About these examples
What you're actually looking at
Three finished brand systems, shown the way the client received them. Nimbus is a demonstration build — a fictional climate-tech platform used to show the full shape of a system end to end. Bohém Skincare is real client work for a New Zealand skincare label. The Occasion Co is live work, published here once their new site goes up.
Each one covers the same ground: the mark and its rules, a palette with ratios and contrast notes, a typographic hierarchy with real specimens, a tone of voice with worked examples, and the brand applied to something that actually ships — a dashboard, a storefront, a product label.
That last part is the bit most brand decks skip, and it's the bit that decides whether a system survives contact with a real team. A palette is easy. A palette plus “here is exactly what a notification looks like when the news is bad” is a system.
What's in a system
Six components. Every time.
A brand system isn't a logo on a page. It's a set of documented decisions covering every way the business shows up — and each one has to be specific enough that a contractor who has never met you can apply it correctly.
Logo suite
Primary, reversed and icon-only. Clear space, minimum sizes, and the misuses spelled out rather than implied.
Colour palette
Hex, RGB and CMYK, plus the part most guides omit: what percentage of a layout each colour is allowed to occupy, and which pairings pass contrast.
Typography
Two faces, a defined hierarchy, and live specimens at the sizes they'll actually be used. Web-safe fallbacks included.
Imagery & graphics
Art direction with real examples — what photography, illustration and graphic language belongs to the brand, and what quietly doesn't.
Tone of voice
Personality traits, the vocabulary list both ways, and side-by-side rewrites showing on-brand against off-brand for the same message.
Brand in use
The system applied to the touchpoints that matter for that business - product UI, storefront, pitch deck, packaging, social.
The process
Why it takes a week, not a quarter
Most brand projects stretch for months because of the number of people allowed to have an opinion, not the amount of work involved. The sprint format fixes the input side: one brief, one decision-maker, one direction developed properly instead of three concepts presented for a vote.
- Day 1 — Discovery. A 60-minute brief covering audience, competitors, positioning and what success looks like.
- Day 2 — Strategy. Positioning, personality and tone of voice settled before a single visual decision gets made.
- Days 3–5 — Identity. Mark, palette and typography developed together, because they only work together.
- Day 6 — Guidelines. Everything documented in a format the team will actually open.
- Day 7 — Handover. Source files, web-ready assets and a walkthrough call.
The trade-off is real and worth saying out loud: this works when there's one person who can decide. If your brand needs sign-off from six stakeholders in three time zones, the sprint isn't the right shape and I'll tell you that on the first call.
Common questions
Brand systems, answered
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A brand system is a documented set of decisions covering how a business looks, sounds and behaves - logo suite, colour palette with usage rules, typographic hierarchy, tone of voice, and worked examples of the brand applied to real touchpoints. It gives every person and vendor the same playbook, so the deck, the website and the invoice all look like the same company.
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Five to seven working days: strategy, visual identity, a shareable guidelines document and ready-to-use assets. One brief, one decision-maker, one focused sprint. The constraint is a feature - it forces decisions that a six-week timeline lets people avoid.
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Logo suite (primary, reversed, icon-only) in SVG, PNG and print formats; colour palette with hex, RGB and CMYK plus usage ratios; typography pairing with hierarchy and fallbacks; tone of voice with on-brand and off-brand examples; brand-in-use mockups; and the guidelines document itself, shareable by link so the team doesn't have to hunt for a PDF.
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Yes. The three examples on this page span a B2B climate-tech platform, a consumer skincare label and an events and gifting brand. The process doesn't change - audience, positioning, personality, then visual decisions. What changes is where the brand has to perform. A SaaS dashboard needs states, alerts and data colours. A skincare label needs to survive being printed at 30mm on a curved bottle.
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Nimbus is a fictional climate-tech startup, built as a demonstration piece so the full system could be published without an NDA conversation. Bohém Skincare is a real brand system built for a New Zealand skincare client. The Occasion Co is live client work, going up here when their new site launches.
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Often that's the better call. If you have equity in a mark or a colour, it gets kept and the system is built around it. The discovery brief is where we work out what's actually load-bearing and what just happens to be there because someone picked it in 2019.
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A complete system in 5–7 days - mark, palette, type, voice, and the whole thing applied to the places your brand actually has to work.
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