Corporate Design Agency Switzerland.

A corporate design consists of six design building blocks and one organisational block: mark, colour, typography, image language, grid, applications — and the rulebook that records who uses what and how. Order only the first block and you get a logo, not an identity.

• The mark. Wordmark, symbol, or a combination. The practically important question is not how it looks on a large screen but whether it still works in one colour, embroidered, engraved, and at 24 pixels high. A mark that only works in colour and only at size produces an exception in every second application.
• The colour world. Not a palette but a hierarchy: one primary colour, one accent, two or three neutrals, plus colours for states such as success, warning and error. Every colour needs values for screen and for print. A colour that exists only as a hex value will look different on the brochure than on the website — and then nobody knows which version is the right one.
• The typography. One family is enough in most cases, two is the maximum. What matters is not the names but the size steps, the line spacing, and whether the licence covers use on a website at all. That last point is regularly overlooked and is the most expensive thing to put right later in the whole project.
• The image language. Concrete rules instead of mood words: people or products, studio or situation, cropped or cut out, warm or neutral. An image language you cannot write down in five checkable sentences will be reinvented at the next photo shoot.
• The layout grid. Spacing, column widths, margins, size relationships. This is the invisible part that decides whether two documents made by two people look as though they came from the same company. In the digital space it becomes a design system with named components.
• The applications. Website, quotation, invoice, presentation, email signature, signage, vehicle, workwear, social posts. This is where the real effort sits — and where it shows whether the design survives daily use.

The seventh block is the rulebook. It does not need to be a sixty-page manual; for most Swiss SMEs two to four pages are enough, as long as they contain the right things: minimum clear space around the mark, minimum size, permitted and forbidden applications, colour values in every system you need, type sizes, and where the master files live. Without that part, every identity falls apart within a year, because each department builds its own interpretation.

Corporate identity is the whole thing, corporate design is the visible part of it, and "branding" is used in everyday speech as a loose umbrella term for work on both. The distinction is not pedantry; it decides the order of work in a project.

Corporate identity covers what a company stands for, how it speaks, how it behaves towards customers and staff — and, yes, how it looks. Corporate design is the translation of that stance into mark, colour, type, image and grid. The mistake we see most often is the reversal of that order: an identity gets designed before anybody has decided who the company actually works for and what it should be distinguished by. The result usually looks good and does not survive the first change of substance.

In practice that means three questions need answers before the first draft exists. Who do you work for, and who explicitly not? What is the one reason customers buy from you rather than from the business next door? And what should somebody who does not know you yet think about you — in five words, not in a paragraph. With those three answers in place, design becomes a craft task. Without them it is a matter of taste, and matters of taste get decided in committees rather than in studios.

What does not belong on this page is the interface of your digital product. How a user is guided through an application, where they drop out, and how a prototype is tested is a separate craft — that is described on our page about UI/UX design. Corporate design supplies the building blocks; UI/UX work decides how they are used inside the product.

In five steps: settle the positioning, check name and mark for availability, design, test against real applications, hand over the rulebook and the files. Steps two and four are the ones most often skipped — and they are the ones that cause the most expensive corrections afterwards.

• Step 1 — clarification. A conversation of two to three hours about audience, differentiation, occasion and what already exists. What is there, what may stay, what has to go? If an existing mark is known in the market and works, a gentle rebuild is almost always the better answer than a fresh start. At the end there is a sentence against which every later draft can be measured.
• Step 2 — search. With a new name or a new mark we check, before the first draft, what is already registered at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property and in the commercial register, and whether the domain is free. Both searches are public and take minutes. Doing them afterwards is the classic avoidable project accident.
• Step 3 — design. Two to three directions, each with mark, colour, type and one real application — not a logo floating on white. Then one round of consolidation. We work with two decision rounds rather than five, and with one named person who is allowed to decide.
• Step 4 — testing. The chosen mark gets applied to the awkward cases: one colour, very small, on a dark background, in an email signature, on a vehicle, as a favicon in a browser tab. Whatever breaks here will break every week in real life later.
• Step 5 — handover. Every file format, colour values for screen and print, font licences with evidence, the rulebook and the open source files. All of it is yours, and you can continue with a different agency using it.

Where the corporate design is part of a website project — the normal case here — steps three to five run together with the build. That saves an entire round of coordination, because the website is in any case the most demanding application of the whole identity. How such a project runs overall is described on having a website built.

We deliberately keep no list price for brand work, because the effort depends almost entirely on the number of applications and hardly at all on the mark itself. Designing a mark takes days. Carrying that same mark through website, print, signage, vehicle and social channels takes weeks — and that is the work an agency is actually paid for.

With us, corporate design normally runs as part of a website or shop project, and that falls within our range of CHF 3,000 to 25,000. Brand work commissioned separately we bill by effort, and we name the amount only once the list of applications exists. Anyone hearing a number before that list is hearing a guess — from us as much as from any other provider. The bands for the website part are set out openly on web design, and a first order of magnitude comes out of our project calculator.

