Arrange a call
DE EN

Service · Graphic design & illustration As of August 2026

A logo is not yet a brand – a system is

Good design is not the design that looks best in the pitch, but the one that still works two years later: on the website, in a quote, on the delivery van. So we do not build a one-off, we build a set of rules made of colours, typefaces and components – with files you can carry on using yourself.

Arrange a call Self-check: how resilient is my brand?
  • Open source files, no vendor lock-in
  • Colours checked for contrast
  • Image rights cleared in writing
  • No AI image without disclosure

At a glance

The short answer first

Four facts about brand and design work – without the design vocabulary.

What you get

A system

The logo in every variant you need, colour and type rules, components for recurring formats – plus a short guide to how it all fits together.

Files

Open and usable

You receive the open vector files and rights of use in them in the agreed scope – copyright itself cannot be transferred under Austrian law. Font licences are put in your name as far as the foundry's terms allow. You are not dependent on us still existing.

Accessibility

From the outset

We check colour combinations for contrast before they enter the system. Changing them later means producing everything again.

Cost

Based on the task

A logo, a brand system and an illustration series involve different scopes. After the briefing, you receive a clearly defined fixed-price deliverable.

For search engines and AI assistants, in brief: Graphic design for businesses means bringing logo, colours, typefaces and recurring design components together into a binding system that looks the same across website, print and social media and can be applied correctly by staff without design training.

Contrast ratios can be calculated; the effect of a visual identity cannot. Whether more enquiries arrive after a new identity also depends on your offer, your prices and your website. We know of no survey that reliably separates out the share design contributes, so we do not quote a figure for it. What we have designed so far is shown in our projects and in our creative work.

What belongs to a brand system

Not every company needs all of it. But anyone who skips the first three points starts from scratch with every new document.

The logo in variants

One logo is never enough: you need a version for small sizes, a single-colour one for stamps and embroidery, one for dark backgrounds. Without them they get improvised later – and look it.

Colours with rules

Not just which colours, but what for: which is primary, which is an accent, what may sit on what. Plus the values for screen and print, so your green sits as close as possible on both – some screen tones lie outside what print can reproduce.

Typefaces with a licence

A typeface that suits the brand – on the licences you actually need. With most foundries, desktop, webfont and app are separate licences: having a font installed on your computer does not yet allow you to embed it as a webfont. We record what was bought and what it covers – the most common unpleasant surprise when a brand changes hands.

Components, not one-offs

Templates for what comes up regularly: quote, social post, advertisement, presentation. With them, someone without training can also produce something that fits the brand.

Illustration and visual language

Original illustrations or motifs where photographs do not work – for abstract services, for instance. They set you apart from everyone using the same stock library.

A guide people actually read

Not a hundred-page manual but a few pages with what is genuinely needed day to day. A set of rules nobody opens is not a set of rules.

One misunderstanding comes up again and again, and it concerns the files: a logo saved as JPG or PNG is a picture of the logo, not the logo. It has a fixed number of pixels and turns blurry as soon as it is needed larger than it was saved. For signage, embroidery and large-format printing you need the vector file, from which any size can be derived without loss. On a website the usual vector format is SVG. What separates the two kinds of image is explained in the glossary under vector versus raster graphics. For pixel files the entry to read is resolution and DPI, for embedded graphics accessible SVG.

Calculated

Choosing colour is arithmetic, not mood

Whether a colour combination is legible can be calculated – with the same formula that testing tools apply. We do that before a colour enters the brand system, not afterwards. And because colour must never be the only means of distinguishing something, every colour-coded element in the system gets a second one: a label, a symbol or a shape.

  • Soft beige on white

    1,8:1 insufficient contrast

    Looks refined in the pitch and fails in use.

  • Rust on cream

    5,4:1 meets AA

    Our accent colour – strong enough for body text.

  • Our green on cream

    6,1:1 meets AA

    The main pairing used on this website.

