Branding & Identity
A Digital: Crafting a new brand
My role
Sole designer on the project at A Story Called, working as a two-person team with the Client Partner: full creative control on my side, her judgement on client relationship and feedback. I was in the room for the original brief and co-presented the first round of concepts back to the client.
My project, end to end: brand ideation and logo development (including the hand-drawn origination), colour and typography, strapline, image treatment, the icon suite, and the copywriting and design of the services brochure. My title at the time was Creative Graphic Designer.
The challenge
A Digital are a Cumbria-based digital agency specialising in bespoke websites built on Craft CMS. Founded as Armitage Online in 2007 and renamed in 2015, they'd outgrown a visual identity that still looked like the small technical outfit they used to be, not the design-led agency they'd become.
The brief was blunt about the real problem. Their existing mark was a found font stitched into an "AD" monogram. It didn't scale, the name got dropped whenever it broke, and there was no system of any kind sitting behind it: no guidelines, no rules, no logic. In their own words, they'd become "trapped in our thinking around the brand mark", every attempt to refresh the website stalled because there was nothing underneath the logo to build from.
So the deliverable wasn't a logo. It was a visual language that could keep pace with the competitors they were pitching against, and a system flexible enough to carry a website, a brochure, proposals, signage and sub-brands they hadn't invented yet.
The research
The insight came from how they work rather than what they do. A Digital build websites modularly: components, assembled and reassembled, tailored per client. Craft CMS is the tool because it lets them do exactly that.
Moodboard
The Strategy
So the brand is built the same way. Every element is a primitive, a circle, a bar, a slash, a dot, and the identity is what happens when you assemble them. The visual language borrows directly from the language of code: binary, punctuation, the marks that sit between the things developers write.
That gave the brand a rationale the client could defend internally, which mattered: this was a company that had already talked itself out of three website redesigns.
Concepting
The Development
Four brand routes were developed to full roll-out before selection, then five rounds of refinement on the chosen direction.
Strapline
Three routes were explored: "Crafted with confidence", "Digital with a difference", and the one that landed: "Marketing, with a little more craft." It works on two levels at once. Craftsmanship as a standard of work, and Craft as the platform they've built their business on. Their audience of marketing managers reads the first meaning; their technical audience reads both.
The identity system
The mark
A lowercase "ad" monogram assembled from two shapes: a circle and a rectangle. Nothing is drawn, everything is constructed, and where the shapes overlap the colours interact to produce new ones. The construction is the message: modular parts, combined, producing something more than the sum. It scales, it works as a standalone symbol, and the name sits alongside it rather than depending on it, which was the exact failure of the old mark.
Colour
The client came in open on palette and cool on the green they'd used for years. The answer kept green but repositioned it: a sharper acid lime against a deep navy, with cyan, blue and magenta as the modular accents. Five colourways and four blue/green combinations were tested specifically to resolve a contrast problem inside the "ad" icon — the detail nobody sees, and the reason the mark still holds up at small sizes.
Typography
A geometric sans across the board, with the punctuation doing the work: the dot on the "i", the descender counter, the full stop, each picking up an accent colour. Small moves, but they're what stop the wordmark reading as generic.
Image treatment
Soft, low-opacity treatment is used for background images to create more of a texture, rather than a competing layer.
Circle-cropped portraits balanced by accompanying colour dots, so photography joins the system instead of sitting outside it, the same overarching modular logic applied.
Icons
A purpose-built suite for the key service areas, constructed from the same primitives as the mark.
Rollout
The first live deliverable was the Brand Growth Proposal — a services brochure, and the client's front-line sales document. I wrote the copy and designed it: an audience-first opening addressed to the marketing manager or MD carrying the problem, a services architecture built on the new icon suite, duotone team portraits, testimonials set as full-bleed statements, and the modular shapes used as a compositional device throughout rather than as decoration.
Impact
The identity launched in 2019 and is still in market seven years on.
The logo, the colourways, the typography and the image treatments remain in use on adigital.agency today. The navy specified in 2019 is still the site's theme colour, unchanged. The brand has outlived the website it was designed to unlock, and every website since.