Branding # Logo Design # Brand Guidelines
Dissident Automotive makes bolt-on carbon fibre parts for the Porsche 911 and 718, from front lips and diffusers to ducktails and engine covers. Every part is hand built in Peterborough, alongside sister company AGN Composites, and most are shipped to owners abroad. We created the Dissident brand in 2023, from the logo and guidelines to its first magazine ads.
At the start of 2023, Dissident was a name and a plan. The people behind AGN Composites, the Peterborough carbon fibre firm whose website we'd built in 2021, had seen a gap for high-quality carbon parts for premium cars and set up a new company to make them. They'd picked the name themselves: Dissident, for standing apart and going against the grain. What they didn't have yet was anything to put it on.
It started as a request for a logo, and it grew from there. The brand would have to work everywhere at once: on the website that was coming next, on social media and in print. Dissident wanted to become the name in carbon fibre parts for Porsches, with a brand as sharp as the parts they make by hand.
The brand also had to come with rules a small team could follow on its own, so it would look the same wherever they used it.
Sam designed the brand and started with three moodboards on 4 January 2023. Dissident picked a direction, preliminary guidelines followed on 27 January, and the final logo pack was ready on 16 March, ten weeks after the first moodboards.
The logo comes in two parts. The D icon is one geometric shape, simple enough to work as a stamp, a profile picture or a favicon. The wordmark spells out DISSIDENT in heavy capitals, with the icon standing in for the second D, so people learn the shape and the name together. Once they know it, the D can carry the brand by itself.
Black and white do most of the work, which keeps the brand plain enough to let the carbon and the cars stand out. Scarlet is the only accent, kept for whatever needs to catch the eye, and a smoky grey comes in only when it's needed. Headings are set in Stolzl, a strong modern typeface that reads well in print and on screen, with Switzer for body copy.
Everything went into a 25-page brand guide: the smallest the logo can go, the space around it, the ways not to use it, where it sits on a page, which colours can go together, how to set type, how the logo moves and how to shoot the cars. The handover pack had the logo files in black and white, profile pictures and headers for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, social post templates and a letterhead.
In July 2023 the brand went into print for the first time. We designed four full-page ads for Porsche Post, the Porsche Club GB magazine, and turned them round to a same-day print deadline. The same brand now carries Dissident's website and online shop, which we built next.
Their brand was handed over in March 2023, and they still use it today.
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