Naming and identity for a development
The name is the cheapest decision on the programme and the one everything else inherits.
There is a street in most British cities where four new schemes are called The Foundry, Foundry Works, The Old Foundry and Foundry Yard. One of them was a foundry.
We wrote the long version of this argument as How to name a development, which covers what a name is doing commercially and a test that kills a bad one in ten minutes. Read that first. This page is what happens after the name is agreed.
What the name has to survive
Three things, and none of them is a mood board.
A buyer saying it on the phone to a partner who has not seen it. An agent saying it forty times a day without resenting it. And a search, where the real test is whether typing your scheme name and the city finds you rather than the other three.
A name that fails any of those is a discount you pay later, unit by unit, and the cost of changing it rises every week after the planning application is validated.
The identity system, and what it actually has to cover
A scheme identity is not a logo. It is the smallest set of decisions that lets eight different suppliers produce work that looks like one scheme without ringing you to ask.
That means: the mark, in the versions it will really be used in, which includes very small and in one colour on a vinyl banner. A palette that survives being printed on correx in February. Type that the brochure designer, the signage contractor and the web developer can all license and use. A rule for how the scheme sits with your developer brand. And enough examples that the next person applying it can see what right looks like.
Four to six weeks gets you that. Most of the elapsed time is sign-off rather than design, which is worth knowing when you plan the programme around it.
The hoarding is the biggest piece of marketing you will buy
It is also the one most often designed last, by whoever is quickest, under pressure from a contractor who needs artwork on Friday.
A hoarding is seen by more people than the brochure, the microsite and the film put together. The neighbours walk past it twice a day for two years. The planning officer drives past it. So does the journalist writing about the application, and so does the buyer who has not registered yet.
What it has to do is narrow: say what is coming, say who is building it, show one image worth looking at, and give one way to register. What it must not do is apologise for the building site, which is what a hoarding covered in lifestyle stock photography is doing.
Get the artwork specified at the same time as the identity, not six weeks later from a different supplier working off a PDF.
The sales suite, and the things that get forgotten in it
By the time the sales suite is fitted out, the identity has usually been signed off for months and nobody has looked at the list of what still needs applying to it.
The list is longer than people expect: the price list, which is the single most-handled document in the room and is usually a Word file. The floorplan sheets. The materials board. The window vinyl. The lanyards and the business cards for agents who are not your staff. The presentation the agent gives on a laptop. The reservation pack a buyer takes home and shows somebody.
Every one of those is a place the scheme either looks like itself or looks like whoever made that item in a hurry.
Where this sits in the programme
Name before planning. Identity before CGI. Hoarding artwork with the identity. Sales suite collateral before the show home is finished rather than after.
Run it in that order and nothing gets made twice. It is the cheapest sequence available and it is almost never the one the pressure of a programme produces on its own.
Straight answers
Asked and answered
- How long does a scheme identity take?
- Four to six weeks from brief to a mark, a palette and a type system you can hand to the hoarding contractor. Sign-off sets the pace more than design does: the work is quick and the decision is not, so the useful question is who signs it off and when they are in the country.
- Should the scheme have its own identity, or carry the developer's?
- Both, with a defined relationship between them. The scheme needs enough of its own to be remembered and the developer brand needs to be visibly behind it, because an off-plan buyer is underwriting the company as much as buying the flat. What that relationship looks like is a decision to make once, at the first scheme, rather than per launch.
- Can you work with a name we have already chosen?
- Usually, and we will tell you if it fails the search test before we start drawing. If three schemes within a mile share your word, the problem is not the design and no amount of it will fix the phone call where an agent has to explain which one you are.
Put your next development in frame
Send us the site, the programme and the sales target. We will come back with what we would shoot, what we would name it, and what it costs.