Services — Brand Strategy & Identity
Brand Identity Design Agency
Ellington & Vale designs brand identities for Indian companies — the mark, the typography, the colour, the way it all behaves, and the system that keeps it recognisable long after we have handed it over.
An identity is a system, not a logo
The most expensive misunderstanding in this category is that a brand identity is a logo with some colours attached.
A logo is one asset. An identity is the set of rules that makes every future asset look like it came from the same company — a business card nobody has designed yet, a packaging line three years from now, a presentation made by a salesperson at 11pm.
Which is why the deliverable that matters most is rarely the mark. It is the system: what the typography does at every size, how colour is used and in what proportion, what the layout logic is, how photography is treated, and what happens in the situations nobody planned for.
A company with a beautiful logo and no system produces inconsistent material forever. A company with an unremarkable mark and a strong system reads as coherent and serious.
What an identity project actually includes
The mark. Wordmark, symbol or both, drawn to work at the sizes it will genuinely be used — a favicon and a building sign are the same asset under very different conditions.
Typography. The most load-bearing decision in the whole system and the least discussed. Type does more to establish a brand's character than colour does, and it is where most identities are weakest.
Colour. A working palette with defined proportions, not a moodboard. Most identities fail here by specifying too many colours and no rules about which dominates.
Application. How the system behaves on the things you actually produce — stationery, packaging, digital, signage, presentations, brochures.
Guidelines. The document that decides whether any of the above survives contact with reality.
Guidelines that get used
Most brand guidelines are ignored, and it is usually the guidelines' fault.
Ninety pages of theory about brand essence, no templates, and no answer to the question the person actually has at 6pm before a deadline. So they improvise, and the identity erodes one improvisation at a time.
Guidelines that get used are structured around real situations. Here is how a presentation is built. Here is the social template. Here is what to do when the logo has to sit on a dark background or a busy photograph. Here are the files. Shorter, more specific, and far more useful than the version that wins the design award.
Indian scripts, designed rather than added
If your brand operates in more than one script, both need designing.
Devanagari and other Indic scripts are routinely dropped into Indian identity systems at the end — at whatever size fits, in a face that does not sit with the Latin, on a baseline that does not align. A brand that sets one script beautifully and the other carelessly is telling part of its audience which one matters.
Getting this right requires choosing typefaces that work together across scripts from the start, not finding a Devanagari face afterwards that approximately matches.
Rebrands, and when not to do one
Sometimes the identity is not the problem.
A company whose material looks inconsistent may have an adequate identity and no guidelines. A company nobody understands may have a positioning problem that a new logo will not touch. A company losing to competitors may have a product or pricing problem wearing a brand problem's clothes.
We will say so when that is what we find, and it costs us the larger project more often than it should. A rebrand executed on top of an unresolved positioning question produces a new logo on the old confusion — and you pay again in three years.
The strategic layer underneath is on our brand strategy page.
What determines the cost
No published rates. What moves it: whether this is a new identity or an evolution of an existing one; how many applications the system has to cover; whether the strategic and positioning work is already done or is part of the engagement; how many scripts and languages; and whether packaging, digital or environmental applications are in scope.
Tell us what you are solving and we will give you an honest read — including when the answer is smaller than a rebrand.
FAQ
- What's the difference between a logo and a brand identity?
- A logo is one asset. An identity is the whole system — mark, typography, colour, layout logic and the rules governing them — that makes everything a company produces look like it came from the same place. Buying a logo without the system means paying again every time something new needs making.
- How long does a brand identity project take?
- It depends on scope and, more than anything, on how many people need to agree. A single founder deciding moves considerably faster than a business with a board and a marketing committee — not because the design takes longer, but because alignment does.
- Do we need brand guidelines?
- If anyone other than us will ever make something with your brand on it — an in-house designer, a printer, a freelancer, an agency — then yes. Without them the identity drifts a little further from itself with every piece produced.
- Can you work with our existing logo?
- Often, and sometimes that is the right answer. A recognisable mark with a broken system around it usually needs the system fixed, not the mark replaced.
- How much does a brand identity cost in India?
- No published rates — see above for what drives it.
Your Next World
Let's create something distinctive.
Tell us what you are building. We will help give it the clarity, character and presence to be recognised.