A decade of Bold Wise

Earlier this month I passed the decade mark for Bold Wise. It’s pretty incredible to think that over ten years ago this month I sat down and formalised the business. That felt worth marking, so I thought I’d do a quick run-through of some of the more memorable things I’ve had the pleasure of working on.

Early on I worked with law firm Addleshaw Goddard, helping make sure their new visual identity actually worked in practice. That included things like getting the logo to behave properly and translating the identity into real-world use.

I developed an identity and a series of complex catalogues and brochures for The Watermark Collection, a fantastic brassware company. These were that perfect mix of fun and challenging. I’ve always enjoyed simplifying large, complex sets of information and making the result clearer and more usable, and their range of fixtures and fittings definitely gave me plenty to get stuck into.

I also worked with a large mobility organisation, first on their news portal and then on a series of digital tools around EV transition and fleet management. A big part of that work was turning complex expertise into something customers could actually use, and something the business could use commercially too.

I helped Ingenious sharpen their identity so it better reflected the capability and ambition of the business, and worked with them on early digital product thinking too. From there the work expanded into website structure, messaging, and practical materials for sales, tenders and recruitment.

I worked on a number of UX projects with Bliss Systems, who are fantastic application developers and lovely people to work with. Again, it meant getting my teeth into complex process and usability issues, which is never a bad place for me to be.

And, coming up to date, I’ve worked with Locale to bring their positioning, website structure and digital presence into better alignment with the business they’d become. That meant helping clarify how the offer was structured and communicated, shaping the navigation and information architecture around that, and supporting rollout and refinement as the site evolved. On this one I got to work with graphic designer Gareth Rimmer, which was a real pleasure, and the end result was stronger for it.

Looking back, the common thread is pretty obvious. Different sectors, different challenges, different kinds of work, but the same underlying thing: helping organisations make better sense of who they are, what they do, and how that comes across.

Ten years in, I’m still glad to be doing it.