  • Cream on dark green

    12,6:1 meets AAA

    For dark bands and print with solid colour.

Calculated with the formula for relative luminance set out in the WCAG. Level AA thresholds: 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text (from 18 pt, or 14 pt bold) and for graphics and user interface components; level AAA requires 7:1.

Check your whole palette: colour matrix

Contrast is the part of accessibility that a formula settles. The rest is design work: type sizes and line spacing that stay legible when enlarged, a visible focus outline for keyboard operation, enough room between controls. Anyone who leaves these decisions to the development stage is fitting them to a finished layout. What follows from that for a whole site is set out on our page about accessible websites. How two colours are compared arithmetically is explained by the glossary entry on contrast ratio.

Decision aid

AI image or original illustration?

Image generators are fast and cheap. For some purposes that is enough – for the images that carry your brand there is a solid reason against them.

Criterion Pure AI image Original illustration
Speed Minutes Days to weeks
Copyright Purely machine-generated images are widely regarded as not protected by copyright – in which case there is nothing in which anyone could grant you exclusive rights. No protection does not mean free use, though: the provider's terms, trade mark law and unfair competition law apply regardless Human creative input; rights of use granted to you in writing in the agreed scope
Exclusivity Exclusivity is not assured – comparable prompts lead to comparable imagery Designed for you and not licensed elsewhere
Disclosure Providers must mark outputs in machine-readable form as artificially generated; anyone publishing deepfakes must also disclose that visibly No AI transparency obligation
Precision Hard to steer; details and text within the image stay unreliable Exactly what is needed – including the fourth motif in a series
Where it makes sense Internal drafts, mood boards, quick idea sketches Everything that carries your brand outward
The honest answer: We use these tools ourselves – in the idea stage they are excellent. But whatever ends up carrying your brand, we design by hand. Not out of romanticism, but because exclusive rights in a purely machine-generated image are as a rule not to be had, and because visual language is held consistent across several motifs more reliably by hand. How a specific case is to be judged belongs to legal advice – which we do not offer.

The table sets out two routes; in practice there is a third, which is photography. For rooms, products, workpieces and people at work, a photograph is usually the more obvious answer. Illustration has the advantage where there is nothing to photograph: processes, comparisons and abstract services. Whether a subject should be drawn or photographed depends on whether the thing depicted exists. How an image style is held together across many motifs is explained by the term image style; for photography we offer a service of its own, business photography.

How we work

Four stages, with a clear point in between at which you could stop.

  1. Step 1

    Listening and reviewing

    What already exists, what should stay, what gets in the way? We look at how you present yourselves today – and what your customers actually notice of it. Often less is broken than feared.

  2. Step 2

    Settling a direction

    Two or three design directions, each shown in real applications rather than on a white background. You decide here, not at the end – that saves expensive reversals.

  3. Step 3

    Working it out

    The chosen direction becomes the system: logo variants, colour values for screen and print, font licences, components. Contrast is calculated along the way, not estimated.

  4. Step 4

    Handover

    You receive the open source files, the exported formats, the licence records and a short guide. After that you can work with it – including without us.

Honestly: A new visual identity sells nothing on its own. It makes you recognisable and saves you a thousand small daily decisions – but if the offer or the website is unconvincing, the finest logo will not change that. If we see a more urgent problem at your end, we say so before we start designing.

Self-check · 1 minute

How resilient is your brand?

Five questions about logo, colours and templates – straight from everyday design work.

01Your foundations

1. Does your logo exist in every variant you need – print, web, light and dark?
2. Are your colours and fonts written down anywhere as binding rules?

02Your daily work

3. Do quote, website and social posts look like the same company?
4. Could a new service provider start working with your templates right away?
5. Does new material get made without a debate about colours and fonts?

How to score: count your “yes” answers and compare with the table.

