About

We shape perception through branding

ASPEN Lab builds brands for businesses that need to be taken seriously on a shelf, on a storefront and on a screen, long after the launch has stopped being interesting.

The studio

We sell the system, not the logo

The studio exists because of something that keeps happening. A business pays for a logo, gets a good looking file, and six months later has a brand that falls apart the first time it meets packaging, signage or a campaign nobody wrote rules for. The logo is rarely the problem. The missing system is.

So the work runs the other way round. Positioning first, then a visual and verbal identity built to survive people who are not designers. It is a duller thing to buy than a logo and a far more useful thing to own.

The people who take the brief are the people who do the work. Nothing gets handed down to a junior team once the pitch is over, and nobody sits between you and the studio to relay messages.

What we believe

01

A brand you can't hand over isn't finished

If your team cannot produce something on brand without calling us, we have sold you a dependency. Everything ships with rules a non designer can follow.
02

Strategy before craft

Good work built on a wrong decision is expensive waste. We spend the first two weeks on positioning, and the logo is better for it.
03

Published prices

Our rates are on the site. We price the work rather than the client, and you should not have to sit through a discovery call to find out whether you can afford us.
04

We say what a thing is

Scope, price and timeline are written down before you commit to anything. No studio should make you guess.
05

Fewer projects, properly

We take a limited number of brand builds at once. If we are full we will say so and tell you when we are free, rather than stretching you across four months of silence.

Why Lab

A studio should be caught practising

The word is in the name for a reason. Alongside commissioned work we run a standing brief to ourselves: pick a category that deserves better branding than it has, write a real strategy, and build the identity in public with the reasoning attached.

It keeps the craft sharp between engagements, and it lets you evaluate how we think rather than which logos we happen to have been hired for. Some of the work on this site started that way and every page says which.

The rules are the same either way. A real brief with real constraints, taken to files a supplier could actually run. Nothing stops at the mockup, including on projects where stopping there would look better.

See the work

Capabilities

  • Brand strategy
  • Positioning
  • Naming
  • Verbal identity
  • Logo & wordmark
  • Arabic type
  • Design systems
  • Brand guidelines
  • Packaging
  • Signage & environment
  • Art direction
  • Motion identity
  • Web direction
  • Social systems
  • Launch campaigns
  • Bilingual type

Photography, illustration, development and print production come from collaborators we have worked with for years, directed by the studio. One point of contact, one invoice, one set of standards.

Let's find out if we're a fit

Start a project See pricing