Quality of life: that’s what is at the core of our latest project. Our long-standing client Cavendish Care spent the best part of 2018 establishing an Activity Centre for their clientele of Learning Disabled people just outside the centre of Crawley in West Sussex.

Our challenge was to brand it.

The centre is based in a refurbished Tudor cottage (with a large rear extension) that has been totally customised, creating large, gorgeous spaces for every imaginable activity.

Devising an identity for ARC Crawley and rolling it out has been a real pleasure over the last six months – essentially building a healthcare brand from scratch.

Some people prefer not to be pigeonholed. That’s certainly the case with cabinet-maker Gary Worth. His work has a tendency to bend around his clients: getting to know them, then making a piece of furniture that is the right fit. Personally and literally.

This understanding of lifestyles and a great use of space is essential in a craftsman of his calibre but makes categorisation tricky. As a result, he’s hard to define and is no fan of a label. Furniture maker or interior designer? He reckons there’s no need to choose. The best way of thinking about his work, he says, is that it bridges the gap between the two.

As a result, our new brand and website for him does just that as well.

For a few of our clients, the journey from the briefing of a project to the full, finished product can take some time. This is particularly true when collaborating in the financial services industry where there are stringent regulatory constraints around promotions and marketing.

One such client is Oxford Investment Consultants. We designed their branding over a year ago and launched a small website at the time. The bulk of the work we had done however remained under wraps. However – the wait is over. Following their full FCA authorisation, this past week has seen the launch of the complete site we had planned from the outset.

It’s a project that I’m really proud of and a great piece of new design for financial services. It’s a strong case study of the work we’ve been doing in that industry over the last couple of years.

What began life as a simple brief to ‘add in a new set of copy and imagery… and consider a refresh of a homepage’ has taken on a life of its own. And become not merely a minor update but a completely new website designed from the ground up.

But then, we’ve always had that sort of working relationship with Cavendish Care.

They have often come to us with an idea and we tend to respond with one of our ‘how about… this’ moments.

‘Design consultancy’ is a somewhat dry term for what we do. But it’s about right. People come and talk to me about how their business might improve its communications. We then consult – which essentially means an initial conversation ensuring we’re talking our client’s visual and verbal language.

But when I meet someone who themselves runs a consultancy we’ve immediately got even more to discuss. There’s an understanding, if you will, of the service we are offering. Interestingly we’ve been doing a fair amount of this kind of work lately.

Earlier this summer we worked on a brand and website project for financial services management consultancy AlgoMe. Then this week we’ve completed a brand review and website redesign for The Hand – who offer business mentoring and lead generation for creative consultancies.

Both of these are great examples of our work providing brand and web design for consulting businesses.

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.