Brand identity
done carefully
Tolbanerup has been working on website brand identity since 2018 — not as an abstract design exercise, but as a practical problem with measurable outcomes.
A website's identity is not just its colour palette. It is how visitors understand what you do within the first few seconds of landing on a page.
Tolbanerup works with businesses in Thunder Bay and surrounding Ontario markets on the full scope of website brand identity — from naming conventions and typographic systems to how a homepage communicates purpose without lengthy explanations. The work is methodical. Each project starts with an audit of what a client's current site communicates versus what their business actually delivers.
Most of the projects Tolbanerup handles involve companies that have been operating for several years but whose website was built quickly and never revisited. The visual signals those sites send — outdated stock photography, inconsistent heading styles, mismatched colour use — create friction before a visitor ever reads a sentence. Fixing that friction is specific, practical work, not a rebrand.
Tolbanerup's process does not promise outcomes on a fixed timeline. Brand identity changes take time to register with audiences. What the work does guarantee is that every decision made has a reason grounded in how the specific business operates and how its clients make decisions.
People behind the work
Small team, direct communication — every project has a named person responsible for delivery.
Petra Valkonen
Brand Strategy Lead
Petra runs the intake process for new projects and oversees the audit phase. She has worked with retail, professional services, and municipal organizations across northern Ontario.
Miriam Szabó
Visual Identity Designer
Miriam builds the visual systems — type scales, colour application rules, and component libraries — that keep a site's identity consistent as it grows and changes over time.
Olivier Tanguay
Content Strategist
Olivier handles the language side of brand identity — how a business describes itself, what the navigation says, and whether the page copy matches the work the company actually does.
Radu Florescu
Front-End Implementation
Radu translates finished identity systems into running websites. His focus is on ensuring that the visual decisions made during strategy hold up correctly across devices and browsers.