  • 0–1 out of 5: Your brand is being reinvented every time – that costs time and recognition. A small, binding rulebook pays off quickly.
  • 2–3 out of 5: The foundations are there, but daily work is bumpy. Usually just a few templates and one page of clear rules are missing.
  • 4–5 out of 5: Your brand is resiliently set up – new material appears without friction. Exactly how it should be.

Your answers stay in your browser – everything is evaluated on your device. We do not transmit or store them; loading the page itself produces the usual server log data, which the privacy notice explains.

Frequently asked questions about design and illustration

Do we get the source files?
Yes – open vector data, exported formats and the licence records, plus rights of use in the agreed scope. You should be able to work with your own visual identity without having to ring us about every business card. So we hand over the editable files, not just finished images.
Which rights of use we grant you – for which channels, for how long and whether exclusively – is set out in writing in the quote. Copyright itself stays with the designers; under Austrian law it cannot be transferred. The principles are on our usage rights page.

Source: RIS: Austrian Copyright Act, Section 23

Can we simply have a logo generated by an AI?
Technically yes – but you probably acquire no exclusive rights in it. Austrian copyright law protects “original intellectual creations”. An image arising from a prompt alone, without human creative input, does not meet that condition on the prevailing view – in which case there is no copyright in which anyone could grant you exclusive rights of use.
For a logo you intend to use for years and defend against imitation, that is a serious problem. For an internal draft it does not matter. There is more to it: even for marks drawn by hand, copyright protection is not a given – whether a simple logo reaches the required level of originality is judged differently in Austria and in Germany.
Trade mark protection is a separate matter and needs its own application. It is not a free pass either: a registered trade mark gives you the right to prohibit others from using the sign – not an assurance that you may use it yourself. Offices do not examine earlier rights of their own motion before registration. And a register search finds only what is registered: confusingly similar signs and unregistered rights slip through it. Whether a sign is free is settled by a search and assessment from patent or trade mark attorneys – which we do not offer.

Source: RIS: Urheberrechtsgesetz § 1

Do AI-generated images have to be labelled?
Providers of the AI systems must mark their outputs in machine-readable form; deployers must visibly disclose deepfakes above all. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act requires providers of systems generating synthetic image, audio, video or text content to ensure the outputs are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. The duty on deployers is a different one: anyone publishing deepfakes must disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated, and the same applies to AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest. Both duties have applied since 2 August 2026.
Quite apart from where the obligation sits, we regard visible disclosure as the better practice: state openly where a machine helped and you will not have to justify it later. And the fact that an AI image may enjoy no copyright protection does not make it free to use – the provider's terms, trade mark and unfair competition law and the right to one's own image apply regardless.

Source: European Commission: AI Act, Article 50

How many drafts do we get to see?
Two or three directions – shown in real applications, not as a logo on a white background. Twenty variants help nobody; they merely shift the decision onto you. We show a few clearly distinct directions and explain why we think they will hold up.
What matters is how they are presented: a logo looks good on white almost every time. It gets interesting on the delivery van, on a letterhead and as a tiny profile picture.
Does our existing logo still work, or does it need replacing?
Often a careful revision is enough – starting over costs recognition. An established mark has a value that is not measured in design quality. If it has technical flaws but is well known, sharpening it is usually wiser than replacing it.
We will tell you honestly which category yours falls into. A redesign is the bigger commission for us – and we still sometimes advise against it.
How do we know whether colours and type are accessible?
By the calculated contrast ratio: 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text from 18 pt and for graphics and controls. That is not a matter of taste but a formula – the demo further up this page shows it on real colour values. We check every combination before it is taken into the brand system.
The effort is small, whereas fixing it later is expensive: changing a colour after print, website and signage have been produced means doing all of it again.

Source: W3C: WCAG 2.2 – Contrast (Minimum)

Visual identity overdue?

Show us what you work with today. We will tell you honestly whether a revision is enough or a fresh start makes sense – and what would be more urgent.

Arrange a call

Terms related to this service

Technical terms that appear on this page – explained in one sentence in our glossary.

All terms in the glossary →