Gladman brand refresh

The brief

In October 2025 Gladman asked for a website: professional, clean, modern, and able to speak to the next generation.

Gladman promote strategic land through the planning system, which means convincing two audiences that want opposite things. Landowners deciding whether to trust a promoter with their field, and planning authorities deciding whether to grant permission on it. A mark that looks approximate is a problem on both counts.

The approach

Before designing a page we redrew the mark they had, and it did not survive being redrawn. The squares were off-kilter, the G inside was a scripty punch-out, and the whole thing read old and stuffy for a business that sells itself on precision. You cannot build a precise website on an imprecise mark, so the brand came first.

Three routes in December. A simple evolution that kept the square grid and straightened it. A mark drawn from land registry plans and the boundary lines Gladman work with every day. And a north arrow built into the A of the wordmark, the symbol every planning drawing carries. They chose the boundaries, the only route drawn from the business’s own documents. The new G is built from those plan lines, and the wordmark nods back to one detail of the old one, the slice off the A.

Then the system underneath it. Twenty-one pages of guidelines, now at version 1.2: the colours, the supporting graphic and the type rules. Epilogue everywhere it can be installed, Segoe UI inside Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Nobody in a planning department is installing a font to send a letter, and a layout that breaks is worse than one that is slightly off-brand.

What was done

The mark, the twenty-one page system, and the print it goes on: letterheads, business cards set from their own staff list, the compliments slip, the drawing block and the Have your say leaflet for public consultations.

Gladman signed a support contract in June 2026, and we have looked after the brand since. In September the guidelines went online, which puts the rules where the people applying them already are, and the LinkedIn templates went with them so the team can post without the brand drifting.