A global agency identity, built so thousands of people who are not designers could use it without breaking it.
FleishmanHillard · Associate Creative Director, on the brand team
Brand strategy and archetype · Guidelines authoring · Photography direction · Large-format and event graphics · Design systems at scale
THE CHALLENGE
At an agency this size, most of the material is made by people who are not designers, in offices around the world, every day. A brand that only holds when a designer touches it is not a brand. It’s a style.
So the problem was never what the agency should look like. It was what to hand someone in another country, on a deadline, with no design training, that would still come back looking like the agency.
WHAT I DID
Started from an archetype, not a palette.
Multiple discovery sessions landed the team on The Explorer, and every visual principle descends from it. That is what made the system arguable rather than decorative: each rule traces back to a claim about who the agency is.
Wrote principles instead of prohibitions.
True shapes, seeing beyond the edge of the page, the overlay effect, moving forward. Roughly a third of the guidelines is method rather than restriction, so someone can make new work with it instead of only avoiding mistakes.
Made the flexibility explicit, and proved it.
The guidelines state that the same principles serve a conservative B2B client or an edgy consumer one, then show the framework annotated against a real cover. Stating the range is what stops people asking for exceptions, which is how systems break.
Gave photography rules a non-photographer can apply.
Human focus, candid, globally representative, shallow depth of field on close-ups, a brand color in frame. Concrete enough to brief a shoot or choose a stock image against.
Designed the assets that applied it.
Event banners and the agency’s brand collateral, all built from the system.
Contributed across the effort as associate creative director:
Visual principles, photography direction, color, and page layout on the guidelines document alongside another designer.
RESULTS
A 27-page identity system covering ethos, visual principles, typography, color, photography and logo usage
The agency’s official guidelines, used across a global network of offices
The foundation for the presentation template I then built, which produced 200+ decks
The applied assets: event banners and agency collateral, designed from the system
Still visibly applied in agency strategy decks and other marketing assets years later
The test of a brand system isn’t the launch. It’s what the work looks like three years on, made by someone who never read the guidelines.
The same discipline on a software brand: guidelines, a sub-brand and templates built for the client’s own team to run.
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