The boring bits are the brand.
I judge car park signs. There I said it. Not in a clipboard-and-hi-vis way. More in the way designers notice things most wouldn’t. Bad kerning on a menu. A stretched logo on a PowerPoint. A laminated A3 sign taped to a reception desk that suggests temporary but has clearly been there since 2019. Car park […]
The power of belonging.
Last week I found myself in a small town in Lower Saxony, Germany. For four days every four years, Hessisch Oldendorf becomes the centre of the vintage Volkswagen world. Over 65,000 visitors from more than 60 countries. Around 900 registered classic Volkswagens. Many, many air-cooled cars spread throughout the town. People travelling from Mexico, Brazil, […]
Building More Than an Audience.
Last Monday I went back to the Octopus Energy Tech Summit at Evolution London in Battersea Park. It was my second time there and, once again, it was a fantastic event. Really well organised, really well hosted, and full of interesting people talking about energy, transport, technology and where all of this might be […]
How to build a community-first brand.
A lot of ‘community brands’ start at the surface layer: warmer copy, friendlier colours, more photos of people wearing branded T-shirts. Community-first branding isn’t a tone of voice problem. It’s an organisational design challenge wearing one of those T-shirts. Communities rarely judge you on how supportive your headline sounds. They judge you on whether they […]
Open mic night for brands.
Open mic night for brands – it was April Fools again, and the annual risk of bombing or bringing the house down. Done well, it’s a small bit of personality, a reminder there are actual humans behind the logo (or at least one sleep-deprived social media manager with a Canva login). In a sea of […]
Inspiring human kindness.
Branding matters most when it helps people understand what you stand for, trust it, and want to be part of it. That’s why we’re proud to share this latest We Are Acuity case study for Goods For Good and The Kind Network. This was never just about creating a logo. It was about building a […]
From idea to identity: Designing a cultural shift.
When Stellantis introduced its internal programme “A Better Me, A Better Us”, our brief wasn’t to design a campaign asset. It was to create an identity capable of carrying a cultural ambition across an entire organisation. As designers, our task is to express the relationship between individual growth and collective performance in a single, recognisable […]
Being forgettable is rarely intentional.
Small businesses don’t neglect their brand because they’re careless. They neglect it because they’re busy. They’re opening up, locking up, paying suppliers, answering WhatsApps at 10pm, trying to keep staff happy and customers happier. Branding quite reasonably drops down the list. Somewhere below “fix the card machine” and “order more towels”. I was reminded of […]
In reference to brand guidelines…
81% of customers need to trust a brand before they will even consider buying from it. That has not changed. What has changed is how brands show up and who is now responsible for making that happen. Today, more marketing is handled in house. Store teams, office staff and regional managers are all producing content. […]
£532K well spent?
Did the Government really pay £532K to move a dot?Of course not. What they paid for was trust, consistency, clarity, optimism, and detailed guidance for every department on how to adopt a new, all-encompassing design system.The click-baiting, political hyperbole suggesting anyone would pay over half a million to “nudge a dot” is not only insulting […]