Most organisations can commission a great brand. Few can operationalise one.

I make brands work everywhere they’re used, in every office, every template and every document produced under deadline.

The Brand System Pulse is twelve questions and takes about four minutes.

Who controls what leaves the building?

Every professional services firm has brand guidelines, and almost none has anything underneath them that controls what actually goes out. The guidelines are a PDF nobody opens. Templates get copied instead of pulled. The person who knows which logo file is current is one resignation from taking that knowledge with them. Nobody can tell you which version of the disclaimer is on the deck that left the building this morning.

That held while a few dozen people produced client documents and somebody was always checking. It stops holding when every fee earner has an AI tool producing client-facing material at volume, and the review layer is the size it was two years ago.

I build the layer of control underneath the brand.

That means rules structured so software can follow them, one authoritative source for colour, type and layout, templates that survive being populated automatically, and named sign-off over what reaches a client.

I specify it so IT will accept it, because I have spent years on the other side of that conversation. Then I hand it over. The measure of the work is whether your team is running it themselves a year later.

Where to start

Each step produces the evidence for the next. Most firms start with the Pulse.

Brand System Pulse

Twelve questions online, about four minutes, free. A first reading of where your brand system stands across seven domains, from guideline machine-readability to team capability.
Take the pulse
Brand system diagnostic

Sixty minutes with me, at your offices or on screen. The same seven domains, placed at a stage during the session, and a written report within 24 hours on where you are and what I would fix first.
Audit

Ten working days inside your systems. Templates tested to the point of failure, and assets and tokens traced across Figma, Office, web and the DAM. You get the evidence behind every finding and a costed roadmap for fixing them.
Build

The system itself: component library, templates, tooling and rollout with guidelines, training and comms. This includes agent-ready brand identity, brand rules structured so AI output comes out on-brand first time, and a pitch and bid document system your team can assemble under deadline.
Retained

Monthly ownership of the system once it is live. Adoption monitoring, quarterly improvement cycles, training and AI tooling maintenance, so the system keeps pace with how your firm actually works.
On-brand at Speed

AI training for in-house design teams, run alongside any of the steps above. A single session or a three-session programme, worked on your own brand assets, so your team gets on-brand output from the tools it already has. Each programme ends with a written follow-up on what came up and what to fix first.

Who I work with

Legal, wider professional services, financial services and insurance. These sectors share the conditions that create the problem: partnership or matrix structures where senior people override brand decisions, offices producing their own local work, heavy document and pitch output, regulatory limits on what can be said, and marketing teams that are small against the number of people producing branded material. A brand system that survives a law firm survives an insurer.

Marketing and brandI give firms control over their client-facing material, now that most of it is generated rather than designed.
OperationsI give firms control over what leaves the building, without adding people to check it.
In-house creativeI build the system that gives your team control over what everyone else produces, so you stop spending half the week correcting it.
Marketing and MBD operationsI make the templates and the rules work properly so requests stop coming back.
DigitalI turn brand rules into structured assets with one authoritative source, which is where the control actually sits now.
Bids and pitchesI build a bid and pitch document system your team can assemble under deadline without losing format marks.

Why consistency matters

A client cannot try a professional services firm before they buy. Every document they receive is evidence for or against what they expect. Consistency turns that material into recognition, and recognition is what puts a firm on the shortlist.

95%
of the people receiving your material today are not buying. Companies change their principal law firm or bank roughly once every five years, so most of what you send is building a memory for a decision that comes later.
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the 95-5 rule
32
percentage points faster revenue growth for companies in the top quartile of the McKinsey Design Index. The quartiles below the top showed little difference between them. The market paid only for design that stood out.
McKinsey, The Business Value of Design, 2018

Michael Dunn

I spent 14 years at Norton Rose Fulbright, most recently as Global Design Director, leading brand and design infrastructure across more than 50 offices. That included a firm-wide presentations design system built from the ground up in PowerPoint, with more than 100 slide layouts, rolled out with the training and guidelines that got people outside the design team using it properly.

My design career runs to 28 years across five organisations. I set up mykd to do the same work for other firms. I design and build the system, and your team or my associates produce the volume.

Portfolio and case studies