A full brand system and two complete website directions for an accounting firm

The situation

Accounting firms all look the same, and they look that way on purpose. The category signals safety, which means every firm ends up navy, serif and interchangeable.

Catalyst needed to signal something different: tax as strategy rather than tax as filing. That is a genuinely different service and it was being sold with the same visual language as everyone else.

What we built

Positioning first, because the whole identity hangs off the distinction between filing and strategy. Then a twenty page brand system with a navy, royal, tan and cream palette that sits in the category without disappearing into it, and a logo component set with every format and colour as a variant.

The mark animates as falling dominoes, which is the catalyst idea made literal. Getting it to feel like a chain reaction rather than a sequence of moving rectangles took finding the one corner the whole mark could pivot from.

Then two complete websites, not two mockups. A light editorial direction and a dark premium direction, both fully built, so the choice could be made by clicking through the real thing.

Why it works

Building both directions cost less than the usual round of static concepts, revisions and reinterpretation, because the production model makes a second version cheap. That changes what you can offer a client. Instead of asking them to imagine a site from a flat comp, you hand them two working ones and let them decide.

This is an in-house venture rather than an outside client engagement, which is why we can show the whole process rather than a selected slice of it.