Case studies — Identity study
A trade logo carrying three ideas at once, rebuilt around one. The HP monogram stays, the tap goes, and the water drop does the explaining — so the mark still reads on a van door, a badge and a 20mm invoice header.
The brief
The original was not a bad idea badly drawn. It was three good ideas competing for the same small space: a bold HP monogram, a tap with a length of pipe, and a water drop — all pushed inside a circle with the name underneath.
Every one of those elements is trying to say “plumber”, so none of them gets room to say it properly. Shrink the mark to the size it actually gets used at — a work polo, a Facebook profile picture, the corner of a quote — and the tap turns to mush while the letters lose their shape. The job was to decide which single idea carries the brand, then build everything else around it.
Each change solves a practical problem in the original mark. Nothing was altered just to make the logo look different.
The tap and the pipe are gone. The water drop stays, because it is the simplest shape that says “plumbing” and the only one that still reads at 20mm. Removing the tap frees up the space the monogram needed to be the thing you notice first.
Rather than sitting alongside the letters as a fourth element, the drop now hangs off the tail of the P and finishes the letterform. One shape, two meanings: it is part of the monogram and it is the plumbing cue. That is what makes a mark feel designed rather than assembled.
In the original the H and P sat next to each other and overlapped by accident. They are now drawn as one unit — matched weights, a shared centre line, deliberate joins — so the monogram holds together as a single silhouette instead of two letters fighting for the middle.
The solid ring squeezed the artwork and thickened up whenever the logo was reduced. Breaking the circle turns it from a box into a frame: it still gives the mark a badge shape for stamps, buttons and social avatars, but the letters can now breathe inside it.
HARDY and PLUMBING are now properly related — the name set heavy and wide, the service line spaced out beneath it and held between two short rules. There is one obvious reading order: symbol, name, trade. The italic slant was dropped so the name lines up square with vehicle panels and sign boards.
Two flat colours, no gradients, no thin details that fill in. It cuts cleanly as vinyl, embroiders without losing the drop, prints in one colour for a rubber stamp, and reverses out white on a navy work jacket.
The rebuilt mark sets a repeatable visual language: two defined blues, a confident wordmark and a monogram that can stand on its own wherever the full logo will not fit.
The test of a trade logo is not the screen it was drawn on. These are the two places it does most of its work — handed across a doorstep, and parked outside a job for a day.
The mark carries the front on its own, with no contact detail competing for attention. Everything a customer needs to actually ring up goes on the navy reverse, in reading order: name, number, area, services, email.
Signwriting is where the rebuild pays off: two flat colours cut cleanly as vinyl, and the horizontal lockup fills the panel without the drop or the letters closing up. The number stays the biggest thing after the name, because that is what people read from behind.
Nobody who already knows Hardy Plumbing has to relearn anything — it is still the blue HP with a water drop. What changed is that the mark now survives being made small, made single-colour and made out of vinyl, which is where a trade logo spends most of its working life.
Every project here follows the same principle: keep what customers already recognise, rebuild what is holding it back. See all case studies →
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