Pursuing The Creative In Branding

There's a version of branding that starts with a moodboard. Colours are pulled, references gathered, logos sketched. It looks like progress. But the brands that genuinely hold together - the ones that attract the right people, build real trust, and stay coherent as a company grows - almost never start there.

They start with a question: who are you, really?

At SE Studio we've built brand identities across fintech, healthcare, consumer and beyond. The work looks different in each sector, but the approach shares a common foundation: real brand work begins with a deep understanding of a company's culture, values, and position - before a single visual decision is made.


By Lindsay Gravette, Ty Lou and Margaretha Andreassen.

Positioning In A Complex Market

When ArcticDB came to us, they had a genuine technical edge. Originally incubated within Man Group - one of the world's largest hedge funds - ArcticDB was a quantitative data platform with serious credibility inside the industry. The challenge was translating that into a brand that could stand on its own as they moved to market. The temptation with a technically complex product is to lead with the technology. We pushed back on that. The best brand work doesn't start with design - it starts with a real deep dive into what the company actually is: its team, its culture and its vision of the future.

“Working with Something Else Studio felt like having an extension of our team.
They brought ArcticDB’s vision to life.”

— Abhi Thakur, Principal, Head of Business Development, ArcticDB

For ArcticDB, that meant understanding the people building it: a talented, collaborative team driven to solve problems that others hadn't even properly defined yet.

Every visual element that followed was rooted in that understanding. The mountain-and-graph logomark draws from the data science concepts at ArcticDB's core. The ultra-modernist logotype reflects the team's forward-thinking ethos.

The deep purple palette signals precision and ambition without leaning on the tired visual language of financial services.

A brand identity should be so well-calibrated to a company's character that it feels inevitable. That's what we were aiming for. The result was a cohesive, living system - built to scale from a developer's GitHub profile to a subway billboard.

Building For Trust

In industries that deal with health and wellbeing, the stakes are higher and the design constraints are real. A brand that feels too expressive can undermine the confidence people need to have in the service. A brand that feels too clinical can fail to connect with the humans at the centre of it.

Papa sits right in that tension. Papa is a care-companion service that connects older adults and families with college students who provide companionship, help with tasks, and social support.

We started with a solid, considered logotype - dependable, not playful - then supplemented it with joyful colours and hand-drawn imagery that signal human connection rather than clinical service. We also developed a brand manifesto to establish tone of voice: a document that gets to the heart of why Papa exists, not just what it does. That manifesto became the anchor for all subsequent communications - the “why” that every piece of content could be checked against.

The brands that hold up under pressure are the ones where someone did the hard thinking upfront - about purpose, about audience, about what trust actually looks like in this context.

Highlander Health presented a different kind of healthcare challenge. Co-founded by Amy Abernethy and Brad Hirsch - two of the most recognised figures in the industry - Highlander Health needed to move from stealth to launch with a brand that could hold its own in clinical and investor contexts while still signalling a new kind of thinking.

We built an identity designed to constantly evolve: an adaptive wordmark and a motion-led visual system that conveys transformation over time. The brand's core idea - progress never pauses - is embedded into how it moves, not just how it looks. Every element, from the sleek wordmark to the content kit, reflects an organisation that sees itself as a force for change rather than a fixture of the status quo.

Consistency as a Competitive Advantage

Strong brand identities don't stay strong on their own. The identity is the starting point; what makes it durable is the system built around it. Robust brand guidelines - the kind we build in Figma alongside the design process, not as an afterthought - serve as the handbook for everything that follows.

For companies growing fast or operating across multiple markets, this matters enormously. A brand that relies on a few people holding the visual logic in their heads will drift the moment those people move on, or the moment a new product line, campaign, or market demands decisions the original designers didn't anticipate.

The answer isn't more rules. It's a smarter system - one that teaches the logic of the brand rather than just documenting its outputs. You can read more about how we approach this in our piece on brand guidelines that actually get used.

Telling a Story

Not all brand work begins with an existing company. Sometimes the name, the narrative, and the identity all need to be built from the ground up — and each one has to earn its place.

“The team at Something Else truly captured the essence of our brand and translated it into a visual identity that feels fresh yet deeply authentic.”

— Christ Taylor, MD, The Seltzer Company

When Mulberry Street came to us, The Italian Seltzer Company had a product with real character - flavours rooted in Italian heritage, made for a New York state of mind - but a brand that hadn't yet found a way to tell that story. The rebrand needed to attract new audiences without losing the cultural authenticity that made the product worth caring about.

The name Mulberry Street came from the heart of New York's Little Italy, grounding the brand in a specific, emotionally resonant place. The packaging redesign enlarged the fruit illustrations to foreground ingredient quality and freshness, letting the product speak for itself visually. A comprehensive communications kit - imagery, copy, brand guidelines - was developed to ensure anyone working with the brand could maintain the same voice and feel across retail, social, and events.

Two hands toasting with Mulberry Street New York Seltzer cans: Sicilian Orange with Chinotto and Sicilian Lemon with Bergamot, both 4% alc vol, on a warm terracotta background.
New enough to attract attention. True enough to retain loyalty. That's the balance a rebrand has to strike, and it's only achievable when the strategy comes before the design.

Brand as Strategic Asset

A well-considered brand is one of the highest-leverage investments a company can make. It shapes how talent is attracted, how investors read confidence, how customers build loyalty and how internal teams make decisions. Done well, it will compound over time.

What separates the brands that last from the ones that stall is almost never the quality of the visual execution. It's whether the design was grounded in something real from the start - a genuine understanding of who the company is, what it stands for, and who it's trying to reach.

That's the work we care about most. Not just making things look right, but making sure the thinking behind them is solid enough to hold up as the company grows.



About the piece: Lindsay Gravette, Ty Lou and Margaretha Andreassen, co-founders at SE Studio, a branding, design and technology agency based in London and San Francisco. Case studies referenced: ArcticDB - An Identity With Scale, Papa - No One Can Do It Alone, Highlander Health - Forward-Thinking Healthcare, Mulberry Street - New Look for a New York Seltzer