Brand Identity Refresh: How I Evolved an Existing Mark

The brief was simple; the problem was not

The client was a regional architecture firm that had operated under the same logo for fourteen years. The mark — a stylized "A" in a geometric sans-serif with an abstract triangular device — wasn't broken. It was just old. Set against their new website, their competitors' polished identities, and the contemporary architectural photography in their portfolio, it looked like it belonged to a different decade.

The brief was a refresh: "make it feel current without losing what we've built." The challenge was understanding what "what we've built" actually meant — which elements of the mark carried genuine equity and which were just familiar.

The equity audit

Before I touched the mark, I spent a week in an equity audit. I interviewed the firm's partners and senior staff about their relationship to the logo. I looked at every context the mark appeared in — email signatures, signage, business cards, website, presentation decks, construction site hoardings.

What I found: the equity lived almost entirely in the triangular device, not in the letterform. When I asked staff what they thought of when they thought of the firm's visual identity, they described the triangle. The "A" was familiar but not loved. The color — a deep slate blue — was strongly associated with the firm.

This was the decision framework. Preserve: the triangle, the slate blue. Refresh: the letterform, the proportional relationships, the typography system.

The mark's construction problems

Studying the existing mark closely revealed why it felt dated: it had been designed at screen resolution in the late 2000s and had never been cleaned up for vector use. The curves weren't smooth — they had extra anchor points and micro-wobbles that were invisible on screen but visible in print at large sizes. The spacing between the triangle and the letterform was uneven.

These construction problems were symptoms of a mark that had been designed quickly and never refined. Fixing them — rebuilding the mark properly on a geometric construction grid — was 40% of the refresh work.

The proportion evolution

The original mark had the triangle device at the same visual weight as the letterform. They competed rather than working together. In the refresh, I reduced the triangle to approximately 60% of the letterform's visual weight and positioned it as a leading element — it appeared before the "A" in the reading order, establishing the geometric visual register before the letterform arrived.

This proportion change made the mark feel more designed and more confident. The hierarchy was clearer: the device led, the letterform confirmed.

What stayed the same

The slate blue stayed, with a slight value refinement to improve digital reproduction. The geometric approach stayed — the refresh moved the construction to a more precise grid rather than away from geometry. The founding partner's initials in the letterform stayed.

What the partners recognized in the final mark was the firm they knew. What they felt was that it had grown up. That's the right outcome for a refresh.