What a brand identity includes, and what it costs, in Ireland

Most people who ring us asking for a logo need a brand identity. The logo is the part you can point at, which is why it's the part that gets asked for. The identity is everything that makes the logo mean something once somebody sees it, and it's the part that quietly does the selling on your behalf.

Here's what's included in a proper identity project, what moves the price on a quote, and how to spot the difference between a system and a nice picture.

The logo is about 10% of it

A logo on its own is a signature at the bottom of a letter nobody wrote. It signs for nothing. What you're buying instead is a system: a set of decisions that stay consistent everywhere your business shows up, so that a stranger who sees your Instagram, your van, your invoice and your website understands they belong to the same company.

A real identity project includes four things, and none of them is optional.

• A primary logo plus the variations you'll need: a stacked version, a horizontal version, a single-colour version, and a tiny icon mark for app tiles and social avatars.
• A colour palette with exact values, defined for both screen and print, and rules for which colour does what.
• Typography, meaning the fonts for headlines and body, licensed correctly so you're not breaking terms by using them commercially.
• The way it all goes together: spacing, sizing, dos and don'ts, written down so the next designer, printer or intern can't wreck it.

If a quote covers the logo alone, ask what happens the first time you need it in white on a dark background. The answer tells you what you're buying. A system, or a single file.

What drives the price

Irish studios vary widely in what they charge for the same brief, and the number comes down to four things, in this order.

1. Scope. A single wordmark is a different job to a full system with sub-brands, packaging and templates.
2. Strategy. Whether the work starts from research and positioning, or from a preference for green. The thinking is where the value sits, and the decoration is cheap by comparison.
3. Who does the work. In a small studio you work directly with the people making the thing, while in a larger agency you're often paying for account managers between you and the designer.
4. Rounds and rollout. How much revision, and how much of the applied material, website, social templates and print, is included rather than quoted separately.

The honest ranges

As a rough guide for Dublin and the wider Irish market, a considered logo-plus-basics sits in the low thousands, while a full identity system with strategy and rollout runs from there into the low tens of thousands depending on how much of your business it has to cover.

Anything advertised as a 50 euro logo is a template. Somebody else already owns it, and forty other businesses are already using it.

How to buy well

Ask to see the system in a studio's past work rather than only the finished logos, because the system is the part that decides whether the thing survives its first year. Then ask who you'll be talking to day to day, rather than who turns up on pitch day.

Then ask what you leave with, because you want the source files, the fonts sorted & a short guide, so the work is genuinely yours and doesn't fall apart the first time you brief someone new.

That's the difference between something that looks good in the pitch deck on the day it's presented and something that still looks good, and still works, two years and three hires later when nobody involved in the original project is in the room.

If you're weighing up a rebrand and want a straight answer on scope and cost for your business, tell us what you're working on and we'll tell you what we'd do.