Service № 04Branding & logos — names that get remembered, marks that scale
Identity · Logos · Voice · From £1,800

A brand is the feeling people get when they hear your name.

Branding and logo design in Ely, Cambridgeshire — twenty years of identities for independent businesses that needed to look like themselves, not like everyone else. Logos are the smallest part. The rest is voice, posture, and the courage to be specific.

20
Years designing brands
£1.8k+
Logo & basic identity
£4.8k+
Full brand system
3–5
Weeks · concept to delivery
The Old Warehouse, Ely — a recent Lord Knows brand identity
— The Old Warehouse, Ely
Brand · 2026
“Your logo is the smallest part of your brand.”
7s
Time to form a first
impression of a brand

A brand is a promise, made before you’ve had a chance to keep it.

A short manifesto on what branding actually is — and why most of what gets sold under that name is decoration without conviction.

A brand is not a logo. A brand is the feeling people get when they hear your name — the colour of the assumption they make before they’ve met you. Your logo is the smallest, most ornamental part of it. The rest is posture, language, photography, the way you answer the phone, the kind of person who works there.

A brand made for everyone is made for no-one. The bravest thing a small business can do is be specific — to look, sound and feel like itself, and unapologetically not like its competitors. Specificity is what makes you memorable. Vagueness is what makes you a category.

A great identity isn’t the one that wins design awards. It’s the one your customer can describe to a friend without seeing it. “The teal one with the dewdrop” beats “the modern one with the gradient” every time.

And it has to scale. From the favicon to the side of a van, from a 16-pixel app icon to a six-foot shop sign. A logo that only works at one size is a sketch, not a brand. The work is in the system — the family of marks, colours, type and voice that holds together everywhere it appears.

3
Promises on every
identity project

Three things every brand has to do.

Three things any identity I deliver has to be — without exception. They’re not features. They’re the standard. Without them, what you’re paying for is a logo, and a logo on its own won’t save anyone.

A name people remember.

Distinctive, ownable, and specific. Not a watered-down compromise that committee-tested its way into invisibility. The brave choice on the page is usually the right one in the market.

A look that scales.

Vector logo files in every variant you’ll need — colour, mono, reversed, horizontal, stacked. A type system, colour palette, and visual language that holds together from app icon to A1 poster.

A voice that sounds like you.

A brand voice document — the kind of words you use, the kind you don’t, how you greet a customer, how you sign off. Identity is half visual, half verbal. The written half is the half nobody talks about.

A complete identity, delivered in a folder.
07
Working parts
in a full brand system

What’s in the folder.

A finished brand identity from this studio is more than a logo file. It is a complete, usable system that anyone — you, your printer, a future designer — can pick up and apply consistently across every place your brand will ever appear.

A primary logo. The lead mark, designed for the contexts you use most often. Plus secondary lockups, a monogram for square places (favicons, app icons), and reversed versions for dark backgrounds.
A colour palette. Primary and secondary colours with print and digital values — Pantone, CMYK, RGB, hex — and rules for when and how to combine them. Tested for accessibility, not just taste.
A type system. A primary display face and a workhorse text face, with weight, size and pairing rules. Selected from foundries you can license forever — or genuinely free fonts where it makes sense.
Visual language. The patterns, shapes, photography style, and graphic furniture that make a brand recognisable beyond its logo. The dewdrop on a Lord Knows page is more memorable than the wordmark.
A brand voice. A short written guide: how you describe what you do, the words you use and the ones you don’t, sample headlines, sample sign-offs, sample social posts. The boring document that quietly does most of the work.
Brand guidelines. A PDF or web page covering everything above, with do/don’t examples, spacing rules, and clear-space specifications. The document you hand to anyone who ever has to apply your brand.
Templates & assets. A starter kit — letterhead, email signature, social-media templates, business card artwork — so the brand is in use the day after handover, not stuck in a folder.
A few marks I’ve made.
10+
Identities, recently
across UK independent businesses

The marks themselves.

A logo is the smallest part of a brand — but it’s also the bit that gets put on the most things, and the bit a customer remembers first. A short selection of recent identities, each one designed alongside the website, the voice, and the rest of the visual system.

From blank page to brand book.
3–5wks
Concept to delivered
identity system

Four steps. One identity.

A brand can’t be designed in a hurry, but it doesn’t need three months either. Most identity projects from this studio run three to five weeks — long enough to think, short enough to keep the energy.

i.

Discover

Week 1

The conversation. Your business, your customers, your competition, the words you’d use and the ones you’d never. Mood-boards, audits, and a written brief that you sign off before any design starts.

ii.

Concept

Weeks 2–3

Two — sometimes three — distinct directions. Not minor variants of the same idea, but genuinely different routes the brand could take. Presented in context: on signage, on the phone, on a van.

iii.

Refine

Week 4

The chosen direction is sharpened, stress-tested at every size, refined typographically, and turned into a complete system — colour, type, voice, patterns, application examples.

iv.

Deliver

Week 5

Final files in every format, brand guidelines, templates, and a one-hour walkthrough. Plus a quiet 30-day window for any tweaks once you start using it for real.

Adam listened carefully and understood the aims and values of SupplyFinder, and he then communicated those values through digital design. He helped to unravel a complicated project and give it clarity. From vision to completion, valuable guidance and advice — for the most favourable outcome.
Lord JD Waverley
SupplyFinder
The Old Warehouse, Ely
Common questions

Branding, plainly answered.

The questions every first call starts with — including the awkward ones about cost, ownership, and what happens when you don’t love any of the concepts.

Have a logo, need a system? Logo refresh and identity-system projects are common — email adam@lordknows.co.uk with what you have.
How much does a logo cost?+
A standalone logo with primary, secondary and monogram variants starts at £1,800. A full brand identity — logo, colour, type, voice, guidelines, templates — typically lands between £4,800 and £9,500. Quoted as a fixed price after a free 20-minute call.
Who owns the logo and brand?+
You do. Full copyright transfers to your business on final invoice payment. You get the editable source files, every variant, and full rights to use, modify or licence the work. Forever.
What if I don’t love any of the concepts?+
It’s rare, but it happens. The discovery phase is designed to make sure we’re aiming at the same target before a single concept is drawn — which is why I do two distinct directions, not five micro-variants. If we’re genuinely off, we revisit the brief, not just the visuals.
Will you use AI for the design?+
No. The thinking, drawing, typesetting and refinement are done by hand — the same hands that have been doing it for twenty years. AI is a useful tool for early mood-boarding and admin, but the work itself is human.
Do you do brand refreshes?+
Yes. A refresh — keeping what works, sharpening what doesn’t — is often the right call when a brand has equity but feels tired. Quoted separately from a full rebrand and usually a third of the cost.
Can you put the new brand on the website too?+
Yes. About half of brand projects are bundled with a website rebuild — it’s the natural place to apply the new identity, and the savings on doing both together are real. Quoted as a combined project.
Get in touch

Let’s have a conversation.

Twenty minutes on Calendly — no obligation. Or send a message and I’ll come back the same day, Monday to Friday.

One small ask — please book the call only if you’ve a real project in mind. I’d rather not be pitched SEO, hosting or anything else in a 20-minute slot, and if you do book, please show up. The diary is shorter than it looks.

Same-day reply · Mon–Fri

Tell me about your project.

A few lines is plenty — what the business does, what’s not working with the current site, and what good would look like.

Your details are used only to reply to this enquiry. Not added to a list, not passed on. Plain English.