The logo had been bothering me for months. Not because it was bad — Pierre Chamat had designed it well when we launched in 2009. But we had been using two versions without any consistency. The original flat magenta version on some materials. A glossy 3D-effect version on others. Both on the website at different times. Different shades of magenta depending on which file someone grabbed from which folder.
Yesterday we made the decision: pure magenta, flat, no 3D effect. Consistent across everything — web, print, office signage, email signatures. The 3D version is retired. The decision took ten minutes. The preparation took two months.
How visual inconsistency creeps in
Nobody decides to have an inconsistent visual identity. It accumulates. In 2009 we had a logo and nothing else. No brand guidelines, no color specifications, no rules about spacing or placement. Why would we? We were three people in a shared office space. The logo was a PNG file on my desktop.
By 2013 we are twenty people across two offices. Every presentation deck, every client proposal, every email footer, every social media profile has been created by a different person at a different time using whatever version of the logo they happened to find. Some use the flat version. Some use the 3D version. Some use a version with a tagline, some without. The magenta is different in almost every instance because nobody ever specified the exact hex code.
From the outside, this probably seems like a trivial problem. Clients do not choose agencies based on logo consistency. But from the inside, it signals something: we are not paying attention to how we present ourselves. If we cannot standardize our own brand, what does that say about the quality of the brand work we do for clients?
The actual decision
The 3D version had a certain appeal — it looked more modern to our eyes in 2010 when gradients and depth effects were fashionable. The flat version looked simpler, cleaner, but perhaps less impressive.
By late 2013, the industry had moved decisively toward flat design. Apple had flattened iOS earlier that year. Google was clearly moving in the same direction. The visual language of the web had shifted, and our 3D logo now looked dated rather than modern.
That made the design decision easy. The harder decision was committing to enforce it. Standardization means retirement — every document, every profile, every piece of signage that uses the old version needs to be updated or replaced. For a twenty-person company running at full capacity, finding the time to do a complete visual audit is not a small ask.
We are ordering new wall signage for the Gothenburg office — one-meter, two-meter, and three-meter versions of the flat magenta logo. The Stockholm office gets the same treatment. Every client-facing template is being rebuilt. The website was already updated during our redesign last autumn, but print materials, proposal templates, and social profiles still need a pass.
Why it matters more than the logo
The logo standardization is the visible part of a broader professionalization effort that has been running through BBO for the past year. We rebuilt our website in autumn — not because the old one was ugly, but because it felt like a suit we had outgrown. The new site reflects who we are now, not who we were when I was the only employee.
We standardized our reporting templates. We wrote down processes that had previously existed only in people’s heads. We defined a pricing strategy instead of pricing each deal on gut feeling. The visual identity standardization is the surface expression of all of that.
There is a phase in a company’s growth — somewhere between ten and twenty-five people — where the informal systems that carried you through the early years start to break. Not dramatically. Not in a way that shows up in revenue. They break in the accumulated friction of small inconsistencies: the proposal that looks different depending on who writes it, the onboarding that varies depending on who does it, the brand that changes depending on which file someone grabs.
Fixing each one individually feels like overhead. Fixing them systematically feels like growing up.
What I have learned about brand decisions
The first thing is that these decisions take longer than they should because they feel less urgent than they are. Nobody ever lost a client because their logo had a gradient. But the compound effect of visual inconsistency erodes the perception of professionalism in ways that are difficult to attribute.
The second is that brand decisions are organizational decisions. Choosing the flat magenta logo was a design choice that took ten minutes. Getting twenty people to consistently use it requires systems, templates, and a willingness to enforce the standard. The design is five percent of the work. The implementation is ninety-five percent.
The third is personal: I delayed this for too long because I was focused on things that felt more important — client work, hiring, revenue growth. The visual identity is now standardized, and the company looks like itself for the first time in two years. It should have looked like itself the entire time.
Curious whether other agencies struggle with this — when did you first standardize your visual identity, and what finally triggered it?