The dog days of August are a precious resource. Clients and team members are taking time off. The phone isn’t ringing quite as much. Some might rejoice in the peace and quiet.

But for anyone who considers themselves a forward planner this is one of the best times of the year to chew the end of a pencil and have a bit of a think.

How have things gone?
Did that new year launch work out?
Is the carefully-written, long-term business strategy at the bottom of a drawer still gathering dust?
What’s next?

Should we – big gulp! – be doing a spot of brand planning for 2019?

I’ve been thinking lately about what management consultants do. My conclusion wasn’t a particularly revolutionary one: namely that ultimately a good consultancy will ensure that the right people are in the right place in a business, so it works and grows in the most effective way.

But this idea – of talented people being at the heart of ensuring a business works better – particularly struck me while we were completing a project for AlgoMe Consulting. They have spent the past couple of years building an online platform that matches people with career opportunities, mentoring relationships and the kind of professional networking events that can be so effective in business life.

Our brief from AlgoMe was to build on this, creating a management consultancy brand and web design project – utilising the creative work from the platform and defining them as a standalone business.

Every summer at Stationers’ Hall in the centre of London, there’s a day of creative celebration. The Shine School Media Awards rewards the talent of secondary school students around the UK who are working, sometimes entirely outside their schooldays, to better themselves and forge the path to their future career.

We’ve been a contributor to the Awards programme now for five years, giving our time to this fantastic endeavour.

It’s a great portfolio example of our work when we design for charities.

At the end of 2017 we were approached to work on the total re-brand of literary agency Diane Banks Associates. After over two years of planning, the management team had decided to fundamentally re-consider their business offering.

Today if you’re an author you don’t just write a book and then retreat back to your desk to start on the next one. There’s a world of talks, tours, social and traditional media where the lifespan of your work is extended.

With this, the traditional notion of a literary agent has fundamentally shifted… to one of thought leaders across multiple disciplines and exposure. The notion then is to take on clients with a far wider set of disciplines. This was no ordinary creative project – we were creating a new media brand design.

The end result of all this preparation is now revealed – and it’s called Northbank Talent Management.

Having worked for both luxury hotels and a wide range of corporate businesses over the years it seems logical that we might somehow combine the two. I must admit I never saw how we could creatively exploit the link – until recently.

My thinking has been that with a strong brand culture, most of the larger hotels in London logically focus their online presence on their customers. Then, invariably this sort of marketing-led creative work is handled centrally at a headquarters in, for instance, Milan or New York. But hotels are a business like any other and require a corporate side to their branding.

The first requirement of this is usually the part that makes the hotel tick – staff resourcing. It’s this interesting crossover of corporate and luxury that recently led us into our first luxury hotel web design project – for the Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge.

One of the great things about having ‘been around’ a while is that we tend to experience growing with our clients.

While we’ve completed plenty of identity design over the years, this project I am writing about today covers two rather fantastic ‘firsts’ for us.

The work completes a completely new legal brand design. It’s also the first project that we’ve completed after a merger.

In this case it’s the blending of our long-time client Freedmans Law and Hilmi+Partners, engaged in similar work to do with commercial real estate.