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§ 1.3.1 · A1 / A2 · typically four weeks

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What this is

The complete visual system: a logo suite, a color palette, a typography selection, written visual guidelines, collateral templates, and a brand guide document that holds all of it together. It is the foundational design asset. Every piece of creative work that follows—the website, the podcast artwork, the sales one-pager, the social templates—inherits from it, which is why building it before the website rather than during is worth the wait.

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What we need from you

A settled message. This is the real prerequisite, and it is not a formality. The brief that drives the design is written directly out of the messaging document, so if § 1.1 is unfinished, the design work becomes a series of educated guesses about a personality nobody has decided on. One named decision-maker with actual authority. Identity work is the single most opinion-attracting thing we do, and it is where approval-by-committee does the most damage. Everyone can have input. One person approves. An honest inventory of where the brand has to live. Every place a logo currently appears, every template someone maintains in a spreadsheet, every piece of letterhead. The list is always longer than anyone expects, and finding out in week four is expensive. A few hours of review time at defined points, with feedback consolidated rather than trickling in.

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What you will have

A logo suite covering the primary mark, secondary lockups, and an icon, in the file formats each context needs. A defined palette with each color’s intended role. A typography system with hierarchy rules. Written guidelines showing how the system behaves and how it breaks. And templates for the things you make most often—presentation, letterhead, social, whatever the inventory turned up.

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How long it takes

About four weeks of design work once the brief is approved, though the calendar time depends more on your review turnaround than on ours. Two rounds of consolidated feedback keeps this to four weeks.

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Costs that sit outside our fee

Typeface licensing, trademark searching, stock or mockup assets, and print proofing are billed at cost and quoted separately. Typeface licensing in particular is worth knowing about early, because it scales with how many people and platforms will use the fonts.

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What this is not

Not a refresh of an existing identity—that is a brand refresh, which costs considerably less. Not a website build, though the identity governs it. The site comes later, in Chapter 2, and goes much faster for having this in place.