Work+Co

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.