Journal
Keep the wordmark.
Marlow & Kite’s logotype was drawn by hand in 1984. Keeping it was the whole job; replacing it would have been the easy one.
- Published
- 12 March 2026
- Written by
- Milo Vance
- Filed under
- Identity
- Read
- Six minutes
The bindery on Clerkenwell Road has been in one family since 1953 and in one typeface since 1984, when Priya Marlow’s grandfather paid a lettering artist forty pounds to draw the name on a trade card. It has been stamped into every cover the workshop has bound ever since. When the brief reached us it was about none of that: the trade counter shut at five, two thirds of the enquiries arrived after ten at night, and the website took payment by emailing an invoice the following morning.
The instinct is to redraw everything
A studio that is paid to make things has an obvious bias, and the honest version of it is this: a new mark is easier to present, easier to justify and much easier to charge for. It also lets us skip the part of the job where we have to work out what the old one was doing right. Nobody commissions a rebrand hoping the answer is that most of it should stay.
So we started by drawing the counter-argument. We set the 1984 logotype beside four replacements of our own and put all five in front of eleven customers who had spent more than £400 with the bindery in the previous year. Nobody chose ours. Two people described the original as “the one my ledger has on it”, which is not brand recall, it is ownership.
“A mark that has survived forty-one years has already won an argument we were not in the room for.”
What changed instead
We redrew the logotype rather than replacing it: the same letterforms, cut as outlines from a 600 dpi scan of a 1991 die stamp, with the spacing corrected and the ampersand rebuilt where three decades of photocopying had eaten it. Set at 14px on a phone it now holds together, which the traced version we were given never did.
Everything around it is new. A second type system carries the product copy so the logotype never has to do a job it was not drawn for. The packaging survives a courier rather than a counter. And the shop takes money at midnight, which is when the people who love this bindery are awake.
The number it moved
- Of revenue online, from 12%
- 61%
- Average order value
- 2.4×
- Wordmark redrawn, not replaced
- 1984
None of that is an argument for keeping every old mark. Most of them are old rather than good, and the test is whether anyone outside the company would notice it going. Ask eleven customers. If they shrug, draw something better.