Brand for Byrd + Link Audit and Accountancy Firm

Money talks. They translate.

Accountancy can be pretty tricky to grasp. That’s why you go and hire other people to do it for you. We had previously worked with the two directors of Byrd + Link as part of another project, and we got to appreciate their honest and straightforward approach.

The moment of change: Changing the game

Byrd + Link were stepping away from a big accountancy firm to go it alone, and they wanted a brand that was the opposite of ‘big firm’ – something modern and fresh.

The problem was that they wanted to do this in the middle of lockdown. Luckily, at Mighty, we roll with the punches, so we took our brand process online.

The plan we made

We started out with a fact-find to get to the heart of what made Byrd + Link different from the huge corporate number-crunchers, and we brought the two of them together on Zoom (excuse me, you’re on mute, mate …) to challenge their thinking and figure out exactly what they want to say.

The two of them were specialists in audits, which is a decidedly unsexy part of accountancy. It’s also usually complicated and annoying, even for large businesses that are used to this kind of process. What Byrd + Link do is make it nice and simple, which gave us a brilliant idea.

What Byrd + Link do is take a complicated subject and make it easy to understand – just like us. This gave us scope to play with iconography and create a timeless brand.
JamesManaging Partner

The story we told

When thinking about audits and the complexity of them, we thought about symbols –how they can be confusing to those who don’t understand them, but perfectly clear to those who do. That led us to nautical code flags and the phonetic alphabet. If you’re not a sailor, you likely don’t have a clue what each flag means, but if you do, it makes messages easy to understand at sea.

We took the code flags and used the Bravo flag as the basic shape for our logo, paired with a contemporary font that would look fantastic on a whole bunch of collateral. In the fact-find, one phrase that came across consistently was “we’re straight-talking”, so we took that to form our strapline: Straight-Talking People.

As well as a brand, Byrd + Link needed a website, so we built them a simple WordPress site that would get across everything they needed. Using the tone of voice we’d developed for the brand, we wrote all the copy, too, helping to set people straight on whether they needed an audit or not, and what they could expect from working with Byrd + Link.

Finally, we used the shapes from the code flags that represented the letters in Byrd + Link to create animations and graphics that tied it all together nicely.

The Mighty change

The brand we created set Byrd + Link off on the best foot possible, even through difficult circumstances. Since launching, the senior team has doubled in size, and they’ve been working with multi-million-pound businesses across the country. The firm has doubled down on the audit side of things to make that the main focus of the business, which has taken them from strength to strength.

The Byrd + Link website on a tablet, featuring animation. Designed by Mighty, digital agency

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