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Making Credibility Contemporary
A story at the intersection of legacy and relevance.
Good design doesn't change who you are. It clarifies how you're seen.
I didn’t come across this project through a portfolio enquiry or a cold email. It came through a conversation with someone from a former chapter of my life, my time in the chartered accountancy world. A friend from those years, now a partner at a reputed Chartered Accountancy firm, SRBR & Associates LLP, reached out with a simple request: Help us redesign our firm profile.
SRBR is a Chartered Accountancy firm with over four decades of experience, deep technical expertise, and a reputation built on rigour and trust. When reaching out to me, they weren’t trying to reinvent themselves, and they certainly weren’t struggling to define who they were. What they were looking for was something more subtle, and perhaps more difficult: a way to appear as relevant and vibrant as the contemporary businesses they worked with, without losing the depth of their legacy. That need for balance became the brief for this project.
Their firm profile, the document they shared with prospective clients, no longer reflected the confidence and scale of the work they were doing. The information was all there, but it felt dense, dated, and harder to engage with than it needed to be.
They were looking for someone who could design, yes, but also understand their work without having it explained from scratch. That shared context mattered. It allowed us to move quickly past surface-level decisions and focus on what really needed attention.
Where the work began
Early conversations made one thing clear: this was not about making the firm look trendy, louder, or more expressive than it needed to be. The work lay in restraint, in knowing what to keep steady, what to gently refine, and where a fresh perspective could bring clarity without disruption.
I suggested beginning with a light refresh of the branding itself, not as a departure from their existing identity, but as an evolution of it. We retained their primary colour as a base, refined its tone, introduced a complementary accent, and paired it with a more contemporary typography.
The intention was to subtly balance depth and novelty while maintaining the brand's unmistakably professional personality.
From there, we turned to the firm profile. We decided to treat it as more than a static document. It needed to work across contexts: printable when required, easy to share digitally, and memorable enough to hold attention. Alongside the PDF versions, I proposed presenting it as an interactive flipbook, allowing the content to feel more open and considered, without becoming gimmicky.
Shaping the story
Before any layout work began, we focused on content.
The firm shared both their older profile and a more recent revision. I distilled the essentials from both and restructured the narrative to reflect not just what the firm did, but how it thought: its breadth of services, its people-first culture, its mentoring ethos, and its readiness for an evolving business landscape.
To keep the process collaborative, we worked within a shared document, allowing the partners to review, comment, and refine in real time. This step mattered more than any visual decision that followed. Once the story felt right, the design had something solid to support. From there, the layouts took shape...
The challenge was balance: allowing the profile to breathe without diluting its authority.
Dense information was broken into clear sections. Visual elements were used sparingly, only where they added rhythm or relief. The result was a profile that felt composed, confident, and readable, rather than overwhelming.
A measured outcome
The final outcome wasn’t about transformation for its own sake. It was about alignment, allowing a firm with forty years of history to speak to the present with clarity. The firm profile now reflected what SRBR & Associates already were: experienced, capable, and grounded, but also current and engaged with the realities of modern business.
It worked equally well as a printed document, a digital PDF, and an interactive format, each version adapted thoughtfully for its purpose.
Additionally, as a small gesture, I also designed their updated business cards using the refreshed identity. It wasn’t part of the brief, but a way of extending my gratitude for their trust in my expertise and signalling the tone for future touchpoints.
This project reinforced in me...
This project reminded me that good design often lives in restraint.
It is not about adding more. It is about choosing carefully. In knowing when to change, and when to preserve. In understanding that credibility doesn’t need embellishment, only clarity, and that modernising a brand with history isn’t about making it louder, but making it more legible to the present.
It also reinforced the value of shared context. Being able to understand a client’s work, language, and responsibility allowed the design to move beyond surface decisions and into something more precise. Design, in this case, wasn’t about making a firm look different. It was about helping them look like themselves, more clearly.
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