An identity built for the hundredth touchpoint, not the launch film.
The system in use, two years and three product lines later.
· What it moved
0
Product lines on one system
Added without our involvement
0
Assets in the kit
0
Years without a revision
And counting
0
Pages of guidelines
Cut down from forty
01 The brief
Ferrous made industrial hardware and looked like sixty other companies that made industrial hardware. They had a logo, three unofficial variants of it, and no agreement on anything else.
The brief was a rebrand. The actual problem was that nobody could produce an on-brand document without asking someone.
02 What we did
We designed for the boring middle of a brand's life: the hundredth social post, the invoice, the trade-show banner someone reprints at 2am without asking.
That meant a system rather than a logo. One mark with defined behaviour at four sizes, a two-typeface pairing with real fallbacks, a palette that survives being printed on cardboard, and a 140-asset kit their team can pull from without opening Illustrator.
The guidelines are twelve pages. We cut them from forty on purpose — a document nobody reads protects nothing.
03 How it landed
Two years and three product lines later the system has not needed a revision. New categories slot into it without a call to us, which was the whole point.
· The work
· How it ran
The whole thing took 9 weeks, with Ferrous in the room for every phase.
Weeks 1–2
Collected every asset in circulation, including the ones nobody admitted to making.
Weeks 3–5
Mark, type pairing and palette, tested at trade-show scale and on a printed invoice.
Weeks 6–8
Packaging, templates and the asset kit their team pulls from.
Week 9
Twelve pages of guidelines and one workshop. No retainer attached.
What Ferrous said
The brand system they built still holds up two years and three product lines later.
· Still running
The system in use, two years and three product lines later.
Next project
Volume One
· More work
Same studio, same thread, different problem.