Co-working / Commercial Property
Work+Co
Naming, brand strategy, and full identity for a co-working concept with a David-vs-Goliath brief.
- My role
- Brand lead — naming, strategy, identity, guidelines
The brief
A co-working concept in council-owned buildings outside London, competing for attention against WeWork-era brands with far bigger budgets. Being outside London read as a weakness. The job was to make it the selling point, starting with a name that didn't exist yet.
What I did
- Ran the naming process — Worko-Loco, MoreCo, Worko-Pad, FlexiCo — before landing on work+co, where the ampersand holds the tension between independent and shared
- Built the anti-London positioning and wrote the taglines it runs on: 'Empires are not built in London alone', 'Build your empire without the commute'
- Explored the mark widely — ampersand-in-box, hexagon, beehive, human figure, serif and bold variants — before landing the boxed 'w' lockup
- Designed a blue-led palette aimed at trustworthy rather than corporate
- Applied the identity across stationery, signage, mugs, business cards, bus-stop advertising and interior mockups
- Wrote and designed 22 pages of brand guidelines in a Canva-compatible format, so the client could apply the brand themselves rather than paying an agency for every touchpoint
How it went
Work+Co converts council-owned buildings outside London into shared workspaces for freelancers, remote workers, and small businesses. The brief was clear: build a brand that made a virtue of not being London — affordable, local, and genuinely useful. I took the project from naming through to a complete 22-page brand guidelines document.
The naming process was worth documenting on its own. We worked through Worko-Loco, MoreCo, Worko-Pad, FlexiCo before landing on work+co — a name that held the tension between individual and community, between independence and shared space. The ampersand did a lot of work.
The logo exploration was extensive: ampersand-in-box, hexagon, beehive, a human figure, serif and bold variants. What came out was a clean, confident mark — a boxed lockup with the 'w' as the primary element — applied across stationery, signage, mugs, business cards, bus-stop advertising, and interior mockups. The palette was a blue-led system that felt trustworthy without being corporate.
The strategy leaned hard into the anti-London angle — taglines like 'Empires are not built in London alone' and 'Build your empire without the commute' — and the brand guidelines were built to carry that tone consistently. All 22 pages, documented in a Canva-compatible format so the client could apply it themselves without needing an agency for every touchpoint.
The spaces never opened. The brand was finished and the client had everything needed to launch, and the venture didn't get there. I'm including it because the naming and identity work is some of the best I've done, and because a portfolio that only shows the ones that landed isn't telling you much.