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 through Worko-Loco, MoreCo, Worko-Pad and 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 that feels trustworthy without feeling 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 without paying an agency every time
How it went
Work+Co converts council-owned buildings outside London into shared workspaces for freelancers, remote workers and small businesses. The brief was to build a brand that made a virtue of being outside London: affordable, local and useful. I took the project from naming through to a complete 22-page brand guidelines document.
The naming process is worth showing on its own. We worked through Worko-Loco, MoreCo, Worko-Pad and FlexiCo before landing on work+co, a name that holds the tension between individual and community, independence and shared space. The ampersand does a lot of work.
The logo exploration went wide: ampersand-in-box, hexagon, beehive, a human figure, serif and bold variants. The final mark is a clean boxed lockup with the 'w' as the main element, applied across stationery, signage, mugs, business cards, bus-stop advertising and interior mockups. The blue-led palette feels trustworthy without feeling corporate.
The strategy leaned hard into the anti-London angle, with taglines like 'Empires are not built in London alone' and 'Build your empire without the commute'. The 22 pages of brand guidelines carry that tone through, in a Canva-compatible format so the client could apply the brand themselves without needing an agency every time.
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.