A brand book that holds its shape under operational pressure.

Pumpt needed a brand identity that could carry both a consumer-facing surface and a partner-facing one without splitting in half the moment the team scaled past three people.

Client: Pumpt
Year: 2024
Scope: Brand · Identity · Guidelines
Role: Brand partner
Team: 1 designer + 1 strategist
Duration: 6 weeks

The engagement

Context, approach, and the decisions that mattered.

The brief was a complete identity system plus the guidelines a small team could apply without our help. We treated the guidelines as the deliverable — the visual system was a means to that end. Every primitive was designed with a single, defensible reason; every exception was documented in advance; and the type system was held to four sizes across every surface so that consistency would not depend on taste. The result is a brand book that has survived the operational pressure of a real scale-up team without generating the slow, accumulating drift that brand systems usually accumulate in their second year.

Guidelines first, marks second

We wrote the guidelines structure before drawing the wordmark. The mark was then designed against the structure, not the other way around — every primitive had a documented reason before it acquired a shape.

Four sizes, full stop

The type system is constrained to four sizes across every surface. Consistency is therefore not a matter of taste; it is a matter of the team selecting from a list of four. After twelve months in production, no one has asked for a fifth.

Documented exceptions

Every exception the system permits is documented up front. Teams do not have to discover what the brand allows by submitting a piece for review — they read the rule, find the exception, and ship.

Selected artifacts