HOW+HOW rebrand: a volume-dial logo | Mindsparkle

Mindsparkle Mag

How&How, the brand studio Cat How and Rog How founded in London in 2020 and which now also works out of Los Angeles, has rebranded itself as HOW+HOW. Six years in, the studio has a new strategy, a new visual and verbal identity and a new website, all built on one line: turn up your truth. It is the same advice the team has been giving clients such as Ideogram, Big Cartel, Chester Zoo and Hometree, so this time it took the brief itself.

The idea is simple to state and hard to do. A brand finds the one thing only it can claim, then dials that up until it is impossible to ignore, which also means turning everything else down. Cat How describes it as a mixing desk: push every fader to the top and all you get is noise, so someone has to decide which channel matters most.

The new H+H mark is where that thinking gets most literal. Its letterforms behave like an analogue volume dial, stretching and amplifying so the logo can run across a wide banner or tighten into a compact shorthand for square and tall formats. The logo reel runs through the studio's earlier How&How marks before the dial turns all the way up to the final H+H.

Around the logo sits a set of 3D illustrations: a bird gripping a key, a lyre, a tree, an eye ringed by rays. They lift off the page with a rough, carved texture, yet each one stays tied to a plain idea instead of drifting into decoration. The studio uses them as markers for its capabilities, from rebrands to mergers, across the website and its presentations.

Colour and type do the rest of the work. The studio's green yellow has evolved into a shade the team calls "Gello", which brings energy to the identity without shouting over the client work, and a refined Wagram serif carries the headlines with the clarity HOW+HOW promises its clients. Subtle animation runs through the whole system, so it feels alive without any one element competing for attention.

The verbal identity got the same edit, with shorter and more direct copy that sounds like a studio that knows exactly what it wants to say. The new website was built to match the calibre of the clients it shows, and it is optimised for AI answer engines as well as for Google. It even carries pages written specifically for large language models to crawl, a small joke that also says a lot about where search is heading.