To bring purpose and meaning to Catsnake: The Story Agency by creating a brand identity which would reflect their commitment to using creativity and strategy as tools to make the world a better place, and position them as a trusted thought leader. A decade of focusing on winning work and crafting creative meant that Catsnake had gone from strength-to-strength from a buisness point of view, but it had little in the way of a distinct and ownable visual identity, along with a website which didn’t reflect the company’s high-quality output and attention to detail.

We began by embedding with the Catsnake team at their annual strategy away day, which allowed us to experience the company culture, to get under the skin of its short, medium and long term objectives, and to formulate a framework for the company’s mission, vision and values. Following this we ran individual brand discovery workshops with each of the key stakeholders in order to uncover further insight and information to help us position the company effectively and appropriately. From here we established a creative direction and built a robust, scalable design system to allow the brand to grow organically and the team to scale their marketing creative output internally.

From our stakeholder interviews, we established that Catsnake offers much more than just strategy and creative campaigns that deliver results. Its work gives its clients power. Power to reach, evolve and grow beyond their wildest dreams by harnessing the power of creative intelligence, rigorous, methodical practices and storytelling.

Historically, oral stories passed from one generation to the next and storytellers were regarded as healers, leaders, spiritual guides, teachers, and entertainers. A near-universal theme of storytelling is repetition, which we illustrated by repeating, overlapping and intertwining geometric shapes to create unique constructions. These were repeated in multiples of three, to evoke human connection, the passing on of knowledge and the bringing together of separate elements to create something new and unique.

We refreshed their legacy logo, adding a mixture of sharp and rounded, softened corners to the wordmark to reinforce the symbology of both the cat and the snake - key elements to the brand and its way of working. Cats travel light and are inveterately curious leaving no stone unturned and, like snakes, can strike with lightning quickness and precision.

The primary palette of a trio of colours (there’s the rule of three again) and typeface were selected to communicate a sense of depth, warmth, trustworthiness and fun, which sum up the brand, its people and what it stands for.

Brand guidelines in granular detail and a hefty suite of assets and templates were supplied to the team, empowering them to own and develop their brand and tone as the company continues to grow.

As a final touch we built and installed a custom analytics and tracking dashboard, so that we can make data-driven design changes to optimise engagement and conversions as the site and its content expands.