The framework set out what is special about our organisation. We are a small, dynamic team keen to express the vibrancy, personality and creativity of our work.

These workshops were vital to give me the tools I needed to start building our brand. Without this, the rest of the process could easily have stopped in its tracks.

But thanks to this early investment from the team, I had a clear steer on what Distinctive meant and the key audiences to whom we had to appeal – place-makers, purposeful businesses and public bodies. Our brand represents these three key strands.

When putting pen to paper, I instinctively focused on expressing distinctiveness through the letter D. So using this as an anchor point for our brand values immediately made sense.

In my creative process, I’m inspired by the simple, timeless, design we see in logos like HBO or the BBC.  Focusing on the first letter therfore felt like a good way to avoid cluttering up the Distinctive brand. I complemented this with a simple clean sans serif font – Poppins – to maintain the clarity of design.

I sketched out some initial designs, first using pen and paper and afterwards via Illustrator. As always, this design process involved seeing several concepts I’d sweated over fall by the wayside.

An early attempt to anchor the logo in forms representing building and construction did not work hard enough to reflect the good we are doing for clients in other sectors. A version which removed the dots from every letter fell foul of our proof-readers. Colleagues wanted to correct it every time I brought it up on the screen.

After working through this process, I presented my initial concepts to the team at our weekly meeting. As so often in processes like this, a version of the final design was the one which immediately appealed to the team.