How I Helped This Consulting Firm Fix Its Brand Misalignment
Karlan Group, a safety and HR consulting firm, struggled with brand inconsistency after redesigning its logo three times in one year. The issue was not preference, but misalignment. The logo failed to reflect the firm’s veteran-led leadership, dual expertise, and lacked scalability as a brand system. I led a full redesign, retaining the existing colors while rethinking structure and meaning. The final logo uses layered symbolism, negative space, and motion to communicate guidance, leadership, and a people-first philosophy, creating a cohesive, scalable brand identity.
Here’s how it started.
Last month I was approach by the founder of Karlan Group, a consulting firm with dual expertise, safety consulting and human resource. Initially he hired 4 designers including me for a paid test to see who is the best fit, long story cut short, he ended up hiring me, he mentioned that I surprised him in a good way, haha.
But, how did it all start?
What was the problem he had with his consulting firm’s brand?
Prior to the test project, he mentioned that he had redesigned his logo 3 times in one year alone, I was perplexed and asked my self, “what could the problem be”
Knowing that a logo is not about a person’s like or dislike but about the brand’s message, nevertheless it’s important for the founder to be sold on the logo.
It was after he filled out my discovery form and while I was analyzing his current firm’s logo that I noticed a lot of disconnect between what the logo projects and what the brand stands for, I also saw some issues with the geometry and scalability which I pointed out to him.
It was not clear how the current logo could be expanded into a brand system, so these were the issues I was brought in to solve.
What exactly were we looking to solve?
So the objective of the project was to create a unified brand design that reflects that his brand is veteran-led without being too obvious and also highlight the dual expertise of his consulting firm.
The birth of the logo
I did something quite different from what I’ll normally do when carrying out a brand refresh, because the current logo did not reflect the brand, I did not do a refresh but a redesign, however we retained the current brand colours as those were already aligned.
During the exploration stage, I closely studied various brands in his niche while making a ton of sketches, and this is the funny part, I did not get a perfect sketch on paper until after digitization then I moved to further exploration digitally.
Usually I try to sketch every idea by hand down to the last detail, of course I’m an artist too. This just shows me that success isn’t always a linear path.
Final Logo
The logo design solution we settled for had four meanings,
it featured 2 major elements reflecting the dual expertise of Karlan Group,
it also had a negative space geometric human figure which gives a nod to the group’s people-forward philosophy, additionally the logo took the shape of a bookmark,
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You may ask, what has a bookmark to do with a Consulting firm?, well..
Abstractly, a bookmark can signify direction and guidance. It points to where you are, where you have been, and where you will continue, representing intentional progress rather than aimless movement.
Lastly, the logo resembles a flag, which symbolizes leadership, service, and authority, drawing from its deep association with military duty and collective purpose. In this context, it subtly honors the founder’s veteran background while reinforcing values of discipline, direction, and earned leadership within the niche, without relying on literal military references.
Extending the logo to other visual assets wasn’t much of a hassle as I already considered that before refining the logo for presentation, I already thought of how that’ll play in presentation slides, report designs, stationery designs etc. And I felt like everything just fell into place. during this process I brought in some brand messaging style sample I had worked on earlier.
While putting the final pieces together we figured out that the logo needs to move, there has to be motion, so we said…
(let their be motion!, and there was motion)
not literally tho, XD
I thought how this logo design can further enhance the brand’s message so I crafted this animation story board for the clients approval after which I collaborated with Carl Osimiri for the final animation and that king of animation came up with this.
In all, the client was very much satisfied and me even more satisfied because consulting firms deserve more dynamic brand identities that work.
