A new look, and when a brand should change

New frame, same picture.

That’s the shortest honest summary of what you’re seeing on this site. After more than forty years, designcraft Advertising has a new look: a lowercase wordmark, a warmer palette, and a descriptor that finally says what we actually do: Strategy + Advertising. What follows isn’t really an announcement. It’s the reasoning, because the same reasoning applies to your brand too.

The test: expression vs. substance

Every brand is two things sharing one name. There’s the substance: what you promise, how you treat people, the work itself. And there’s the expression: the type, the colors, the logo, the words on the wall. They age at completely different rates. Substance, done right, barely ages at all. Expression ages like everything else that was designed in a particular year. If substance is the picture, expression is the frame.

Here’s the test we used on ourselves: what’s expression, and what’s substance? The wordmark, the palette, the name on the letterhead? Expression. The promise Yvette made in 1985, that this would be advertising with a conscience? Substance. One got redrawn. The other wasn’t up for discussion.

That’s the whole discipline of a refresh, and it’s what separates a refresh from a rebrand. A rebrand changes the picture. A refresh changes the frame. If your substance is broken (wrong market, wrong positioning, a reputation you need distance from), no typeface will save you, and you have rebrand work to do. But if the substance is sound and the expression has simply fallen behind it, you’d be discarding the only part that took decades to build.

Why now

Our old look was built for the agency we were: a design shop that did advertising, with a conscience worn proudly on the letterhead. It wasn’t the 1985 original, either. It arrived in the mid-2000s, the last time the work outgrew its frame. Two decades is an honest run for an identity. This one earned its retirement.

The agency we’ve become leads with strategy, the thinking that decides what the advertising should say before anyone designs a thing. Somewhere along the way, the frame stopped fitting the picture. That’s the signal to change, and it’s the only good one. Not a new owner’s itch to redecorate. Not a trend. A gap between what you are and what you look like.

So the expression caught up. The wordmark is now lowercase, set in a serif with some warmth to it, because approachable and confident is who we are in the room. Strategy leads the descriptor, because that’s where the value gets created. And the conscience? It moved off the letterhead but remains where it always has: in the work, the client relationships, and the way we treat a budget like it’s our own. We stopped sloganizing our values around the time everyone else started. They’re still load-bearing.

The question to ask about your own brand

Not “does our logo feel dated?” Almost every logo feels dated to the people who see it daily. The better question: does our expression still match our substance? If yes, leave it alone; consistency is compounding interest. If no, change the expression carefully, and only the expression.

And if you’re not sure which situation you’re in, that’s a strategy question before it’s a design question. Which, conveniently, is now the first word in our descriptor.