Brand systems for finance, legal & professional services

Look as credible as you actually are.

Your clients trust you with their money, their data, or their legal standing. Your pitch deck should make that easy. We design premium, fully custom brand systems and the working templates to run them, delivered in four weeks. If you don't love it, we work for free until you do.

Watch: how the four-week engagement works
The catch

There isn't one. No cost, no commitment. If it's not a fit, we'll say so.

Selected clients
Giant Capital ABC Legal MedicAlert Foundation MicroAgility NetActuate Smartr 1031 Simile Amazon
The problem

Your expertise outruns your appearance.

The people you pitch are professionally suspicious. Allocators, general counsel, procurement officers, boards: trust is literally their job. Before you've said a word, they've read your deck, your proposal, and your website, and they've formed an opinion about how serious your firm is.

If that opinion is "smaller, older, or more generic than they really are," you start every meeting in a hole your expertise has to climb out of. The work is excellent. The materials undersell it. And nobody in the room will tell you that's why the fee got questioned.

The deck a partner rebuilt from a 2019 file.

Every firm has one. It's the one that went out yesterday.

The brand guide nobody opens.

The last rebrand ended with a beautiful PDF. Within a month, everyone was back in the old templates.

The competitor who looks sharper than they are.

You've lost a pitch to them. You know the work was better.

The offer

A brand system your firm can actually run.

If you're leading a firm that needs to be taken seriously by investors, clients, and strategic partners, and your current materials feel dated and generic, we design a premium, fully custom brand system and toolkit within four weeks that lets you present with confidence, clarity, and consistency.

01
A complete brand identity.

Logo system, typography, color, graphic devices, and imagery direction, designed against the real scenarios where your firm gets judged.

02
Guidelines your team will actually use.

Short, clear, and built for the people producing the work, so the brand holds together without a designer on staff.

03
Working templates for the documents you already produce.

Pitch deck, proposal and RFP template, one-pager, and report template. Your team drops in content and it comes out looking designed, every time.

If you don't love it, we work for free until you do.

We can offer that because every design decision traces back to something you decided, in writing, in week one. "Don't love it" means a specific decision needs revisiting. It never means starting over.

Get started
How it works

Four weeks. Three phases.
One half-day of your time.

Most rebrands don't fail on design. They die in feedback rounds: three months of "can we see another direction," a committee that can't agree, a project that drags until everyone hates it. We built the engagement to remove that problem before it starts.

Week 1

The Brand Clarity Session

A half-day working session with the two or three people who can actually sign off. We walk through your current materials and name exactly where they break down. We talk through the rooms that matter for your firm: investor pitches, diligence reviews, RFP responses, first meetings with referred prospects. We look at who you lose to and what "credible" means in your category. Then we make every strategic call, together, before any design starts.

Within three business days you get the Brand Clarity Report: the decisions in writing, an audience and competitive read, and two or three mood boards. It becomes the single source of truth for everything that follows.

Weeks 2–3

The brand system

We design your complete system against the scenarios from the session, not against a mood board. How does it read to an allocator? Does it sell your capability and your experience across the table from a strategic partner? Every decision traces back to something you said in the room, which is what kills the "I'll know it when I see it" problem and keeps approvals fast.

Week 4

The toolkit

We build the working templates for your pitch deck, proposals, RFP responses, and reports, plus the guidelines document that ties it together. Your team drops in content and it comes out looking like the flagship. That consistency is exactly what trust-based buyers are scanning for, and it's what keeps the rebrand paying off long after we hand over the files.

Your time

The half-day session, plus a short check-in each week. That's it. Four weeks after kickoff you're presenting with the new system, and your team can run it without us.

Work

Built for firms people trust.

Every one of these clients runs a business where credibility is the product. Here's what we built, and why it had to hold up. Tap any one for the full story.

Why us

Two reasons this works.

We design for your pitch, not our portfolio.

Most studios design to win the approval meeting. Is it beautiful? Do the partners like it? Will it look good in their portfolio so they can land the next client? When that happens, you get a brand that photographs well and does next to nothing. It looks like every other polished B2B site, and it disappears in the meeting that actually matters: the one where someone is deciding whether to trust you with their money.

Obviously the work has to look good. But we judge every design decision against a real scenario you named in the Clarity Session. How does it read to an allocator? In a diligence review? Next to the firms you lose to? When a decision traces back to a meeting you described and a call you made, there's nothing left to debate. That's why our work gets approved fast.

Most rebrands die in a drive. Ours ship with the toolkit.

Here's the dirty secret of branding engagements. Designers love making beautiful guidelines documents. Most of them end up in a folder on the client's hard drive, gathering dust. Within a month, the team is back in the old templates, and the brand breaks at exactly the moments it matters most: the proposal that went out yesterday, the deck a partner rebuilt from an old file.

That's not on you. You're not a designer, and it isn't your job to sit with a PDF and figure out how to apply it. So we build the working templates for the documents your firm actually produces. Your team drops in content and it comes out looking like we designed it ourselves. Every touchpoint, every time.

The studio

Small on purpose.

Adam Levermore

Studio Lever is a brand design studio in Seattle, run by Adam Levermore: twenty years in brand and identity design, nine of them as an Art Director at Amazon, building the design systems and brand tooling behind hundreds of storefronts and campaigns, including one that added $2.77M in annualized revenue.

Adam Levermore
Founder & Creative Director
Stanford UniversityFormer Art Director, AmazonFounded 2023
Who we work with
  • Private capital
  • Wealth management
  • Legal services & legal tech
  • Cybersecurity & federal services
  • Infrastructure
  • Consulting
  • Health organizations
FAQ

Questions we get on the first call.

How long does this take?
Four weeks from kickoff to a delivered brand system and toolkit, assuming materials and feedback arrive on the agreed schedule. The Clarity Session is what makes the timeline possible: every decision that could stall the project gets made in week one.
How much of our time does it take?
A half-day for the Clarity Session, then a short check-in each week for three weeks. You won't be shepherding designers or refereeing feedback rounds.
What do we actually walk away with?
A complete brand identity (logo system, color, typography, graphic devices, imagery direction), a guidelines document, and working templates for your pitch deck, proposals and RFP responses, one-pager, and reports. Built so your team can produce on-brand materials without a designer.
What if we don't love it?
We keep working for free until you do. Because every decision traces back to what we agreed in the Clarity Session, this is a scoped revision against something specific. It's never an open-ended restart.
Who needs to be in the room?
The two or three people who can sign off. Usually the founder or managing partner plus a marketing, BD, or IR lead. If your firm can't name who approves the work, that's the first thing we'll help you resolve before the clock starts.
We're not in finance or law. Is this for us?
Our focus is firms whose clients are trusting them with something that matters: money, data, legal standing, infrastructure, health. If that describes your business, tell us what you do and we'll be straight about whether it's a fit.
Do you work with Google Workspace?
Templates are built for Microsoft Office by default. If your team lives in Google Workspace, mention it early. It changes the build and we'll scope it accordingly.
How much does it cost?
Pricing depends on scope, and we talk through it once we understand your engagement. The first step is a short questionnaire so we can figure out together whether this is a fit.

Your next pitch is going out either way.

The only question is which version of your firm it shows. If some part of you already knows the materials are underselling the work, let's find out whether we're a fit. It starts with a few questions about your firm and what's prompting this. It takes about five minutes, and you're not committing to anything.

If it looks like a match, we'll get on a call and talk through what four weeks would look like for your firm specifically. If it doesn't, we'll tell you straight and we won't waste your time.

No cost, no commitment. If it's not a fit, we'll say so.