Brand identity
Brand identity is the work of deciding how an organisation looks and sounds before anything gets designed. It is not a logo, though a logo comes out of it. The output is a system: a primary mark and its variations, a typographic hierarchy, a colour palette with defined roles, spacing rules, photographic direction, and a written guide explaining when to use which.
The reason to buy the system rather than the logo alone is consistency. A logo handed over on its own gets stretched, recoloured and set in whatever typeface the next person has installed. Within two years the brand looks like four different companies. A documented system survives staff turnover and outside vendors.
Typical deliverables
- Primary logo plus horizontal, stacked, and single-colour variants
- Clear-space and minimum-size rules
- Colour palette specified in HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone
- Type system with licensed webfont and desktop equivalents
- A brand guide, usually 20–40 pages
- Source files plus exports in SVG, EPS, PNG and PDF
Editorial and publication design
Annual reports, magazines, catalogues, programmes and books. Editorial work is structural: the grid, the hierarchy of headings, the treatment of pull quotes and captions, and the pacing across a spread do more for readability than any decorative choice. Long documents live or die on whether a reader can find their place after looking away.
Canadian annual reports carry an additional constraint worth planning for early: if the organisation is federally regulated or publicly funded, the document may need to exist in both official languages. French runs roughly 15–20% longer than English for the same content, so a grid that only works in English will break. That gets designed for at the layout stage, not fixed afterward.
Packaging
Packaging design sits closer to manufacturing than most design work. The dieline comes from the converter, not the designer, and colour has to be specified for the printing method actually being used — offset, flexo or digital — because they do not match.
Products sold in Canada also carry bilingual labelling obligations under federal consumer packaging rules, and food products carry additional requirements for the nutrition facts table. These consume real estate. Designing the front panel first and discovering the mandatory copy afterward is the most common and most expensive mistake in Canadian packaging projects.
Digital and web design
Interface and website design delivered as designed screens plus the specifications a developer needs: type scale, spacing tokens, colour tokens including accessible pairings, component states, and responsive behaviour at defined breakpoints.
Accessibility is not optional in Ontario. Public-sector organisations and private organisations over a certain size are required under the AODA to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA on public websites. Practically, that constrains colour contrast, focus indication, text resizing and non-text alternatives — all decisions made during design, and painful to retrofit.
Which one do you need
| Situation | Start with |
|---|---|
| New organisation, nothing exists yet | Brand identity |
| Look is inconsistent across materials | Brand identity, audit first |
| Brand is fine, one document needs designing | Editorial |
| Going to retail shelf | Packaging, with the converter involved early |
| Site looks dated but the brand is sound | Digital, reusing the existing system |
If you are not sure, describe the problem rather than the deliverable. The brief that begins "we need a new logo" is right about a third of the time.