You Are Here
A full brand refresh for a production company becoming a creative studioBefore drawing anything I asked what they wanted a new logo to do. The answer was about the company rather than the mark. Coming up on ten years, they were moving beyond production towards a broader creative studio, and they wanted the name to carry the philosophical weight it had always half implied. A logo on its own could not do that, so the project became a full refresh: a position, an identity system, and a book to hold it together.
I audited the studios You Are Here sits alongside. The big houses have prestige and craft but feel impersonal, the social-first shops move fast and date quickly, and the boutique studios are stylish but tied to a single look. Almost none of them say what they believe about the work.
The position came out of the name. Presence is a thing a production company can actually claim: work that makes people stop in a landscape built for scrolling past. I wrote it up as five pillars, three personality traits and a manifesto, all drawn out of conversations with the founders. The tagline, wherever you are, You Are Here, already existed. The strategy gave it something to sit on.
The old logo worked because it read as a tag. It marked a place, which is exactly what the name says, so the job of the mark stayed the same and only the handwriting changed.
It had to hold two things at once. The solidity of a stamp, compact and self-contained, with the authority of a studio ten years in. And a quality that felt closer to something cosmic than something made by hand. The letterforms fuse and melt into one another so the mark reads as a form coming together out of nothing, which is where the name's new meaning sits.
They had one logo and it broke the moment it got small. For a studio planning to widen into a creative practice, that was a ceiling on where the brand could appear, so the new system was built to go anywhere the ambition went.
The master logo takes priority wherever there is room for it. YAH works as a monogram in small spaces and in contexts where the brand has already been introduced. The A was drawn as a locator pin from the start, built into the wordmark so it could be lifted out and used alone, which carries the identity down to favicon size without a single letter.
Three states is more than a scaling fix. Giving the brand three ways to show up is what turns a logo into a world, and it opens up how the studio can present itself across a title card, a profile picture or a co-branded lockup. Guidelines set a minimum width for each mark, an exclusion zone of half the logo's width and height, and lockup rules for the client work.
The palette holds to the same logic. Off-white and off-black rather than the pure versions, named Here and Eclipse, so nothing in the identity competes with the films it sits on.
The identity went live across everything: Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, thumbnails and end cards on the studio's work, and co-branded lockups on client films. The manifesto sits on the ethos page of their site as a poster.
Merchandise is where the system goes next. A studio that people work inside rather than hire needs something wearable, and it is the clearest place for the monogram and the icon to carry the brand on their own. I also supplied early web directions showing how the identity could translate into a site, which the studio took forward with their own developer.