Athena Security Solutions: a brand refresh, animated logo and website for high-end security

Athena Security Solutions is a high-end, London-based security firm founded by Lee Horton in 2006. They handle close protection, corporate and event security, surveillance and intelligence, and they work all over the world. We refreshed the brand end to end: a sharper identity, a new positioning and messaging system, an animated owl logo, and a website that finally looks the way Athena operates.

The outcome

Athena had built a serious business. A highly vetted, genuinely diverse team, global reach, blue-chip clients. The brand didn’t say any of it. The identity was soft, the messaging was scattered, and the website tried to explain everything at once. From the outside, one of London’s premier security firms could look like one of the thousand it is nothing like.

We gave Athena a brand that matches the operation.

Delivered:

A brand discovery and strategy session that set the positioning, audiences and tone of voice

A verbal identity: mission and positioning statements, a slogan, and clear language rules

A refreshed visual identity: a geometric wordmark, owl icon, a darker navy-and-orange palette and Inter typography

An animated logo (the owl settling into the mark) for the website, social and the podcast

A full brand guidelines document, plus social, podcast and ready-to-use Canva templates for the in-house team

A simplified, SEO-focused website built around the new identity

The result is a brand that reads as premium and discreet at a glance, and a website that turns ‘who are these people’ into a conversation.

The challenge

Athena’s problem was never capability. It was legibility. Three things made the brief hard.

A brand that undersold the business. The old identity leaned on a soft, light-blue, generic ‘security’ look. It did nothing to separate Athena from the roughly thousand commodity firms it is nothing like, the ones the team call “cookie cutter.” The brand had to carry Athena’s confidence about its own worth.

“Athena know they’re expensive, and worth it.”

A service that is broad and, in places, deliberately quiet. Athena’s work runs from uniformed close protection to discreet surveillance, open-source intelligence and private investigation, with intelligence sitting under all of it. We had to describe something wide-ranging, and partly unsayable, in a way that invites the right enquiry without raising more questions than it answers.

Two fixed points. The name and the owl were non-negotiable: Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and the owl that keeps watch for her. The refresh had to build on that equity rather than replace it, and make the owl feel unmistakably Athena’s, not the generic owl every security firm reaches for.

Our approach

We started with a brand discovery session. The point was less about inventing a brand and more about pulling a clear, repeatable strategy out of the team’s heads and the way the business really works.

It set the foundations.

Positioning built on the gap Athena fills. Not cheaper, not bigger. Bespoke. Every brief is assessed and tailored, backed by a vetted, diverse team and real technology, with honesty and discretion as operating values rather than claims.

Intelligence as the through-line. Rather than lead with ‘security’, a word that undersells a firm like this, we led with intelligence, the capability that sits beneath every service.

A slogan that holds it in three words. Short, confident, easy to repeat, and built to flex: the brand shifts ‘Discreet’ in colour to show the very skill the word names.

Global. Discreet. Intelligence.

The owl, sharpened. We kept Athena and her owl and made them modern: a clean, geometric ATHENA wordmark, and an owl the identity can fly into. Wisdom and vigilance, brought up to date instead of thrown away.

A darker, more sophisticated palette. Out with the light blue; in with Athena Navy, Mist Grey and a bold Athena Orange, with electric and sky blues held back for the brand’s grain gradients. All of it set in Inter, precise and quietly confident.

The animated logo

The centrepiece is the logo in motion. An owl banks out of the dark and settles into the ATHENA wordmark, vigilance made literal, over the brand’s orange-and-blue grain. It runs as the hero of the website, and as a scroll-stopping asset across social and the podcast.

It does something a static mark can’t. In a sector full of padlocks and high-vis, a real owl moving through low light says premium, alert and quietly covert in a few seconds, before a single word is read.

You can watch Athena’s animated logo, along with more of our motion work, in our animated logos playlist on YouTube.

The same identity carries all the way through the site. The slogan sits over the owl, the mission statement leads, and a service structure that used to overwhelm is now five clear routes: Personal & Family Protection, Corporate & Organisational Security, Risk Assessments, Martyn’s Law, and Intelligence & Investigation.

What it does for Athena

Athena now looks like what it is: a high-end, intelligence-led security firm that works globally and does things properly. The identity carries the confidence the team always had, the slogan says it in three words, and the owl that stands for wisdom and vigilance finally moves. One discovery session set the direction, and the strategy, identity, animated logo and website all keep faith with it.