The mark, the colors, the type, and everything it has to live on afterwards. Trucks, signs, shirts, business cards, booklets and the website. Designed once, properly, so it still holds together in three years.
Most small businesses do not have a branding problem so much as a consistency problem. Three different blues, four fonts, and a mark that falls apart the moment it leaves the screen.
It looks fine on a laptop and turns to mush on a truck door, a hat, a yard sign or a one-color invoice. If it was never drawn as vector art, or it has a gradient and six colors and thin text, it will fail every time it leaves the screen, and you find out when the sign shop sends it back.
The website blue is not the truck blue, the business card uses a font nobody else has, and the shirts came from whoever was cheapest that month. Customers do not consciously notice. They just quietly read it as a business that is smaller and newer than it is.
The guy who made it moved away, or it came from a marketplace and you got a JPG. Now every sign, every shirt and every print job starts with somebody trying to trace it. This is the single most common thing people come to us with.
Design that accounts for the real world. A logo that survives a sign shop, a palette that prints the same color it displays, and files you will never have to ask anyone for again.
The mark drawn as proper vector art, with the variants you actually need: horizontal, stacked, icon only, one color, and a version that still reads at sign size and on a shirt pocket. Delivered in every format, with the rights in writing.
Print design starting around $250 depending on the piece. Cards, flyers, rack cards, catalogs, booklets, price sheets and mailers, set up correctly for the printer with bleed and the right color profile so it comes back looking like it did on screen.
Artwork built for the surface it is going on, at the size it is going on, readable from the distance people will actually read it. Truck doors, trailers, yard signs, job site banners, shirts and hats, supplied to your sign shop or printer in the format they ask for.
The fastest way to undo good brand work is to leave it off the one place everyone checks. If the site is next, the colors, type and mark carry straight through instead of being approximated.
A brand is not just a logo, it is also what your photos look like. We can shoot your work so the images on the site, the ads and the brochure look like they came from the same company, because they did.
The Google Business Profile, the social pages and the proposal template. The unglamorous places a brand usually goes to die, brought in line with everything else so you look like one business instead of five.
Brand work usually comes with something else. See website design, photo and video, product photography or local SEO once it is all in place.
We used to. The problem is that a logo by itself almost never solves the thing people hire it to solve. A new mark lands, it goes on the truck, and three months later the website still looks like 2014, the business cards are a different blue, the yard signs use a font nobody can read from the road, and the owner is right back where they started wondering why the business still looks small.
So logo work happens here as part of a brand package: the mark, the colors, the type, and the files in every format you will ever need, built so it works on a sign, a shirt, an invoice and a phone screen. If all you want is a logo and nothing else, If a standalone mark is genuinely all you want, that is not what we sell, and we will tell you on the call rather than after the invoice.
What we are good at is making a small Minnesota business look like it has been around longer than it has, consistently, everywhere a customer runs into it.
The design work rarely stands alone. It usually arrives with a website, a set of photos, or both, which is the whole reason it stays consistent.
Site and visual identity built together four years ago and still consistent today, which is the only real test of brand work.
See the numbersA cultivator with several product lines that each needed to look distinct while still reading as one company. Design system plus the storefront it runs on.
See the numbersIdentity and website built together from scratch. Having the design and the build in one place is why it launched already consistent.
See the numbers
We start with what the business actually is, not a mood board. What you sell, who buys it, what the competition in your towns looks like, and where the logo has to survive. Then concepts, then revisions on the one you pick, then the full set of files and a short guide covering the colors, the type and what not to do with the mark.
Timeline is usually two to four weeks depending on how fast feedback comes back. You own everything outright when it is paid, including the working files, and we never reuse a mark we made for you on somebody else.
Brand and print projects are quoted per piece, starting around $250 and scaling with scope. Most design work here arrives attached to a website build, which is the cheapest way to get it done once and have it stay consistent.
One-time project. Most Minnesota small business sites land in here.
For a business with a decent site that needs the phone to ring.
Everything, including me on site with a camera twice a month.
Brand and print projects are quoted individually and you get the number in writing before anything starts. You own the work outright once it is paid, including the source files, and we never reuse a mark we made for you.
Here, logo work is part of a brand package rather than a standalone product, and brand and print projects start around $250 for a single piece and scale with scope. Other Minnesota agencies publish logo packages at roughly $950, $2,450 and $4,500 depending on how many concepts and how much of a system comes with it, which is a fair benchmark for what this work costs in this market. Tell us what you need it to go on and you get a written quote before anything starts.
Not any more. A logo by itself almost never fixes what people hire it to fix, because the website, the truck and the cards are still out of step with it. Logo work happens here inside a brand package, or alongside a website build. If a standalone mark is genuinely all you want, that is not what we sell, and we will tell you on the call rather than after the invoice.
All of them. Vector source, EPS and SVG for sign shops and embroiderers, PNG with transparency for the web, high resolution for print, one-color and reversed versions, and the color codes in hex, RGB, CMYK and Pantone. You should never have to come back to us because a printer asked for a format you do not have.
Yes, outright, once it is paid for, and we put that in writing. We also never resell or reuse a mark we designed for you. Trademarking it is a separate legal step we do not handle, but nothing about how we deliver it gets in the way if you want to.
Usually yes, and often that is the better answer. Plenty of projects here are redrawing an existing mark as proper vector art, fixing the colors so they print correctly, and building out the variants that were never made, rather than starting over. If there is real recognition built up in what you have, throwing it away is rarely worth it.
We design it and set the files up correctly for whoever prints it, including bleed, margins and color profile, so the piece comes back looking like it did on screen. We are happy to work directly with your sign shop, printer or apparel supplier, and we can recommend ones around here if you do not have one.
