2021 to 2022, lockdowns. Ergo needed to show its breadth, how separate business units combine into one hybrid-work solution. A single cross-unit campaign was unusual for the company.

Hybrid was a mess no single tool solved. The jigsaw. Interlocking parts that only mean anything once they're assembled. And a second reading I saw more clearly afterwards: a picture of fragmented pandemic working life made whole.

The puzzle wasn't invented from nothing. It evolved the brand's own Interlock and Concentric embellishments, from the 2017 guidelines by Alan Davis, into a literal jigsaw: moving parts that existed in the book but were never used day to day. I built the campaign on them.

Ergo red as the anchor. Six branches, one per component. I tuned them by eye for optical consistency, not mechanical uniformity. Two deliberate overrides of the brand book ("avoid a rainbow effect" and "avoid montaging images") held together by system and saturation discipline.

One identity carried across every touchpoint. E-book, presentation deck, LED stage environment, pull-up banners, spider stand, lanyards, notebooks, merch, printed and sprung booklets, and LinkedIn nurture ads.

Six colours became six components, each mapped to a named expert: Derek Boyle, Head of Hardware; Sean McAvinue, Modern Workplace Practice Lead; Steve Blanche, CTO. Live at The Mayson Hotel, Dublin, 5 May 2022.

This ran before marketing was instrumented, so no campaign metrics were captured. What is on record is a sold room, six senior experts on one platform, a 13-page guide, and a single identity carried cleanly across every touchpoint of a live national event.

Ergo started in a Dublin shed refilling printer cartridges. It grew into one of Ireland's largest IT service firms, and the anchor of a group that also held Micromail and BoatyardX. Then Presidio acquired it. Every brand in the group had to make the same move: carrying its hard-won recognition into a US parent while retiring the local name without unsettling the customers who trusted it.

The first brief was Local Expertise, Global Strength. I read that as interweaving (two companies becoming one stronger group) and built a concept around a path. Ergo red masking imagery of Dublin, then New York, rising into Presidio blue. Cities as the bridge.

Then the brief moved. Marketing came back with Local Expertise, Global Strength, Greater Possibilities, and Presidio's real emphasis on AI, expertise, people. The customer touchpoints weren't changing. The people were the constant. So I killed the city concept. A path between two skylines answered the old brief. It didn't answer this one.

I rebuilt it around a knot derived from the "&" glyph: the mark for and. Ergo and Presidio. It opens in Ergo red, interweaves through imagery of people, and resolves into Presidio blue. The transition becomes the visual. Not one brand replacing another, but two binding into something continuous.

The knot wasn't a one-off. As Ergo's services became people-led, I had already started letting the brand's own graphic language interact with people imagery. It began as concentric arcs wrapping around real people, first on Ergo, then extended into Micromail. The Presidio knot was the natural next step: the same language, now interweaving two brands through the people at the centre of both.

The knot wasn't made once. It became the transition system for the whole group. One device, one "BECOMES PRESIDIO" lockup, one layout. What flexes per brand is the equity worth keeping: the anchor colour and the brand's own photographic world. Ergo's IT professionals in red. BoatyardX's boats in green. Micromail's students in blue. Everything structural locks, and every ribbon resolves into Presidio blue. Same principle as the group's own brand architecture: preserve each brand's equity, standardise everything around it.

The same device, resized and recut for every touchpoint the transition needed: Teams backgrounds, landing pages, LinkedIn covers, print.

I wrote this rule: "Avoid montaging multiple images together or vector graphics on top of images." Eighteen months later, on the Presidio acquisition campaign, I put vector ribbons over photography. The rule was right for a system that needed to hold together across three brands and dozens of hands. It was wrong for a single campaign that needed to say two companies had become one.

Live and in market: a print ad, LinkedIn posts and covers, and the wider digital rollout, the same device carrying the story to press and to the company's own audience.

The inherited 2017 guidelines carried a colour-wheel concept that mapped services to colours, but it had never been operationalised. The system was holding more visual variables than it could sustain day to day.

Rather than absorb Micromail and BoatyardX into Ergo, which risked the equity those brands already held, I designed an endorsed-brand architecture. Each brand keeps its own colour and its own logo-derived device. Everything else is shared.

One variable flexes: which brand colour leads the 60-30-10 hierarchy. Everything else is locked: grid, arc and ribbon language, Open Sans, the icon set, photography rules, logo placement.

The shared core goes neutral so high-chroma accent colours can coexist without clashing. Mute the centre, let each brand's colour lead.

Ergo and Micromail were the brands under my direct remit, and where I applied and maintained the colour hierarchy day to day. BoatyardX sat inside the same architecture and the same conversations that shaped it. It was included in the thinking from the start, so all three brands could read as one family and hold together without any of them losing the equity that made it theirs.