Digeo Collective: a rebrand that changed the company name

Digeo had been making films for educational publishers for years and were good at it. The problem was that clients were buying Emily and Diarmuid rather than a company, and most of the work came through one publisher. We ran the workshop, wrote the strategy, and the answer changed the company name.

The outcome

A brand workshop, a written strategy, five rounds of concept and development work, a complete visual identity and a 51 page guideline system covering strategy, logos, colour, typography, components and application. Alongside it a logo pack of 75 files, business cards, a rebuilt LinkedIn page and the social campaign that announced the change. The company went to market in September 2026 as Digeo Collective.

The challenge

Digeo was a core team of five plus a network of freelancers, working mostly for one large ELT publisher. That is a good business and a fragile one. What came out of the workshop was a brief to stop looking like two people with a camera and start looking like a company a national charity or a university would hand a large project to.

We want clients to see Digeo as a brand, not just us as individuals.

Emily, recorded in the brand strategy we wrote up from the January 2025 workshop. Every decision after that line was in service of it.

There was a second constraint and it was sharper. The words the team wanted to avoid were safe, small and niche. Reliability was their strongest asset and also the thing holding them back, because reliable is what you say about a supplier rather than a partner. The brand had to hold both at once: dependable enough to trust with a multi year course, interesting enough to be picked over a bigger agency.

Our approach

Change the name. Productions describes what they used to be, which is a small team that shoots films. The actual business is a core of five with a wider network of directors, animators, sound designers and editors pulled in per project. Collective says that out loud, and it answers the Emily and Diarmuid problem in one word, because a collective is by definition bigger than its founders. The change happened inside the concept work: the first three rounds are branded Digeo Productions, the last two are Digeo Collective.

Show five routes, not one. April 2025, five genuinely different directions: a corrected version of the existing slanted D, a D with a camera lens in its counter, an expressive type route with pixel detailing, a radial spark D, and a fully custom logotype built out of viewfinder framing. Every one of them still carried the Digeo Productions wordmark, which is worth looking at now, because it is the last time the old name appears on anything.

Then try to break the winner. The client picked the radial D. Instead of taking that and starting to refine, we came back in June with three alternatives built to beat it: a looser mark with deliberately irregular rays, a version with the stem removed so only the arc survived, and a flowing concentric route with a gradient. The original held. That is a better result than agreeing first time, because the client now knows exactly what they turned down and why.

Two colours to carry it, three to support. Periwinkle and lime do the work, on charcoal, with mist as the neutral. Electric blue, olive and smoke sit behind them for range. Every colour is documented with hex, CMYK and RGB plus a four step tint ramp, and the guidelines carry an accessibility page pairing only the combinations that actually hold up, because a palette this bright will otherwise end up as lime text on mist.

Three typefaces with three clear jobs. Host Grotesk for headlines, DM Sans for body copy, both free from Google Fonts so nothing sits behind a licence somebody has to remember to renew. Felttip Roman is the third, a handwriting face held back for one or two words at a time. It is the reason the brand can be serious about learning and still sound like it is enjoying itself.

Keep the hand in it. The system carries a set of drawn doodles, scribble backgrounds and marker underlines. They are not decoration. A lot of Digeo work is made for children, and a brand built entirely from geometry has nothing to offer a page about a primary school film. The rule is that the scribble sits behind, at contrast, and never competes with what is in front of it.

The brand in use

The guidelines close on application, because a brand this restrained lives or dies on execution. Website, stationery, billboard, signage, flyer, social and apparel, each with a worked example rather than a paragraph describing one.

What it does for Digeo Collective

A company that reads as a company. The name now explains the model, so the network of specialists is a selling point rather than something to explain away. The strategy gives the team a straight answer on who they are for and, just as usefully, which words to stay away from. And the identity is documented tightly enough that Digeo can put a proposal in front of a publisher, a charity and a university in the same week and look like the same firm to all three.

Credits

• Client: Digeo Collective, formerly Digeo Productions
• Studio: Alchemy
• Delivered: brand workshop, brand strategy, five rounds of concept and development work, brand refinements, 51 page brand guidelines, 75 file logo pack, business cards, LinkedIn page rebuild, launch social campaign
• Typefaces: Host Grotesk and DM Sans via Google Fonts, Felttip Roman via Adobe Fonts
• Primary palette: Periwinkle #B5CFFC, Charcoal #1F1F1F, Lime #E3FA83, Mist #F7F7F7
• Secondary palette: Electric #214ECF, Olive #5E6725, Smoke #EDEDE8
• Timeline: brand workshop January 2025, guidelines delivered August 2026, brand launched September 2026