Giving an established design studio more room to show what it can do

Creative Mind Concepts had already built the kind of business their brand wasn’t showing.

Nick, CMC’s Creative Director and Partner, is a designer himself and has spent years working with brands like Airbnb. They weren’t looking for someone to simply make things look better. They needed an outside perspective to help make sense of their own brand and where the studio was headed.

CMC had more than a decade of experience, a strong reputation and an exclusive design partnership with Ingage, but a lot of that growth had happened within the home improvement industry and they were ready to reach beyond it.

The challenge was making that shift without downplaying what had already made them successful. Ingage still needed to be an important part of the story, just not the whole story. The new brand had to feel credible to the clients who already knew CMC while making sense to a much broader audience too.

CMC does a lot, and not always in the same way. One project might call for presentation design, another UI + UX, strategy, technology, or a mix of all of it.

There was another layer to think about too: a lot of CMC’s work lives inside other people’s brands. Their own identity needed enough personality to feel recognizable, without competing with whatever client work it happened to sit beside.

So we kept the system intentionally simple. Strong typography, a restrained palette and a few more playful details give CMC its own presence without asking to be the loudest thing in the room.

Their old identity leaned on a literal brain-and-lightbulb symbol. We moved away from that completely, creating a more abstract mark that feels recognizable without trying to explain what “creative” looks like. From there, the typography, colour and wider visual system do more of the work in giving the brand its character.

CMC didn’t need a big website. They needed the right information, in the right order.

For visitors coming through Ingage or referrals, the site needed to reinforce a reputation that was already there and make getting in touch easy. For people discovering CMC for the first time, it needed to do a little more: explain what kind of studio they are, show the range behind the work and give them a reason to start a conversation.

We built the site as a custom one-page experience around that journey. Instead of filling it with individual service pages, we focused on the parts that help someone understand CMC: what they do, how they think, the two very different people leading the studio, and the clients and partners who already trust them.

The simplicity is part of the strategy. There’s enough there to understand why CMC is different, without making someone work through a whole website before they’re ready to talk.

Since launching, CMC has seen a noticeable shift. Reactions from clients and partners have been overwhelmingly positive, and one key partner has already brought CMC new lines of business since the rebrand.

The website has had a chance to prove its flexibility too. When CMC expanded its offering with Custom Experiences a year later, they came back to add a dedicated page. Because the site was built to grow beyond its original one-page structure, the new offering became part of the existing experience without having to rethink everything around it.