Tessellate identity

A brand a team of nine can run

Tessellate had eleven people and no designer. Any identity that needed a designer to apply it was going to drift within a quarter — so the brief became: make something they can hold on to without me.

Scoping down on purpose

Most identity work fails here. A hundred-page guideline reads as thorough and behaves as a filing cabinet nobody opens. We agreed up front on four pages, and everything that did not earn its place on those pages did not get made.

• One mark, two lockups. Horizontal and stacked. No app icon variant until there was an app.
• One typeface, five sizes. Named for their job — display, title, body, caption, micro — not for their pixel values.
• Four colours, with the contrast already checked. Each pair in the palette is documented with the ratio it passes at.

The rules that mattered

The guideline spends more words on what not to do than on what to do, because that is where a small team loses coherence. Do not outline the mark. Do not set display type below 24px. Do not introduce a fifth colour for a single campaign.

Handover

A shared file, an asset kit with every export already sized, and the four pages as a PDF pinned in their team channel. Six months on, nothing had drifted.