Loomio
Fri 11 Jul 2025 8:38AM

Branding design – how you did it - Worker Coops who specialise

NF Nicholas Frealand Public Seen by 110

Dear all,

Our worker coop start up is on the verge of legally incorporating as a company limited by guarantee, having completed our business plan and decided upon a trading name: 'Common Ground Therapy'.

We are currently brainstorming branding design in terms of needing a logo, colour scheme, fonts/typography and using all of that to create a website.

If anyone would be willing to share their experience of branding creation, that would be really useful, particularly if there’s a process for creating branding that you would recommend or warn against.

If you know of anyone or any group within the worker coop, or cooperative world, that specialises in helping create branding, please do refer us or recommend – if they offer ‘solidarity rates’ for a low-income, fellow-coop, start up, even better.

Also if anyone knows about, or knows someone who knows about trademarking and/or using multiple Domain names to protect one’s brand, that would be helpful - I wonder how often or how many worker coops have trademarked their trading names or taken out Domain names additional to their original one? - any advice or signposting greatly appreciated!

Thanks for reading,

Nicholas

AA

adrian ashton Fri 11 Jul 2025 9:12AM

these canvas prompts may be useful as part of your progressing this, Nicholas (but please feel free to delete/ignore if not...)

NF

Nicholas Frealand Fri 11 Jul 2025 10:00AM

@adrian ashton 

Thanks Adrian, that is definitely helpful.

DCM

Debbie Clarke (Unicorn, Mcr) Fri 11 Jul 2025 9:30AM

At Unicorn we have been working with Paper Rhino (small design co-op in Peterborough) for years...they've refreshed our logo, done our website, illustration, newsletter design and more. They are really great and VERY affordable. They'd do a great job. https://paperrhino.co.uk/

Re. trademarking, we operated for over 25 years without trademarking, but did do it recently after a weird bogus sort of sham website got set up with a similar name to ours. It was quite a time consuming job as the application process is not designed for the layman (you can pay a solicitor to do it for you), but we managed it with help from CITMA who offer some free advice, they were great actually: https://www.citma.org.uk/trade-marks-ip/need-advice/free-advice-clinics.html

My understanding is that you have a lot of protection in law anyway, once you start trading under a certain name and brand, and we were fine for decades, but CITMA can help if you decide you do want to go down this route.

NF

Nicholas Frealand Fri 11 Jul 2025 10:03AM

@Debbie Clarke (Unicorn, Mcr) 

Thank you Debbie, their portfolio and the Unicorn website are definitely impressive so they look like a great option for us.

I will definitely do a CITMA advice clinic - great that they can offer it for free.