Five days. Not nine months.
Tampa websites that earn their place.
A brand brief and a visual identity style guide, produced as a tight five-day engagement. Voice, positioning, audience hierarchy, palette, typography, image direction. Ready to hand to anyone — us, your existing designer, or a future agency — for build. The clarity without the brand-agency theatre.
Fixed price · 5-day delivery · Two documents
Pairing it with a build? Tell us in the form →
- ~2 hours of your time, total
- Two documents, yours forever
- No 47-direction visual exploration
- No stakeholder workshops
Brand sprint · You’re not alone if…
The brand was never written down. Now everyone’s guessing.
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01
Every new vendor — designer, copywriter, developer — asks “what’s your voice?” and you give a slightly different answer each time. The output reflects that.
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02
Internal team debates die in “is this on-brand?” loops because there’s nothing written down to point at. Decisions take three meetings instead of three minutes.
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03
You’ve been quoted $30K and 9 months by a brand agency for a 60-page brand bible you don’t need. The scope is wrong, the timeline is wrong, the price is wrong.
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04
Your output looks like generic-AI design now — gradient hero backgrounds, smiling stock teams, default Lucide icons. Not because you chose it, but because nobody told the tools what to do instead.
If two of those land, a sprint fixes it. Five days, two documents, ~2 hours of your time.
Brand sprint · The thing
Brand strategy is mostly the surface area of what to decide. Not how long the deciding takes.
The nine-month brand workshop exists because billable hours exist. There’s a real version of it — for a board-level rebrand at a multi-vertical company — but it’s not the work most $1M–$20M businesses need. What you actually need is clear positioning, a clear voice, and a clear visual direction, written down well enough that the next vendor doesn’t guess.
We’ve done the discovery and the synthesis often enough to know which questions matter. The trade-off is honest: we don’t do user research, multi-direction visual explorations, or stakeholder workshops. We synthesise from your inputs plus our experience, then we make decisions. We pick two visual directions, not twelve. We write voice samples, not adjective lists.
Five days is enough — not because we’re cutting corners, but because the marginal week of refinement rarely changes the final answer. The faster you have the documents, the faster every downstream decision gets cheaper.
What you get
Two documents. Day 5.
A brand brief and a visual identity style guide. Polished PDFs, ready to hand off. Yours forever — use them with us, with your existing designer, or with a future agency.
Brand brief (12–18 pages)
Day 2 draft
- Positioning — one-sentence positioning + competitive landscape. Not a 12-slide template — the actual decision, made.
- Audience hierarchy — 3–5 tiers ranked by priority. Who you serve and who you don’t.
- Voice + tone — traits, banned phrases, sample copy. We write hero, service description, and error message in your voice. Show, don’t describe.
- Brand values + boundaries — what you believe operationally, and what you refuse to do.
Visual identity style guide (10–14 pages)
Day 3 draft
- Colour palette — hex codes, use ratios, contrast pairings. WCAG-compliant out of the gate.
- Typography — specific fonts, weights, type scale, OpenType features. Not “a serif and a sans” — which serif and which sans.
- Image style — reference examples plus prompts, so anyone (human or AI) generating imagery in your brand can stay on direction.
- Layout system — grid, spacing scale, component shape. Iconography choice. The bones.
Anti-generic-AI checklist
Included in both
- What your brand explicitly isn’t. Gradient hero backgrounds, smiling stock teams, default Lucide icons, “Most Popular” pricing badges — the catalogue of generic-AI defaults your brand refuses to drift into.
- Banned-phrases list. The specific words you don’t sound like. Saves the next copywriter three rounds.
$1,500, fixed. 5 business days. Two PDFs you keep forever — whether you build with us or hand them to anyone else.
How it ships
Five days. Three sign-offs. ~2 hours of your time.
Brand work has a tendency to expand to fill all available time. We cap it because the marginal week of refinement rarely changes the final answer. You answer discovery, react to drafts, sign off on final.
Inputs in
30-min discovery questionnaire (async, you fill at your pace). Competitor inventory pulled. Voice spectrum scored on 8 axes — you anchor.
→ Discovery doc · competitor inventory · voice spectrum
Strategy on the page
First draft of brand brief shared. You react via async comments — one revision pass. Voice writing samples included so you can see, not just read about, the voice.
