Chartwell Capital

A visual reform for a legacy

Chartwell Capital is a Hong Kong-based asset management company, serving institutional clients such as endowment and pension funds, charitable foundations, family offices, and individuals.

The firm approached Studio Earth for a rebrand to signal an investment business that is trustworthy with a contemporary flair. The new visual identity should also pay homage to its cultural and familial roots.

Team

Studio Earth on visual identity and web interface design

Stock photo credit

Aleksandar Pasaric, Jaimy de Hon, Rusland Bardash, courtesy of Unsplash

Chartwell Capital's logo in white with Hong Kong's skyline as the background.
A collage of Chartwell Capital's brand guideline.

Chartwell Capital was established in 2007 as a family office with the goal to explore investment opportunities in Asia. It has since evolved into an asset management company, utilising its local expertise to engage with portfolio companies and cultivating long-term relationships with clients.

To represent the evergrowing opportunities in Asia, Chartwell Capital opted for a brand refresh in 2022. The brief – to show new and existing customers alike that Chartwell Capital is a modern, reputable and trustworthy firm that is keeps up with dynamic investment trends.

A dissection of Chartwell Capital's logo with clear space indicators.
We created clear space guidelines for the logo to preserve the brand’s visual integrity when applied across corporate assets.
Chartwell Capital's logo rendered in the colour gold, black, and white.
Gold, black, and white can be used flexibly across all corporate assets to yield increased contrasts.

We aimed to convey Chartwell Capital as a consistent and sustainable brand, so we conserved facets of the original brand identity. We also selected a relatively heavy-weight serif font to visually exude confidence. The rectangular frame allows the logo to be more flexible and adaptable for diverse placements and application possibilities.

Seven colour palettes from gold, teal, navy, burgundy, lime, blue, and orange in their various hues.
We chose a versatile, extensive colour palette from earth tones and muted hues to vibrant dyes that emphasise details.
The Signifier font's specimen in upper and lowercase.
The company’s primary font emerged with Bézier curves and sharp vectors determined by machine logic and a Brutalist ethos.

We opted to maintain gold, black and white as the foundational brand colours as they convey Chartwell Capital’s authentic, confident and trustworthy nature. We added teal, navy and burgundy to the primary palette for wider use across other brand touchpoints, such as on the website and presentation slides.

Additionally, we chose three vibrant shades of lime, blue and orange that are to be used sparingly to highlight figures or information in dense reports and documents. The aim was to create a contrast between the two palettes to draw the reader’s attention to crucial details while preserving an overall balance within the visual identity.

A demonstration of Chartwell Capital's information hierarchy with a heading, title, and body text.
Fonts, font sizes and weights must be applied extensively to ensure the information hierarchy's clarity.
Three sentence structures that demonstrate the maximum length of a sentence when applied to various layouts.
We created three sentence structures to accommodate a variety of layouts to preserve their readability.

As much of the documents produced by Chartwell Capital include text, we selected two fonts to be their corporate typefaces – one serif and one sans-serif.

We established extensive guidelines for the company’s typographic system, spanning from font size, case, kerning, leading, alignment and paragraph lengths for a comprehensible information hierarchy.

Signifier is the company’s primary font. The serif font is heavier in weight, which stands out against quiet, neutral backgrounds. While Signifier is optimal for headings, sans-serif fonts are more legible in blocks of texts. We selected GT America as the body font – a sans-serif typeface that contrasts itself beautifully against our serif typeface with its versatility.

The front and back side of Chartwell Capital's business card design placed next to each other.
A collage of Chartwell Capital's presentation slides.

Once we established a brand identity, we were able to then apply it across various corporate assets. From business cards to slide decks, we designed templates that the firm’s marketing team could easily edit for various use cases. The result of a well-defined visual identity is a unified look that distinguishes Chartwell Capital from its peers.

A mockup of Chartwell Capital's website displayed on an iMac.
Chartwell Capital's website's homepage interface.
Chartwell Capital’s refreshed website showcases the consistent application of fonts, colours, and layouts.
Chartwell Capital's website's About page interface.
Chartwell Capital's website's Strategy page interface.
Chartwell Capital's website's Engagement page interface.
Chartwell Capital's website on an iPhone 14 Pro's display.

This project’s creative and design direction was led by Jimmy K.K Lam from Studio Earth.

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