Client
Frank te Hennepe, ARA Industries
Role
Brand identity, design system, UX, marketing assets
Made at
Independent
Scope
Brand identity
Design system
Website
Marketing assets
Duration
12 weeks
Background
ARA has always been innovative, human-centred and driven by the people who work there, and none of that had changed. The identity had not moved since the 1960s and had quietly stopped saying any of it. In a technical market where trust is won slowly, the visual language read as stagnation rather than stability, and parts of the website had broken outright. Working with Frank te Hennepe, we separated what had always been true about the company from what the brand was failing to communicate.
Credits
Client: Frank te Hennepe
Approach
The logo stayed. It had good bones, so the work was kerning, legibility and colour, together with the shift from Apparatenfabriek ARA to ARA Industries. A small change, and it points the company forward without erasing sixty years of where it came from. The design system moved deliberately away from the hard, angular aesthetic that dominates manufacturing, toward rounded corners, softer shapes and a saturated palette. Not to make ARA look less serious, but because it is closer to how the company actually works, and in an industry built on sharp edges that reads as a difference. The website was rebuilt on the same logic, with broken sections cut and navigation shortened.
Outcome
ARA was named Best Knowledge Supplier shortly after the relaunch, in part from being read as a modern company rather than a legacy one, and the client base grew over the year that followed. The identity, the site and the marketing materials now say the same thing in the same language.
