Island Estates

The brief

Island Estates was a successful estate and lettings agency operating in Kensington — but their branding didn't reflect either the quality of their service or the market they were working in. The owner had a clear ambition: he wanted to be the biggest agent in the area. What he had was generic estate agent branding that looked like everyone else on the street.

He came to me with one idea: he wanted a lion in the logo. He had an instinct that it should be bold and distinctive. Everything else was mine to figure out.

The creative approach

The lion wasn't just a logo element — it became the organising idea for the entire brand identity. In Kensington, with its royal associations and established heritage, a lion made sense as more than a symbol. It communicated authority, quality and ambition without needing to explain itself.

The challenge was to build a complete visual identity system around that idea — one that could work across every format the business needed, from a small business card to a full-height window display, from a property board on a Kensington street to a website competing with significantly larger agencies.

The lion wasn't a logo — it was the organising principle for the entire brand. Every decision flowed from it.

Making the identity work across everything

The real test of a brand identity in property is whether it holds up in the real world — on a board outside a house, on a brochure handed to a potential buyer, on a window display in a competitive high street. Generic estate agent branding fails that test because it's designed to be inoffensive rather than memorable.

Every visual decision was made with a specific application in mind. The logo mark was drawn to reproduce cleanly at any scale — from a small favicon to a full-height window display — which meant keeping it bold and uncluttered rather than detailed. The typographic system paired a classical serif for headings with a clean sans for body copy: the serif carried the sense of heritage and establishment that Kensington clients would expect, the sans kept it from feeling stuffy or dated. The colour palette was chosen to stand out on a street where most competitors were using the same predictable navy and cream.

• Logo and marque engineered to work across all reproduction methods — digital, print, signage and embossing.
• Property brochures designed with a modular layout system that worked consistently across different property types and price points.
• Brand guidelines developed so the identity could be applied correctly by printers, signage companies and developers without needing constant supervision.
• Website designed to sit credibly alongside much larger agencies, with clear navigation and a property search experience appropriate for the Kensington market.

The outcome

Island Estates had a brand that could hold its own on a Kensington street — boards that looked considered rather than churned out, brochures that felt like they'd been made for the property rather than against a template, a website that didn't apologise for competing with larger agencies. The lion gave the business a visual identity with genuine presence, and a design system that could be applied consistently without me being involved in every decision.

This was an early project in my career, but it taught me something I've carried into every rebrand since: a single clear creative idea, properly developed and consistently applied, will always outperform a dozen clever executions going in different directions.