Corporate Design.

A corporate design consists of much more than a logo. At its core are the word-and-figure mark with its clear space and minimum size, a colour palette with defined values for screen and print, a type system with hierarchy and line spacing, an imagery style, a layout grid and recurring design elements such as shapes, icons or frames. What really matters, though, are the rules for the awkward cases: what does the logo look like on a dark background? What applies to vehicle lettering more than two metres wide? Which colour does an error message use? A corporate design without these edge cases is a collection of attractive drafts, not a system anyone can work with.

Its value lies less in beauty than in repetition. Recognition comes from a few signals staying consistently the same, not from as many good ideas as possible sitting side by side. Day to day, a corporate design mainly saves time: anyone building a quote template, a social media format or a new landing page does not decide colour, type size and spacing all over again but draws on fixed values. That is where the investment pays back. In a business where every department maintains its own template, the result is not only an inconsistent picture but the same discussion starting from scratch every time.

An example from our own work: for JUCAN Massanzüge, the website, the Shopify store and the branding were created in a single project. The point was not the shop as such, but that both presences run with the same look and feel: the same typography, the same use of colour, the same imagery. Someone moving from the website into the shop does not notice the change of platform. That is the real test of a corporate design: it has to work across technical systems that know nothing about each other. A design that only holds together in the designer's presentation and falls apart in the shop template has missed its purpose.

To be honest about the limits: not every business needs a thick manual. A two-person company that appears in two channels gets further with four robust rules than with forty pages of theory: the logo in two versions, two colours with exact values, one typeface, one spacing grid. A comprehensive rulebook pays off once several people create material independently of each other, a sale or a financing round is coming up, or several locations appear in public. How we set up and invoice brand work is described on the page Corporate Design Agency; what the digital presence itself costs is shown under website costs in Switzerland.