Case study · 2025
Fortiter
The full brand identity and Squarespace website for a legal consultancy launched from scratch: logo design, brand guidelines, launch collateral and a site handed over ready to run.
Fortiter is an independent legal consultancy for technology businesses: board-level counsel without the law-firm machinery around it. Its founder was going out on his own after a senior legal career and needed a practice that read as established from its first day, which meant building the whole brand at once rather than growing into it. I delivered all of it: brand identity design, logo design, brand guidelines, launch collateral and a Squarespace website, taken from first sketches to a live site inside two months.
Law brands itself conservatively, and the brief was to move away from that without spending an ounce of authority. The name comes from the Latin maxim suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, and the identity had to hold the same balance: composed on the surface, resolute underneath.
The logo design started with the letterform: the F logomark draws two leaves into a single mark, precise enough to sit on legal correspondence, distinctive enough to stand alone. Around it I built a restrained corporate palette, Deep Slate, Mid Teal and Blue Slate held open by off-white space, with a single accent of Signal Orange used sparingly.
Typography is Roboto, bold and regular only: weight carries the hierarchy and nothing decorative gets in the way. I documented the whole visual identity in a version-numbered set of brand guidelines and shipped it as a client brand pack, logo suite, colour references and templates, so the brand stays consistent whoever applies it.
I designed and built the website in Squarespace: home, about, services and contact, set to the new identity and structured around the three service pillars, fractional legal support, specialist projects, and AI & cyber oversight. Squarespace was the right call for a founder running solo, so the pages stay testimonial-led and plain-spoken, with plenty of white space. Mobile optimised, SEO set up at launch, and a training walkthrough at handover so a one-person practice owns and updates its own website without a developer on call.
A corporate identity for a working practice has to survive contact with real correspondence, so I carried it into the everyday: a letterhead designed for actual letters, presentation templates set in Microsoft-safe type, and the full logo suite exported for print and digital.
Fortiter launched as a new independent consultancy that looks established: modern, assured, none of the visual habits of traditional law. One designer, end to end, took it from first sketches to a live brand and Squarespace website in under two months, leading with the line the brand was built to earn, trusted counsel for the digital age.
Trusted counsel for the digital age.Fortiter · fortiter.co.uk