Making a serious business look serious

Marula's track record was the strongest thing about them and it appeared nowhere a prospective client would see it. The site opened with a photograph of a boardroom and three paragraphs about partnership and trust, which is what every firm in Sandton says. The performance history, the sector expertise and the names of the people who had run it for fifteen years were four clicks in.

The strategy took about a page to write. Lead with the evidence. Everything else is decoration.

Financial services is a category that lives on paper. A fund fact sheet, a quarterly report, a mandate letter, a pitch document: that is where a client actually meets the brand, and most identities in the sector fall apart the moment they hit a data table.

So the system was designed from the table outwards. A typographic scale that holds at eight point in a footnote, a set of rules for figures that keeps columns aligned, and a two colour palette that survives being photocopied. The website was drawn from the same rules rather than the other way round, which is why the quarterly report and the home page look like the same company.

Marula has an internal marketing team of one, and a report to produce every quarter. A brand that needs a designer to apply it would have lasted six months. The guidelines run forty pages, most of it worked examples rather than rules, and the report template does the arithmetic on its own margins so nobody has to remember what the grid was.