Branding Agency Dublin

Brand identity design for Irish businesses

Éire Graphic Design is a branding agency in Dublin, working from Smithfield in Dublin 7 and building brand identities for businesses, public bodies and universities right across Ireland. Most people come to us because they need a logo. What they usually need is the system around it: the colours, the type, the rules and the files that make every sign, van, letter, website and social post look like it came from the same company.

That system is what a brand identity is. A good one means your business looks the same on a quote sent at nine at night as it does on the sign over the door, and it keeps looking that way when somebody other than us designs the next flyer.

We are a small studio, so the person you brief is the person drawing your brand. There is no account manager passing notes along and no junior picking up the job after the pitch. With 491 logos in our portfolio and a 5.0 rating from 102 Google reviews, branding is the work we have done more of than anything else.

What a brand identity from us includes

Every project starts with the mark, because that is the piece people will recognise first. Read more about how we approach that on our logo design Ireland page. You get the logo in full colour, single colour and reversed, plus a stacked version and a small mark for places where the full name will not fit, like a social media avatar or a favicon.

Around the mark we set the colour palette, with exact values for screen and for physical use so the green on your van matches the green on your website. We choose typefaces that suit the business and are licensed properly for the way you will use them. Then we write the brand guidelines: a short, practical document that tells your team, your signwriter and your web developer how to use all of it without ringing you to ask.

Larger brand identity projects carry the brand onto the things you use every day. That can mean letterhead and document templates your team can type into, email signatures, product packaging, social media templates, and signage and vehicle livery. We supply finished artwork for every one of them, set up the way the supplier needs it.

If you are starting out and want the essentials in one go, our startup branding package covers the logo, colours, type and the first set of files a new business needs.

How a branding project runs

It starts with questions rather than sketches. Who you sell to, who you compete with, what you want people to think when they see your name, and what you have already got that is worth keeping. Twenty minutes of honest answers saves weeks of redrawing.

Then we present a small number of distinct concepts, each one shown in use on the things that matter to your business rather than floating on a white page. A logo that looks great on a screen can fall apart on a hi vis jacket or a tiny Instagram icon, and it is better to find that out in the first round.

You pick a direction, we refine it, and once the mark is settled we build out the colours, type and guidelines around it. At the end you get every file in every format, organised so you can find the right one in six months’ time.

Rebranding an existing business

A rebrand does not always mean starting again. Sometimes the mark is fine and the problem is that nobody has used it consistently, so the van, the website and the shopfront all show slightly different versions. Sometimes the logo really has run its course. We will tell you which one you have before you spend money on the wrong fix.

Where there is recognition worth keeping, we refresh rather than replace: cleaner drawing, better spacing, a colour that works on screen, and a set of rules so it stays fixed. Where the business has outgrown its old identity, we start fresh and plan the changeover so the old and new brands are not fighting each other on the high street. See our logo redesign page for more on refreshing an existing mark.

Branding work we can show you

The brand work that tests a studio most is often not a glamorous rebrand. It is building an identity that has to sit beside someone else’s, survive a committee, or keep working in other people’s hands.

For Galway County Council we built the identity for its Broadband Connection Points, the county’s free public wifi sites. The first direction leaned too close to the council’s own logo, so we started again and gave the programme a brand of its own, with variants for each kind of site and a properly rebalanced Irish language version.

For Trinity College Dublin and St James’s Hospital we designed the mark for the Irish National Falls Audit, taken through an audit committee and redrawn when the committee changed the wording, so it reads as official to clinicians across the country.

For Curiosity House we carried an existing brand into letterhead and document templates, rebuilt after the first version showed us how the team actually works, so the branding stays put however much text goes in.

And for Benecol we produced a patient education film to a locked brand specification, which is the other side of branding: working inside someone else’s rules without bending them.

Branding for your sector

Every sector has its own places a brand has to work. A construction company needs a mark that holds up on site hoardings, hard hats and tender documents, which we cover on our construction branding page. An engineering firm needs to look credible in a technical proposal, so see our engineering branding work. Gyms and personal trainers live on Instagram and on clothing, which is why fitness branding needs a mark that works tiny and in one colour. Accountants and solicitors need trust before personality, covered on our accounting firm branding page.

We have built brands for more than sixty kinds of business. Browse them all on our logo design by industry page.

Choosing a branding agency in Dublin

Dublin has branding agencies of every size, from large consultancies that run brand strategy for national companies to one person studios. If you are comparing branding agencies in Dublin, look at whether they have built identities for businesses like yours, ask who will actually do the design, and ask what you get at the end besides a logo file.

We wrote a fair comparison of the best branding agencies in Ireland if you want a starting list, and a separate one of the best branding agencies in Dublin for businesses that want a studio in the city. What we offer is a Dublin brand identity studio with a long record across Irish businesses and public bodies, a fixed price agreed before work begins, and direct contact with the designer from the first call to the final files.