An identity built to be manufactured, not just approved

What we were asked

A developer with a serious build quality and a brand that did not say so. They were selling apartments off plan, which means a buyer is being asked to trust a drawing, and every piece of material they had looked like it had been made by a different company.

How we approached it

Identity work fails at the point of manufacture more often than at the point of design. A palette that looks correct on a screen and cannot be held on a printed banner, a logo with detail that disappears at the size a site hoarding actually uses, a typeface with no Arabic weight that matches. All of that is decided months before anyone finds out.

Because our print and fabrication floor is in the same building, we designed with the machines in view.

What we made

• A full identity system with both scripts drawn to sit together, rather than an English mark with Arabic added afterwards.
• Colour specified to Pantone, checked on the actual substrates the brand would appear on, including the illuminated ones.
• Over forty applied templates so the client's own team could produce day to day material without coming back to us for every post.
• Two films, on location and aerial, and a stills library from the same shoot rather than a second visit.
• Site hoarding, sales-centre interior and the illuminated signage, drawn and then built by our own production team.

The part worth stealing

Before final approval we produced a physical sample of every material application at full scale and put them in a room together. Two decisions changed as a result, both of them things that were invisible on screen and obvious at a metre.

What happened next

The guidelines are with the client's team and the applied set is theirs to run. We produce the large format and the signage as the sites open.