Layer Landscape Architects
Layer is a landscape architecture practice with studios in Cheshire and Newcastle. They believe access to good quality external space is fundamental to mental and physical wellbeing and develop spaces that are grounded in context, inspirational by design, and robust in their longevity.
As a design practice, they were aware their current branding didn’t reflect their ethos and values. It was flat, colourless, and whilst reasonably smart, it didn’t showcase any of their personality. Like the landscape they design, they wanted their brand to catch people’s attention and reflect their style.
I started the process by creating a series of moodboards, benchmarking other brands and categorising them based on their forms, use of colour or general style, such as ‘minimal’, ‘geometric’, ‘loud’, ‘muted’. After narrowing the themes, before adding too much colour I create a few concept logos which were either dropped or redeveloped a number of time until we got to the final outcome.
Below is the final logo and brand guidelines.
I also designed html email footers, business cards and social media posts.
I’m really pleased with the final document templates. Not only are they beautifully smart but there are a lot of automated functions which will help keep them consistent and error-free. Elements like running headers mean the titles from the cover are picked up on the master page item, so there’s only one place you need to update this repeated information. Equally the running chapter titles mean they didn’t have to waste pages on chapter breaks, they can simply repeat the heading for navigation.
Whilst the templates aren’t complicated to use, the requirement of having the running chapter titles alongside an automated table of contents meant there were a few thing that could go wrong if you unlocked the master page items. Alongside a zoom tutorial, I create a small guide explaining how best to use the templates how to quickly fix the running headers if things didn’t seem to be working.
