Featured Work: HOW+HOW turns up its own truth

Introducing Featured Work, a new Apex List series: one standout project from an independent team, picked by our editors from public launches. Not an award entry, not a sponsored slot — just work worth studying, and the lesson it carries for small teams.

First up: HOW+HOW, the brand studio Cat How and Rog How founded in London in 2020 and which now also works out of Los Angeles. Six years in, the studio has rebranded itself as HOW+HOW, with 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 — this time, it took the brief itself.

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. Around it sits a set of 3D illustrations — a bird gripping a key, a lyre, a tree, an eye ringed by rays — used as markers for the studio’s capabilities, from rebrands to mergers. The studio’s green-yellow has evolved into a shade the team calls “Gello”, and a refined Wagram serif carries the headlines.

Why this matters to independent teams: the hardest brief is your own. HOW+HOW’s idea is positioning by subtraction — 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. That discipline is exactly what small studios sell and exactly what they skip for themselves. A self-rebrand done this cleanly is proof of the advice, not just a new coat of paint.

There is a practical detail worth stealing, too. 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. For small teams wondering where search is heading, that is a small, concrete step to copy: make your site legible to answer engines, not just to search rankings.

Featured Work picks are made by our editors from public launches. Source: Mindsparkle Mag on the HOW+HOW rebrand, and the studio’s new site at how.studio.