Jacob Starr

Digital Designer

ServicesBrand Identity

Brand Identity & Logo Design

Logos, color and type, and the rules that hold them together, from a brand designer who also builds the website. For businesses whose work is better than their brand.

Starting From What You Cannot Name

Most clients cannot say what they want from a brand. They can say what they hate. That is a fine place to start.

At McLetchie, Bradley & Fowler, the partner arrived with a list of rejections. No gavels, no Lady Justice, no pillars. So I built a mood board live with her and pushed until she could say why. That became the brand: a navy suit, classic but not harsh.

Built to Hold Up Everywhere

A visual identity that only works in the header is not finished. Every identity ships with lockups for the header, footer, favicon and social, plus rules for color, type and spacing.

Some brands need more room than that. HOSS puts its hygiene kits in front of partner clinics that already have identities of their own. So the deliverable was a color system that sits next to any partner without fighting it.

Colors are checked for contrast before they ship. On Techromatic and Techrobotic, every text-on-background pair was mapped at WCAG AA and AAA.

Brand and Website Together

If you just need the identity defined, that works too, and it is yours to take anywhere. But most of my identities go straight into a site I build. So the brand gets decided where it will actually live, instead of in a PDF that a developer interprets later. As the person who drew it, I can show you how it carries into the website, social posts and the rest of the places it has to work.

The Burt Foundation needed a site before it had a logo, because the board was running a community logo contest. So we designed a modular visual style that could take any mark, and the board chose its palette from eleven.

What a Brand Identity Package Includes

  • Strategy and Discovery

    Conversations with the people who run the business, and a live mood board. For Techromatic, the strategy came first: what each company was without the other.

  • Logo and Lockups

    The mark plus responsive lockups for header, footer, favicon and social, so it holds up everywhere it lands.

  • Color and Type

    A palette with contrast checked for accessibility, and a type pairing that works on screen and in print.

  • Brand Guide

    Usage rules for color, type, spacing and clearspace, so the next person to touch the brand keeps it intact.

  • Icons

    A custom icon set when stock icons would undercut the brand. McLetchie, Bradley & Fowler’s replaced every gavel with icons drawn for the firm.

  • Collateral

    Business cards, letterhead, email signatures, one-pagers and social templates, when you need them.

  • Presentation Design

    Deck systems instead of one-off slides. Techromatic and Techrobotic got a rendering engine in code that turns a prompt into an on-brand deck, exported to PDF or PPTX. Bay State’s showroom team got a sales presentation engine. Or templates connected to Canva, if that is where your team works.

Identities I Designed

“I worked with Jacob on my 2 branding and www projects this year, and the experience was extraordinary! Jacob took on most of the heavy lifting, and freed me up from the shackles of having to do it all myself.”

Paul Smith, CEO, Techromatic & Techrobotic

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