Brant & Hale is a new structural engineering practice for timber and hybrid structures, entering the market through architects rather than contractors. The mark needs to signal that this practice thinks alongside architects from the first sketch, not just makes their drawings stand up. It should read as quiet and precise, closer to the studios it wants to work with than to a typical construction firm.
Overview & Goals
- Launch a credible, standalone identity for a brand new practice with no existing equity to build on
- Position Brant & Hale as an early design collaborator, not a downstream calculation service
- Give both partners equal visual weight so neither name reads as junior
- Build a mark that holds its precision at small scale and in black and white reproduction
Budget & Timeline
The mark itself needs sign off by the end of January so it can be tested on real drawings early. Type and colour systems follow through February, giving enough runway to check both against site conditions before anything is finalised. Stationery and report templates come last, timed to be ready for the office opening in March.
Brand Story & Voice
Brant & Hale positions itself as the engineering partner architects bring in early, not the one they call once the design is fixed. The identity has to carry that seriousness without borrowing the visual language of construction firms or CAD defaults.
Target Audience
The primary audience is architects working on housing and public building projects, who will judge this identity by the same standards they apply to their own studio branding. A secondary audience of contractors hiring directly will encounter the same mark on site documents and title blocks.
Brand programme
- Situation
- New brand
- Logo
- New logo
- Logo direction
- Lettermark / Monogram
- Deliverables
- Logo & marks, Type system, Color system, Brand guidelines, Stationery
- Naming
- Name exists
- Voice
- Trustworthy, Confident
Logo & Style
Chosen logo direction
Lettermark / Monogram logo_type_lettermark_02
Colour
Direction chosen
Monochrome
Black, white and the greys between. Lets shape and typography do the talking.
Examples of the mood, not the colours anyone has to use.
In the client's own words
In March the two of us are leaving a large practice to open our own structural engineering office under the name Brant & Hale. Nothing exists yet — no website, no logo, no stationery, just the name and a company registration. We work on timber and hybrid structures, mostly with architects on housing and public buildings, occasionally directly for contractors. The reason people hire us is that we get involved early, when the structure can still change the architecture, rather than arriving to make someone else's drawing stand up. Most of our competitors look either like construction firms (hard hats, orange, photos of cranes) or like nothing at all. We would like to look like the practices we want to work with — quiet, precise, clearly built by people who care how things are drawn. The first thing we need is the mark itself, then something we can put on a title page and a report.
Scope & Deliverables
- Logo & marks
- Type system
- Color system
- Brand guidelines
- Stationery
Do's & Don'ts
Do
- Design for legibility at 12mm on a report cover and stamped into a title block, since that is where the mark will live day to day
- Keep both partner names equally legible and equally weighted
- Build the one colour, black and white version as a primary output, not a fallback
- Choose a typeface with genuine license and quality, not a CAD software default
Don't
- Don't illustrate a building, a beam, a triangle or anything that reads as a load path
- Don't use orange anywhere in the palette
- Don't let one partner's name read as senior or junior to the other
- Don't design a mark that only works in colour or only at large sizes