Meridian

Meridian had grown from eleven people to ninety in four years, and the identity had not moved since the first pitch deck. Every team had made its own version of the logo. The website was six years old and had been extended sideways until nothing sat where anyone expected it. The brief was to modernise without alienating a client base whose average relationship was eleven years long.

We started with an audit rather than sketches — every touchpoint, every stray logo variant, every PDF template. That produced the actual argument: the problem was not the mark, it was that nothing downstream of it was specified. The identity work that followed was deliberately quiet. A single grotesque, a disciplined grid, one accent colour used sparingly enough to mean something. The platform was rebuilt around a component library so the marketing team could ship a page without a designer in the room.

The new system shipped in stages across eleven weeks, starting with the parts nobody sees — templates, email, document furniture — so the public launch was the last step rather than the first. Two years on the component library is still being used without modification, which is the only metric that really tests a design system.