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When we rebuilt the brand of Fronterra, which develops and operates long-term forest carbon and biodiversity projects across Peru, two small things stayed. We kept the company's mark and favicon, which already carried recognition, and rebuilt the brand around them, as our Fronterra case study records. Almost everything around those two assets changed. The positioning, the narrative, the palette, the typography, the website architecture and the seed deck were all rebuilt, because the company's public face made a serious operator look smaller than the work behind it. Fronterra's problem sat in the story and the system around the mark, and replacing the mark would have spent recognition the company had already earned. Our own summary of the outcome is that the brand now reads as the operating company Fronterra had already become.
That is a call about depth, about how much to change, and every rebrand makes one whether or not anyone says so. A rebrand can look good on launch day and fail in either direction. It can change the surface and leave the decisions underneath untouched, so the organisation goes on doing the same expensive explaining with a cleaner logo. Or it can change more than the business needed and give up recognition, useful language or a visual system that still had room to work. Both versions can photograph well. The difference shows up later, when the organisation tries to grow into the brand.
Judge the change against the next three years
Launch week is the wrong horizon for deciding how much to change. The better test is the company that needs to exist over the next three years. That period may bring new products or programmes, more geographies, larger institutional partners, research or policy publications, a fundraising process, a different customer mix, a more technical sales cycle, or an acquisition. Each of those puts a specific demand on the brand. The typography has to carry a serious report and a public campaign. The palette has to work in diagrams, data and interfaces. New programmes need to be distinguishable without splitting the master brand. The voice has to hold up in a board paper and a public story.
Put that way, the question is rarely about the logo alone. A mark can survive while the whole system changes around it, as Fronterra's did. A new mark can arrive while the brand underneath stays as limited as before. When the existing name and identity can carry the next three years with a stronger system around them, evolution is enough. When the central idea keeps creating strategic contradiction, preserving it becomes more expensive than changing it.
This is also why we separate the diagnosis from the design brief. A client may arrive asking for a new identity and find that the work that matters sits in positioning, offer architecture, evidence or information structure. The scope should follow the constraint that is creating the repeated cost, and one person should own the depth decision.
When a team is weighing a rebrand, our rebrand and identity work starts with that diagnosis and sets the depth of change against the next three years before anyone redraws a mark.
Fair Carbon's later programmes tested an evolved system
Fair Carbon, an organisation working in blue carbon, the carbon stored in coastal and marine ecosystems, came to us with an identity that already carried recognition and a leadership team that wanted continuity. The brief asked us to balance authority with warmth, precision with humanity, continuity with evolution, and femininity with inclusivity. We evolved the existing visual language. The new system keeps a relationship with the original mark and adds a more sophisticated palette, stronger typography, clearer hierarchy and a broader visual world drawn from marine ecosystems.
The three-year question had a partial answer afterwards. Fair Carbon has since expanded around new programmes, including the Blue Carbon Academy, the Blue Catalyst Fund and policy work with governments, and it continues to use the identity and digital language created through the original engagement, as our Fair Carbon case study records. We can say that new programmes arrived and that the identity built before them is still in use. How each programme was fitted into the site and the system is outside what we recorded, and we claim nothing more. As a test of depth, it is the kind of evidence that matters most, because a system judged at launch had to meet work nobody had briefed.
A new name is for a role the organisation has left
Ecosystem Restoration Standard (ERS) sat at the other end of the range. Its team was building a restoration standard under the name Wildsense, in a market led by Verra and Gold Standard, and lacked the authority to compete with the major standards. In our reading, set out in the ERS case study, Wildsense sounded like an initiative. We recommended a name change and supported the search, and the team chose Ecosystem Restoration Standard. A name containing "standard" told buyers and project developers what kind of organisation they were dealing with before anyone opened the website. How that new name was launched across every channel is the subject of our essay on launching a rebrand without fragmenting the story.
The name later changed again. ERS acquired the Equitable Earth standard and now operates under that name. A rename is a decision about the role an organisation holds at the time, and roles keep moving.
Our stated practice is to recommend a new name when the name describes a role the organisation has left. A deeper reset becomes reasonable on a few other grounds too, when recognition is low, when the identity places the company in the wrong category, or when the central brand idea contradicts the future position. Outside those conditions we start from what the organisation already owns.
What we kept in the work we have published
Two more projects show the call made towards keeping. Gaia AI gives foresters a backpack and an app that capture tree data for forest managers. A two-hour design review with the team settled six decisions. The last was to keep the identity and evolve the page around it. Gaia kept its existing identity, and the work went into the words, the structure and the page design, as our Gaia AI case study records. The old site said little to the people who buy the product, and that was a problem of words and structure.
DNAir had a name that people wrote in one letter case and did not know how to pronounce. We kept the name and solved the problem with typography, as our DNAir case study records. The wordmark splits at the centre of the A, with one side heavier than the other, so it reads as DNA and Air at once. The repair went exactly as deep as the problem.
Fronterra, Fair Carbon, ERS, Gaia AI and DNAir are five projects from our own work, chosen by us, and that is a small sample. They describe how we decide depth. They are weak evidence about rebrands in general, and nobody should read them as a rate. What they share is a habit of asking what each asset still does before deciding whether it goes.
Brighter Future will not replace a name, a mark or a palette that the next three years can still use because a clean sheet is easier to present. The amount of change is right when the organisation three years from now still uses every part that was kept, and would have been working around every part that was replaced.
Sources and further reading
Free course lessonThe Brand Strategy System, visual direction from strategy
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