Five things drive the price, and none of them is the design itself: the number of applications, whether a name has to be developed alongside, the number of decision rounds, whether prepress and spot colours are included, and the size of the rulebook. If you want to save, save on the number of applications and on the decision rounds — not on the testing, because that is what prevents the follow-up costs.

One piece of context on the market: in the Swiss search results for this subject, not one provider on the first page names a price. That is not coincidence, it is industry habit. So when you compare proposals, do not compare amounts — compare scopes. Give every provider the same list of applications and the same number of rounds. Only then are two numbers comparable at all.

By seven points, all of which can be checked at handover without a single judgement of taste. Adjectives in a presentation cannot be verified. This list can.

• The mark exists as a vector file and is cleanly built: closed paths, no unnecessary anchor points, type converted to outlines. A logo that exists only as a PNG becomes a problem at the first print job.
• It works in one colour. Black on white, white on black, and in a version without gradient and without shadow. Embroidery, engraving, stamps and fax documents know nothing about gradients.
• It is legible at small sizes. The hard test case is the favicon in a browser tab. If that needs its own simplified version, that version belongs in the delivery rather than being improvised later.
• The colours are defined in every system you need: as hex and RGB for screen, as CMYK for four-colour print and, where spot colours are used, as a spot colour. A colour that exists only as a hex value will print differently.
• The contrasts pass the accessibility check. The WCAG standard requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against the background for normal text, and at least 3:1 for large text and interface controls. A light accent colour on white frequently fails that test — which means you need a second, darker version of the same colour for text. What this means beyond a website is set out in the glossary entry on digital accessibility.
• The font licences cover the actual use. A desktop licence does not automatically permit embedding on a website; webfont licences are usually measured by page views or by domain. Have it in writing which licence stands in whose name.
• The typefaces can be self-hosted. Loading fonts from a third-party server sends the visitor's IP address there on every page view. Self-hosted font files avoid that and load faster as well. Both make it the better default on a Swiss website.

Those seven points cost half an hour at handover. They spare you the cases where an identity gets remade two years later because nobody can reach the open files any more or the font licence has expired.

We are a small digital agency with our own development team in Zollikon near Zurich, not a pure brand agency. Corporate design here is the groundwork for a digital identity rather than the main discipline — and that order of priority is the most honest sentence on this page.

The project we can name for it is JUCAN Tailored Suits: website, branding and a Shopify store in one consistent appearance, plus the search work around it. The case is documented in our work with starting point, approach and outcome. It is the kind of project we are well set up for: brand work that runs straight into a digital product and has to prove itself there.

What follows from that we would rather say before than after. If your undertaking is primarily a brand task — naming for a portfolio of several products, an identity that lives mainly in print and outdoor advertising, a repositioning with market research behind it — then a specialised design studio will serve you better than we will. There are plenty of them in Zurich and across Switzerland, and several sit at the top of the local search results for this term. A provider who promises you equal strength in every discipline is telling you nothing about any of them — we have written that argument out in full under full-service agency.

What we are good for: an identity designed from the outset for screen, search engine and everyday use, delivered directly by the people who then also build the website. No handover between studio and implementation, no presentation that fails in reality, and no intermediate layer to dilute the design during the build. The step-by-step view of brand work for young companies is in our knowledge section under branding for startups.

A business of five people rarely needs a complete brand manual. What works there is a basic kit: the logo in every file format required, two colours plus black and white, one typeface family in two weights, and a two-page rule sheet. Everything beyond that is money that would do more somewhere else.

The reason is simple: a rulebook solves a coordination problem. Where the same person writes the quotation, maintains the website and designs the social post, that problem does not exist. The cost of an extensive manual arises anyway — and it arises precisely when the budget is usually tightest. The full rulebook becomes sensible from the moment several people design independently of one another, or external suppliers such as a printer, a vehicle wrapper or an exhibition builder have to work without asking first. That is less a question of headcount than of how many hands are on the identity.

Three further cases in which we advise against a brand project. First: the existing mark is known in the market and works as craft. Then a refresh — adjusting colours, replacing the typeface, producing clean files — is almost always the better investment than a fresh start, because recognition is an asset you do not write off without a reason. Second: the business model is not settled yet. Before anybody has confirmed that people will buy, brand work is the wrong order of operations; a test is the faster route, as described on prototype and validation. Third: the real problem is visibility, not appearance. If you have too few enquiries because nobody finds you, a new logo will not fix it — then the budget belongs in search work, and we say so even when a brand project would be the more pleasant engagement for us.

Conversely, there are the cases where the full scope pays: a merger or acquisition, expansion across several locations or brands, an identity that lives to a large extent in printed and built space, and entry into a market where your existing recognition is worth nothing. There a rulebook is not a luxury but the cheaper procedure.