Not to lead. Not to explain. To hold space.
Twenty years of expertise and nothing to show a prospect is a common place to be stuck.
Identity system
The mark is a sun rendered as a fingerprint, organic lines that never quite close. Thought in motion, not a fixed symbol standing still.
Set on deep navy rather than white, so the gold has somewhere to glow instead of just sitting flat on the page.
Translating strategy into presence.
Jonathan's work spans leadership teams, founders and organisations navigating complexity. Twenty years advising brands from British Airways to Audi to Tesco, most of it spent making other people's substance visible rather than his own.
The challenge was expression without simplification. Depth without becoming academic, warmth without becoming soft, confidence without turning insight into spectacle. The real risk was over-design, because anything trying to impress would have undermined the work it was meant to support.
Expression
A restrained serif wordmark, a single accent colour, and enough negative space that the identity never has to raise its voice to be noticed.
Digital presence
A single page carrying twenty years of brand strategy work without turning into a portfolio dump: British Airways, Audi, Tesco, Sennheiser and Openpay, all sat inside the same navy-and-gold system as everything else Big Yellow Sun touches.
"Clouds are fluffy. Brands shouldn't be." The line that opens the site is also the whole brief in one sentence.
Applications
A marbled gold-on-navy texture built to travel: pitch deck covers, screen presentations, print collateral. The same mark and the same restraint, wherever it lands.
"He listened, was always constructive, and produced great results."
Jonathan Staines, Big Yellow Sun For you
Years of expertise and nothing to show for it?
This is the most common place to be stuck, and it’s not a problem with the work. It’s that nothing exists to represent the work when you’re not in the room to explain it.
Identity and website together, usually. It’s a shorter project than most people expect.