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Earlybird

EXEC. SUMMARY

A brand new website, and no rules behind it. The design system reverse engineered from what was already live, then extended to a second brand.

Brand Guidelines

Remote

2025

EXEC. SUMMARY

A brand new website, and no rules behind it. The design system reverse engineered from what was already live, then extended to a second brand.

THE SITUATION

Earlybird had just got a new website from another agency. Some brand and visual work came with it, but nobody had asked for a toolkit or guidelines, so nobody built one. The result: a look that existed on one website and nowhere else. The content team kept producing, LinkedIn posts and everything around them, to the best of their judgment, without a rulebook to follow.

THE SITUATION

Earlybird had just got a new website from another agency. Some brand and visual work came with it, but nobody had asked for a toolkit or guidelines, so nobody built one. The result: a look that existed on one website and nowhere else. The content team kept producing, LinkedIn posts and everything around them, to the best of their judgment, without a rulebook to follow.

THE APPROACH

Reverse engineer what already exists.
The website was the only source, so I read it like a document. What decisions had been made, what repeats, what rules sit underneath without anyone having written them down. That became the foundation: not an opinion about how the brand should look, but a description of what it already was.

Write the rules that were never needed yet.
A website only shows a fraction of the cases a brand runs into. Everywhere the site had no answer, I set the rule and built the examples with it, including what not to do. That is the part that decides whether guidelines get used or ignored.

One system, two brands.
The second stage carried the branding over to Earlybird Health, including how its logo is used and how its slides are built. Both brands ended up with presentation templates the team runs on its own, with a key visual, a title slide and a clear logic for which slide to use when.

THE Outcome

A brand that lived on one website now works everywhere the team actually produces: social, content, decks. The content people have a rulebook instead of a best guess, and two brands run on one system that the team maintains without asking anyone.

2 Brands running on one system

THE WORK

Design principles and brand codes derived from the existing site / Logo usage / Colour usage, including colour harmony and weighting for how much of which colour appears where / Typography / Layout / Imagery, including team and people photography and how it sits in a layout / Gradients on images / Rules and application examples with dos and don'ts for everything the website did not cover / Design system translated into PowerPoint and Keynote / Templates for both Earlybird and Earlybird Health / Key visual and title slide / Logo usage for Earlybird Health / Slide system with a logic for when to use which slide

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A small taste of how WE actually work

A small taste of
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I will look at your brand the way I would on day one of a real project: your positioning, your messaging, your visual identity. What's working, what's holding you back, and what I'd fix first.

Here's how it works: we start with a short call so I understand your brand, audience and challenges. Then I take a maximum of 3 working days to go through everything. You get a written report plus a call where we go through it together and you can ask questions.

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