Modal Architecture has been featured by Obvious Brand Partners, part of Paradigm Group, in a new case study looking at the brand foundations, digital systems and practical tools developed for the practice.
The feature looks back at the work we undertook with Obvious in 2023, when Modal was growing beyond its original founder-led identity and needed a brand that better reflected the quality, ambition and direction of the architectural work itself.
For us, the project was never simply about changing a logo. It became a broader exercise in defining how Modal should look, sound and present itself across every interaction, from the website and project photography through to proposals, presentations, social media and client documents.
Building a Brand Around the Practice We Were Becoming
Obvious was engaged to develop a complete foundation for the Modal brand, including strategy and positioning, a new visual identity, photography direction, marketing collateral, the website and a Canva-based design system. Their case study describes the goal as creating a brand that could grow with the practice while remaining practical for a small, fast-moving team to use every day.
That practical side mattered to us. Architectural practices produce a huge amount of client-facing material, and consistency can disappear quickly if every proposal, presentation or project document has to be rebuilt from scratch.
The system Obvious developed gave us a clear visual language and a set of templates we could actually own and use internally, rather than relying on an agency every time something new needed to be produced.
From Brand Identity to a Working System
The case study covers the custom Modal wordmark and monogram, typographic system, colour palette, photography direction and website, but one of the most useful outcomes was the Canva Brand Kit and dynamic template library.
Those tools gave us structured templates for proposals, presentations, project descriptions, regional material, social content and other everyday documents. Obvious also points to the proposal workflow highlighted in its joint Canva case study, where a process that had taken several days was reduced to a matter of hours.
For a growing architectural practice, that kind of efficiency is not just a branding exercise. It means spending less time rebuilding documents and more time focused on projects, clients and design.
A Brand That Can Grow With the Business
Since that work was completed, Modal has continued to evolve across new regions, new services and a larger team. The brand system has had to stretch with us, from residential projects and high-performance homes through to commercial work, new regional pages and an expanding library of project material.
What has been useful is that the foundation has remained flexible. The practice can evolve without every new service, page or document feeling disconnected from the rest of Modal.
Being featured by Obvious is a nice opportunity to look back at that process and see how much of the system created in 2023 is still working behind the scenes today.
We appreciate the Obvious team taking the time to document the project and the thinking behind it.
