Brand design in Abu Dhabi, built to read as credible.

Here the Arabic version of your name is frequently the one on the document, the entrance and the contract. An Arabic logotype traced from Latin letterforms is visible instantly to the people it was meant for, and it reads as a company that did not think this market was worth the effort.

We draw the Arabic as its own piece of lettering rather than a mirror of the Latin, pair it with an Arabic typeface chosen for reading at document sizes, and write the guidelines to cover both directions explicitly — which lockup goes where, how the two sit together when both appear, and what happens in a single-colour application.

The larger the buyer, the more the brand gets applied by people you never meet: a printer, an events contractor, a department building its own slides. Whatever the guidelines do not answer, they will decide for themselves, and the brand degrades one reasonable decision at a time.

So the document is written to be used rather than admired — clear rules, real examples of correct and incorrect application, colour values for every medium, and the awkward cases spelled out: small sizes, single colour, over photography, and on a form somebody has to complete with a pen.

A brand identity project runs AED 5,000 to 20,000 over three to five weeks. The lower end is logo, typography, colour and a guidelines document; the upper end is a full system — bilingual lockups, document and presentation templates, collateral, and the identity carried through to the website rather than handed over and hoped for.

You own every file: master vectors, editable artwork, the guidelines document, and a written note of which typefaces are licensed and how. That last detail is what stops a brand quietly breaking the first time it is handed to an external supplier.