Showing true colours

Hawkins\Brown’s original brand identity was created in 2006, at a time when Tony Blair was PM, a whale was found in the Thames, and Daniel Craig was making his debut as James Bond. The world had moved on in the subsequent years but their identity hadn’t. With no real templates to follow, an unusually broad range of brand assets (from colours to typefaces), and everyone originating their own documents (the practice has no dedicated design department) – the identity had become diluted, messy and unclear.

Hawkins\Brown needed to refresh, reinvigorate and reorganise their identity to reflect their purpose and culture. This included being AJ Employer of the Year (twice), having more than 300 staff working across a much wider span of disciplines, and operating from a Manchester office as well as a London one. As Hazel York, Managing Partner, from Hawkins\Brown explains, “Our key focus was on finding an agency that is able to reflect who we are, as what we had just wasn’t doing this.”

Huddle’s priority is always to focus on the goal of clarity. This started by stripping back the identity, cutting the brand typefaces from ten to three and reducing the main brand colours to two, while at the same time making the logo’s backslash into a distinctive brand asset - a hero feature in headings, navigation and punctuation.

The covers of the new practice brochures break with convention by featuring ‘abstract’ close-ups of structural elements of Hawkins\Brown projects, reflecting how the practice does things differently. Each brochure’s colour picks up on a colour from its image, making the secondary colour palette in effect infinite, yet working as a flexible, coherent and distinctive asset for the practice.