for coherence stays with me.

A production request asks for a file: a logo, a deck template, a set of resizes. Creative direction asks what the thing has to do, decides the idea it rests on, and then makes every downstream file inevitable rather than arbitrary.

The difference shows up later. Systems built without that decision need a redesign in two years. Systems built with it get extended instead — by other people, without asking permission.

Independent engagements typically begin at ₪30,000. Full identity systems with a multidisciplinary team are scoped separately, once the shape of the problem is clear. If you know your range, say it early — it decides what is possible, not whether the conversation is worth having.