branding agency
Branding agency for consistent brands
Hilvec, a branding agency, advises you on where to start with your brand: a name, a logo or sorting out what the company already has, and then runs the project all the way to rollout.
Hilvec, a branding agency, advises you on where to start with your brand: a name, a logo or sorting out what the company already has, and then runs the project all the way to rollout.
Each of these services can be a separate engagement or one stage of a single brand project, from the name to the rollout.
We design the mark in several versions for print and screen, and test it at small sizes and in one color. Every logo comes with basic brand guidelines.
We pair the logo with colors, typography and templates for business cards, proposals, presentations and social media graphics, plus packaging and trade show materials when needed. Everything is documented in brand guidelines. For Bodytec20+, the identity also covered studio storefronts and sportswear.
We help you name your company or product before the logo is designed. That's how our work on the Ankiety Pro Bono survey platform for IMAS International started: first the name, then the logo and website.
We refresh logos that no longer fit the company or cause problems in everyday use, and carry the new look over to your website, online store and materials. We keep what customers already recognize, such as colors, and change what gets in the way.
We have been designing brands for over 20 years: for online stores, service companies, apps and personal brands.
Three things that set us apart from a typical graphic design studio
We design brands for companies that sell online: online stores, platforms and web services. We know how a brand identity has to work in a store, in ads and on social media.
We can start by creating a name, then design the logo and full brand identity, and finish with brand guidelines and materials. One team handles the whole brand, so nothing gets lost between vendors.
Not every company needs a full identity right away. We can start with a logo and basic brand guidelines and expand the brand as your company grows.
With a conversation that settles what stays in the brand and what changes. We ask who needs to recognize the company and where they will see it: in search results, on a shelf, at a trade show or on a delivery van. We look at what the company already has: the name, the mark, colors, materials, and which of them work. That sets the order: sometimes the name comes first, because the current one is hard to pronounce abroad or has no available domain; sometimes it is enough to tidy up the colors and typography and the logo stays. After the rollout we stay with the brand: when a new product, sales channel or foreign market comes along, we extend the identity instead of designing it from scratch.
A name is the first thing customers learn about a company and the hardest thing to change. We look for names that are short, easy to say and spell, and fit the industry. We check every candidate before we show it: whether the .com and local domains are available, how the name sounds when said over the phone, and whether it means something unwanted in the languages of the markets the company is targeting. For the research firm IMAS International, we named its survey platform Ankiety Pro Bono (Polish for "pro bono surveys"): the name says right away what the service is, and once it was approved, we designed the logo and the website.
We also design brand identities for companies and products that are still being built. In that case, we choose the logo, colors and typography for a specific audience and test them right away on the website, on social media and in ads.
Be Usable builds IT and contact center teams for other companies. All we had at the start was the name and a short description of the business, so we designed the brand identity from the ground up. We based the simple mark on the golden ratio and chose the colors for the audience: blue suggests stability and security, orange suggests youth and energy. We used the same identity for a website that also serves visitors from the UK and Germany.
Home Scanner sells reports on a property before someone buys it. When we started, no one offered this service in Poland or anywhere else, so we defined the audience through interviews with people we met at random. Navy in the identity stands for the knowledge in the report, and fuchsia for the decision to buy. Besides the logo and colors, we designed the sales website, social media profiles, the blog and ad templates.
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myFactBook counts how many people attend events, from concerts to marches. We designed its identity, website, mobile app and Facebook page, and, as with Be Usable, based the logo proportions on the golden ratio.
In a rebrand, most of the work happens outside the logo itself. We start with an inventory of every place the brand is visible: from the storefront sign and vehicles, through the online store and social media profiles, to the email signature and the invoice template. That list defines the scope of the project and the order of changes, and at the end we set the day from which the company appears only in the new version, so customers never see two brands at once.
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Before the first sketch, we spend a lot of time talking with the client about the business, its customers and its competitors. The best logo ideas often come from something said in passing.
We also design brands for companies outside Poland, and then we work in English: calls, presentations and the brand guidelines are all in English, so your team and your suppliers get one document with nothing to translate. We prepare materials in your country's formats, for example letterhead and proposals in Letter size for companies in the US and Canada rather than European A4.
The farthest we have reached so far is Australia, where we designed and built the website for Sydney Privé. An eight or nine hour time difference, depending on the season, means there is no shared working day, so we scheduled calls at times that worked for both sides and collected feedback in writing between meetings. We work the same way on a brand project.
We have been through a rebrand ourselves, and foreign markets were the reason. The agency operated as Cary One, but when we decided to work for companies in the US and other countries, we needed a name with an available .com domain. That is how Hilvec came about, and we registered it as an EU trademark. We changed only the name and the logo; the colors, typography and the way we present our work stayed, because they worked and clients knew them. That change left us with one conviction we now pass on to clients: a rebrand does not have to mean replacing everything at once. Sometimes a new name and mark are enough, and the rest of the identity keeps working.
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The price of branding depends on scope: logo design alone starts at $2,500, and a full brand identity starts at $10,000. A new name, a company-wide rebrand or rolling the identity out to your website and online store are separate items. After our first call, we send a proposal that describes each of them.
A short description of your company is enough: what you sell, to whom and how you differ from competitors, plus whatever the brand already has: logo, colors, materials and website. Examples of brands you like and brands that annoy you also help, because taste is easier to discuss on examples. We learn the rest in the first call; a formal brief is not needed.
Yes. We create company and product names, usually together with the logo and brand identity. We present each candidate with the reasoning behind it and the domains already checked, and once you pick a name, we move on to the mark. Our post on naming explains how we approach it.
A rebrand makes sense when your current image no longer fits the company or causes problems in everyday use. That was the case with Eurooffice: its old logo didn't work well in print or on company vehicles and was expensive to produce, so we designed a new one and kept the company's colors. Sometimes a logo refresh is enough, and sometimes the whole identity needs to change. We define the scope after a call.
Yes. Once the identity is approved, we prepare material templates and print-ready files, and if needed we also design a new website or online store in the new identity. The rollout is handled by the same team that designed the identity, so the colors, typography and rules from the brand guidelines reach the website without being reinterpreted by another contractor.
Yes. We present logo and identity designs in online meetings and deliver files and brand guidelines digitally, so the whole project can run without a visit to Gdańsk. We schedule calls at hours that work for both sides, including across time zones, and you can send feedback in writing between meetings.
We want to help grow your company no matter where you run it!
