Two of the largest media companies in the world had merged. Each had its own name, its own identity, its own culture — things that had become inseparable from what it felt like to belong to them. Decades of content, reputation and relationships, on both sides. I invited three agencies to pitch the rebrand — a board-level decision, with real money and real histories in the room.

One approach took a deliberately Bauhaus-influenced position. No icon. A neutral palette. Just the name, set in a carefully redrawn wordmark — clean and structural, designed to sit beneath the content rather than compete with it. In a portfolio of thirty-one territories, thousands of productions and decades of work, a strong graphic identity would fight with everything it touched. The restraint made space for the content to lead.

The room was moving toward something else.

What was shaping the conversation wasn't being said directly — it rarely is. The pull toward the familiar, the weight of what each organisation had built, the relationships people carried into the room — these things matter and deserve to be taken seriously. Part of the work, in those situations, is understanding what should be carried forward alongside the harder question: what does this organisation need to become, for the people it's trying to reach and the markets it's moving into?

Neither organisation needed its history erased. But nor could the new identity simply inherit the visual language of one or the other. The challenge was to understand what mattered in both, then find an expression of the new organisation that everyone could recognise themselves within — without asking either side to become the other.

What followed became its own test of the thinking. Not at the moment of launch, but in the years that followed. For five years, across thirty-one territories and through formats and markets nobody had anticipated at the start, the identity continued to do what it had been built to do.

The thinking had been arrived at through difficulty — through a conversation about what the organisation actually needed, while respecting what people inside it valued and wanted to protect. When the business was eventually sold, that thinking had carried its form through everything that had changed around it — intact, and still recognisably itself.