Brant & Hale is a structural engineering practice working across timber and hybrid structures, launching as a new brand aimed at architects and contractors on housing and public building projects. The identity needs to read as quiet, precise and considered, closer to the design practices they want to work alongside than to a typical construction firm.
Overview & Goals
- Build a complete brand identity from scratch for a new structural engineering practice
- Position Brant & Hale as peers to the architecture practices they work with, not as a generic contractor
- Give both founding names equal visual weight, with no partner reading as junior
- Deliver a mark and system that survives black and white reproduction and small-scale stamping without compromise
Budget & Timeline
The mark is agreed by the end of January, the type and colour system follows through February, and stationery and report templates are finalised in time for the office opening in March.
Brand programme
- Situation
- New brand
- Logo
- New logo
- Logo direction
- Initials
- Deliverables
- Logo & marks, Type system, Color system, Brand guidelines, Stationery
- Naming
- Name exists
- Handover
- Logo files and guidelines
- Voice
- Trustworthy, Confident
- Exact wording
- Brant & Hale, with the ampersand. Under it, smaller: Structural Engineers.
- Where it appears
- Print, Website and social, Signage
- Print colors
- Not defined yet
Brand Story & Voice
Brant & Hale should present as a practice built by people who care how things are drawn: precise, considered and confident without needing to shout about it.
Target Audience
The identity speaks primarily to architects working on housing and public building projects, with contractors as a secondary audience who will encounter the brand on drawings and site documents.
Logo & Style
New logo
Direction: Lettermark / monogram (initials)
Examples of how this kind of logo is built, not of its style.
Typography
Chosen
- Brant & HaleRefined & high-end · High-contrast serifExample typeface: Playfair Display. A starting point, not a requirement.
- Brant & HaleNeutral & functional · GrotesqueExample typeface: Inter. A starting point, not a requirement.
Colour
New color direction
Monochrome
Black, white and the greys between. Lets shape and typography do the talking.
Examples of the mood. The final colors are part of the job.
For print
The new palette has to be defined for print as well: CMYK values for four-color process, and Pantone or HKS for any color that must match exactly.
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 and marks
- Type system
- Colour system
- Brand guidelines
- Stationery
Do's & Don'ts
Do
- Make the mark work stamped into a title block and legible at 12mm on a report cover, since that is where it will be seen most
- Keep both names equally legible, with neither Brant nor Hale reading as the junior partner
- Design the one-colour version as a primary output, not an afterthought, so it survives black and white and fax-quality reproduction
Don't
- Don't draw a building, a beam, a triangle or any literal load-path imagery
- Don't use orange anywhere in the palette
- Don't use a typeface that ships with CAD software