Ethical
A company that issues quality certifications. The mark is what they sell: a check, cut out of the triangle rather than placed on it.
Starting point
Nothing to build on, and no room to look new
Ethical issues quality certifications. It arrived with nothing: no mark, no colors, no type, nothing to revise. That sounds like freedom, and mostly it is not.
A certifier starting from zero is a harder case than most. A coffee roaster can open scrappy and tighten the brand as it grows, and nobody minds a young coffee brand looking young. A certification body cannot do that. What it sells is other people's trust, and the first time somebody sees the mark it has to look like an authority already — otherwise the certificate it sits on is worth less than the paper.
So the job was not a logo. It was a complete system, delivered at once, that had to look settled on the first day it existed.
Strategy
Two claims in one mark
A name like Ethical has to be proved, not announced.
The check is not a metaphor for what the company does — it is what the company sells: a business earns the mark, puts it on its own products, and Ethical's credibility travels with it.
That makes the name the hardest kind to design for. It states a value, and a value stated too loudly stops being credible — which for a certifier is not a matter of taste but the whole product.
So the mark does not illustrate ethics. It puts two ordinary business signs on top of each other — a triangle for the company, and the check that means verified — and lets the overlap do the work. You read the shape before you read the claim.
Identity
How the mark is built
A triangle, a check, and the point where they meet. The check is cut out of the triangle rather than sitting on it, so the mark stays a single silhouette at any size and survives being printed in one color.
That is not a preference. A certifier's mark ends up on surfaces the certifier does not control — a label, a stamp, the corner of somebody else's packaging — often small, often in one color, often reproduced by whoever is printing that week. A mark made of two separate pieces would have to be aligned correctly every one of those times. One silhouette cannot be assembled wrong.
Colorways
The palette
Sea Green
#0C8346
The symbol. Fills and surfaces, never small type.
YLNMN Blue
#26547C
The wordmark, and every link and label.
Magnolia
#F7F0F5
Page ground. Warmer than white, quieter than gray.
Dark Purple
#200116
Body copy and dark grounds.
One note carried into the brand guidelines: Sea Green on Magnolia measures 4.31:1, under the 4.5:1 that WCAG asks for body text. It stays a graphic color; the blue does the reading.
The typeface
ETHICAL
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
abcdefghijklm
1234567890
One family across the whole system. A geometric sans with wide, even letterforms: it holds up at wordmark size and stays neutral at body size, which is what a single-typeface system needs.
Outcome
What was delivered
- Symbol and its construction
- Horizontal and vertical lockups, with clear space
- Colorways — positive and negative on black, blue and green
- Color palette, two primary and two secondary values
- Typography — Montserrat across the system
- Stationery and website design
Next project
Self-initiated · Logo design