A brand that survives its next merger.

You do. The marks, wordmarks, lockups, naming, verbal identity, tokens, templates and guidelines produced for you are assigned to you on payment, with the assignment written into the agreement rather than implied. Trademark applications are filed in your name from the start, in the classes and jurisdictions agreed in the Define phase, and the filing records are handed over with the naming register. Altuon retains its methods and its internal tooling and licenses what you need of them for the life of the system. Design source files are delivered in open, editable formats so ownership is real and not dependent on our software.

The licensing position is decided before a typeface is chosen, not after. Where an open licence serves the identity, we prefer it: a typeface under an open font licence can be embedded, modified and distributed across every subsidiary and market without a per-seat count that breaks at the next acquisition. Where a commercial face is the right decision, the licence is taken in your name, scoped to the group and its future entities, and recorded in the asset register with its terms and renewal conditions. Imagery, illustration and motion assets follow the same rule: your name on the licence, the terms on record, and nothing in the identity that depends on a licence we hold.

Through a charter your board adopts during the Define phase and operates from the Prove phase onward. It names the owner of the brand, the council that decides changes, the path a subsidiary follows to request one, the cadence of review and the release process a change moves through. Tokens and templates are versioned, so the charter has something concrete to govern: a subsidiary is on a version, a change has a number and a changelog entry, and a deprecation has a date set by your council rather than by us. If the engagement ends, the process keeps running with your brand team operating it. If you retain us, we sit on the council as advisers, not as approvers.

As a first-class design problem, not as localisation. Arabic and Latin are designed in parallel from the first sketch: a paired typeface chosen for weight, x-height and rhythm against its Latin counterpart, a grid that mirrors correctly, a decision on numeral systems, and lockups tested in each script and in lines that switch between them. The verbal identity is written in Arabic by people who write in Arabic, with its own register and its own banned list, because a voice translated from English sounds translated. Where a market reads French, German, Italian or Turkish, those languages are set in the same system rather than in exceptions to it. For public-sector and national programmes, the identity is designed in Arabic first and the Latin form follows.

Most engagements begin with an identity, not without one. The Discover phase inventories what exists and where it has drifted, and the Define phase decides what is kept, what is corrected and what is retired, with each decision recorded and its reason. Often the mark stays and the infrastructure is built beneath it: tokens that encode the colours as they were meant to be used, templates that stop the drift, a governance model that did not exist. Where the architecture has to change, because the group has outgrown a single name or absorbed companies that never fitted, the change is sequenced so that the surfaces customers see most are the last to move and the interim states are designed rather than tolerated.

Accessibility is written into the identity as a brand standard, not checked afterwards against it. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the framework, at the conformance level your policy adopts, and the European Accessibility Act and its national transpositions are named where they apply to your products and services. In practice this means every colour pairing in the palette is measured for contrast and the measurement recorded in the token, type sizes and line lengths are specified for reading rather than for decoration, focus states are designed as part of the identity, and every motion has a reduced-motion alternative. A palette that cannot pass is changed in the Define phase, when a colour is a decision and not a fleet of repainted vehicles.

Less than the brief usually assumes, and for a reason the brief usually misses: the cost of a rebrand is not the design, it is the migration, and the migration is a sequencing problem. In the Discover phase we inventory every surface and price each one in effort and in visibility. In the Define phase the migration is sequenced so that the cheapest and least visible surfaces move first and prove the system, and the most visible move once, when the system is proven. Signage, fleet and print are scheduled against their natural replacement cycles wherever the business can bear it. Legal entity renamings are coordinated with your counsel and your regulators on their timetables. The proposal states the phases, the surfaces in each and the decisions each one requires from you, so the disruption is known before it is agreed to, and the identity is built to make the next change smaller than this one.