Pentagram has created a fresh new brand for London-based talent practice Congregation.

Congregation is a purpose-led talent consultancy with a global client base. Founded by Matt Wells and Tim Sparke, the company’s remit is to disrupt formulaic, box-ticking approaches to recruitment and training with a more strategic and holistic approach in tune with the real values and needs of the organisation.

Rejecting the bureaucratic approach used by most talent development companies, Congregation has built a service that helps businesses in a human, creative and smart way with the vision of building the workforce of the future, filling companies with more engaged, more fulfilled and more effective talent.

The brief put to Marina Willer and her team was to evolve Congregation’s existing identity without losing their current logo. In response, Willer and team created a full visual language and tone of voice that draws heavily on the consultancy’s new brand purpose – Make Work Make Sense.

Using straightforward and practical language, Pentagram developed a tone of voice and brand concept that echoes the logo’s circular rhythm.

From the existing logo concept of a forum bringing people together, the new identity’s focus is on working collaboratively, the team has developed a set of messages and visual tools that have allowed Congregation to compose a full and unique visual and verbal style for the consultancy.

A key task was to develop a system to expressed Congregation’s new brand story in a visually arresting way. In response, Pentagram created an imagery library that illustrates in a light-hearted way some of the challenges that businesses can find when trying to “make sense” of a rapidly changing world. Using office paraphernalia to build the story, Marina and her team made constructions that look at the idea of problem-solving with a sense of humour.

“We have looked at the crazy way we all work with a pinch of salt, especially in the corporate world where things don’t always make sense,” says Marina