→ Brand brief v1 · voice samples
Two directions, picked
Visual identity style guide drafted: palette, type, image style, layout. Two directions, not twelve. First sign-off.
→ Style guide v1 · sign-off #1
Polish + handover
One round of revisions based on your feedback. Final drafts of both documents prepared. Polished PDFs delivered. 30-minute walkthrough call. Files are yours.
→ Final brief + style guide PDFs · walkthrough
Discovery questionnaire (30-min async) · competitor inventory · voice spectrum analysis (8 axes scored) · image style boards (reference, not generated) · type spec generator. Strategic synthesis is the work — we read your inputs, write the brief, pick two visual directions instead of listing twelve, and tell you what your brand isn’t as clearly as what it is.
Pricing · One number
$1,500 fixed. One tier. No upsell.
Standalone or paired with a build. Pairing doesn’t change the price — the work is the work.
Standalone sprint
For businesses that need clarity, not ceremony. Two documents, hand to anyone for build — us, your existing designer, or a future agency.
- Brand brief (12–18 pages)
- Visual identity style guide (10–14 pages)
- Voice samples + banned-phrases list
- Anti-generic-AI checklist
- Colour palette with contrast pairings
- Type specification · image style direction
- 30-min final walkthrough
Sprint + authority site
Sprint runs first ($1,500, 5 days). Authority site follows ($3,000, 14 days). The build inherits brand decisions — no re-deciding mid-build.
- Everything in Standalone
- Authority site build inherits brand
- No mid-build “what’s our voice?” loops
- One kickoff covers both
- Audit credit + care plan apply normally
- Best for: rebrands, new businesses
- Senior-led — the strategist writing the brief is the one you talk to
- Two documents, yours forever — use them anywhere
- ~2 hours of your time, total — we do the work, you make decisions
- Audit credit applies: $500 SEO audit credited if you came in via that
- What’s not included: logo design (referred to specialists), user research, multi-direction visual exploration
Pairs well with
Phase 0 of a build, or a standalone document.
Where the sprint goes next depends on what comes after.
Before you commit
Reasonable questions.
If your question isn’t here, ask it on email. We’d rather answer once, in writing.
Five days for a brand — really?
Really. Brand strategy is mostly the surface area of what to decide, not how long the deciding takes. We’ve done discovery and synthesis often enough to know which questions matter. The trade-off is honest: we don’t do user research. If your brand needs primary research (large new market entry, B2B enterprise pivot), this isn’t the engagement — we’ll tell you up front.
Do you design my logo?
Not as a standalone deliverable. If you have an existing logo, we work with it. If you don’t, we recommend either hiring a logo specialist after the sprint (the style guide tells them exactly what direction) or pairing with an authority-site build where logo work fits in the wider scope. We have logo specialists we refer to — ask in the form.
How is this different from a $30K brand agency engagement?
Two ways. One: we don’t do user research, multi-direction visual explorations, or stakeholder workshops. We synthesise from your inputs plus our experience, then make decisions. Two: we’re not building you a 60-page brand bible with applications across 12 verticals. We’re building a brief plus a style guide that’s enough to direct downstream work. Less ceremony, same usefulness. If you genuinely need a $30K engagement, you’ll know — board-level rebrand, multi-vertical company, M&A integration. For Tampa SMBs $1M–$20M, $1,500 is the right scope.
Does it work for rebrands or only new brands?
Both. Same methodology — discovery, synthesis, decisions, documentation. Rebrand-specific: we factor in what to keep from the existing brand (recognisable elements, customer associations, equity) versus what to evolve. That’s part of the discovery on day 1.
What do I bring to the sprint?
~2 hours over 5 days. 30-min discovery questionnaire (async), 30-min reaction to brand brief draft, 30-min reaction to visual identity draft, 30-min final walkthrough. Inputs we ask for: any existing brand assets (logo, current site, marketing materials), 3 competitor URLs, 3 inspiration brands you admire (any industry), 3 brands you specifically don’t want to be like. We do the work; you make decisions.
Sprint slots · one starts each Monday
Clarity in a week. Not a quarter.
$1,500, fixed. Five business days. Two documents you keep forever — whether you build with us or hand them to anyone else. No call required, no follow-up sequence.