Building for the Work Between Brand and Story
Most projects don’t sit neatly in one discipline. Notes on working in the overlap between brand, digital and content.
Most briefs arrive with a label on them: a logo, a website, a film. The label is usually right about the deliverable and often wrong about the problem.
Glo asked for a new identity, and the problem turned out to be its name. Beyond North’s owner had cabins under construction and no brand at all, but what the business needed in the end was bookings. Shackleton needed a launch for its first active insulation, and the work began with a platform, Made to Move, developed with co-founder Martin Brooks. In each case the work that mattered sat between the disciplines, not inside one of them.
A name is the shortest story
Glo designs and fabricates European window and door systems for high-end homes across the American West. Its clients are architects and builders. Its name, Glo Windows & Doors, listed products, while the work was closer to a design studio’s. No mark was going to fix that while the name kept saying something else.
Fenestration is the architect’s word for the design and placement of every opening in a building. It described what Glo actually does, in the language of the people who hire it. It gave the identity work, six routes, 118 marks and three rounds, something true to draw.
The brief that shaped the brand
Beyond North is two timber cabins on open moorland at the top of Scotland. Most guests are passing through on the NC500 or heading for the Orkney ferry, so the brand had one job: give them a reason to stop.
The line Where Adventure Rests, a palette named for the place and two cabins named after the sea all came from that. But the decision that did most to shape what guests see wasn’t in the logo. It was a single rule in the photography brief: this is not a summer-holiday brand. Matt Buckley shot the cabins to it: low light, weather, timber, and the moor in every window. That is brand work, done with a camera.
Where the brand meets the booking
A reason to stop is only half the job if the website then makes it hard to book. So the same idea runs straight into the site. The homepage leads with the place, “The last stop before Orkney”, each cabin has its own page, and on a phone a Check dates bar stays on screen. The site has taken bookings since December 2025.
Polish Interior makes the same point for a different buyer. Its mark was refined so that, among other readings, it is a room: a wall, a full-height window and the wedge of light between them. The website carries that precision through to a product finder, a compare page and CAD downloads, so an architect can get what they need without picking up the phone. The identity makes the promise; the site keeps it.
How the studio is set up
This is why Base Camp is small at the centre and wide at the edges. The same person carries an idea from the first workshop to the last deliverable, so the thinking behind a name is still in the room when the website is built or the shoot is planned. Specialists join for what they do best: Shane Cody drawing 118 marks for Glo, Matt Buckley photographing Beyond North, Toby Roney filming in the Moroccan desert.
The site lists the disciplines separately, because that is how people look for them. The projects rarely stay in one. The useful question at the start isn’t which discipline a brief belongs to. It is what has to be true for the work to land, and who needs to be there to make it true.
Mentioned: Glo Fenestration, Beyond North, Polish Interior, Shackleton Made to Move.
Filed under Notes · Written by Charlie
