A hardware shop's sign finally matched what was inside it
A logo and brand identity studio job that started with a sign and ended with a full identity system for a 41-year-old Austin hardware store.
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Selected work — project ledger 187 through 214
Four finished projects, each closed on a fixed price and a fixed date.
This is what a brand studio in Austin actually ships: not concept boards, but signage, a rewritten website, a stationery system and a packaging label that a client is using today. As a branding consultant working small accounts across Austin, Texas, we log every engagement into a running project ledger. The studio is past project 214, and each case below is that ledger's own record, not a portfolio reel dressed up after the fact.
Four cases here, in full. A wider archive of smaller identity and naming jobs sits below as a shelf, not written up case by case — most of that work is under a confidentiality note from the client.
See the service lines behind this work
Index
Four cases, read in order or jump ahead.
Every case follows the same three-part record: what the client asked for, what the studio decided, and what changed once it shipped.
A law firm's website said everything except what it did
A website structure audit and full content rewrite, delivered as a document, then reviewed against the developer's build at three milestones.
Read the caseA two-person landscape studio needed one mark, not ten
A logotype, a single accent color, one type pairing and a one-page usage sheet — brand guidelines design kept small on purpose.
Read the caseA jam maker's name tested badly at the register
A brand naming consultant sprint that swapped a cute name for a plain one, and the packaging label that had to carry it.
Read the case
01
Case 214 — a hardware shop's sign finally matched what was inside it
Asked
The owner wanted a new sign. That was the whole brief when they called: the old sign had faded to nothing and the shop was getting confused for a chain hardware store two blocks over. No logo work was on the table at the start.
Decided
We turned it into an identity system engagement instead of a sign job, at $2,200 base plus $150 per touchpoint for five touchpoints: the sign, a door decal, a price-tag stamp, an invoice header and a delivery van decal. One accent color, a single condensed letterform pulled from the shop's original 1983 awning, and a one-page usage sheet the owner's daughter — who runs the register — could apply herself.
Changed
The sign went up in week four. Foot traffic is not something we track or claim credit for; what we can say is the owner reordered the decal set twice in the following year and asked us back eight months later for a website content project, which became case 209 below.
"We do not build your website. We make sure the one you get says what you meant" — the line we used with this client when they asked us to also build the site itself, and why case 209 started as a separate, smaller engagement.
02
Case 209 — a law firm's website said everything except what it did
Asked
A four-partner Austin family law practice had a six-page website nobody could describe in one sentence. The homepage opened with a stock photo and a paragraph about their "philosophy." Nobody could say what to click first.
Decided
This is a website content consulting job, priced at $120 per page across six pages under the $95–$140 band: homepage, three practice pages, an attorney-bios page and contact. We audited every page against one question: what does a visitor need to decide here. Then we cut the philosophy paragraph entirely and delivered a sitemap document plus full replacement copy. Their existing developer built from it over five weeks; we reviewed the build at three milestones under a separate Website Build Oversight line, at $210 per page.
Changed
The rewritten homepage now states the four practice areas in the first screen, in plain language, with the phone number visible without scrolling. We do not track their inquiry volume and would not publish it if we did; the client's own comment, unprompted, was that new callers now name the specific practice area instead of asking "what do you all do."
One structured revision round was included. The firm asked for a second pass on the bios page four months after launch — that went through as billable hourly work, exactly as scoped at the start.
03
Case 198 — a two-person landscape studio needed one mark, not ten
Asked
Two landscape designers splitting off from a larger firm came in with a moodboard of forty logos they liked and no budget for forty logos' worth of design hours. They asked, more or less, for all of it.
Decided
We held the line at $2,200 base plus $150 per touchpoint, four touchpoints: logotype, business card, letterhead and an invoice template. One serif wordmark, one washed-terracotta accent, no secondary logo, no icon system — a second mark is a common request we turn down, because two people running a landscape crew do not need a mark library, they need one they can put on a truck door without a designer's help.
Changed
The usage sheet fit one page, letter-sized, and the partners still reference it two years later when a print shop asks for the accent color's exact value. No further design hours were billed after handoff.
"A logo is not a brand. It is the smallest part of one" — the sentence that ended the forty-logo moodboard conversation and started the actual scope.
04
Case 187 — a jam maker's name tested badly at the register
Asked
A small-batch preserves maker had a name built from a pun on her last name. It made people smile once and then people forgot it by the register. She wanted "something that sounded more like a real brand."
Decided
Positioning & Naming, flat fee within the $1,400–$2,600 band. Three weeks, one positioning statement, three shortlisted names — not fifty options, three. The shortlist favored plain, place-rooted names over wordplay, because a name a cashier can say once and remember beats one that needs explaining every time.
Changed
She picked the plainest of the three. The packaging label carried it in one ink color on kraft stock, no die-cut shape, no foil — a deliberately cheap-to-reprint format so a small producer can adjust flavor labels without a new plate cost each season.
One structured revision round covered the shortlist narrowing from nine names to three, then three to one. No further naming rounds were requested.
The archive shelf
Roughly two hundred smaller jobs live on this shelf, not on this page.
Past project 214 sits a run of naming sprints, one-page usage sheets and website content audits too small to write up as full cases, or bound by a confidentiality note from the client. Each one still got a number, a fixed band, and one structured revision round — the archive is the proof that the studio applies the same rate card in case 6 as in case 214, not a different price for a smaller job that happens to be easier to write about.
If your project looks smaller than the four above, it still gets its own ledger number and the same terms. The full rate card is public for exactly that reason.
Start the next case.
Every case above started as a short call, not a proposal deck. Tell us what you are building and which service line sounds closest.