Design the identity at ad size first

Most identities are presented on mock-ups the brand will never buy: a building façade, a shopping bag held in perfect light, a billboard by a motorway. Then the identity ships, and it spends its actual life at 1080 pixels wide, cropped to 4:5, behind a play button, next to fourteen competitors in the same feed.

The feed is the primary medium

For a fashion brand launching now, the order of media is not negotiable: the identity will be seen on a phone first, on a website second, on a garment third, and on a billboard — if things go very well — last. So the sequence in which it is designed should match. A mark drawn at advert size and then scaled up will survive the billboard; the reverse almost never survives the feed.

Designing at ad size forces the useful disciplines early: a wordmark that stays legible at 24 pixels, a palette that reads through a compressed video thumbnail, type that holds its character when a platform re-encodes it, a system that still looks like the brand when the crop removes half of it.

Scale is a test, not a presentation

In our identity work every system is proofed at two sizes before it is shown to anyone: the 4:5 paid-social crop, because that is where the money lands, and six-metre runway backdrop scale, because that is where the photographs that define the brand get taken. If it holds at both, everything between is safe. That test is baked into how we hand identities over to Production — the campaign team should never discover the logo dissolves on camera.

The wrong response to all this is to design something inoffensive that survives every crop by saying nothing in any of them. Character first; then engineer the character to travel. You can see how that balance lands in the work — or tell us where your identity is and we will tell you what it needs.