Featured · client work
Lunarlink Solutions, Toronto
See it live
Drop your URL and I’ll send back a short reply with what’s holding it back, and how to fix it.
Look out for a reply from hello@umberdesignstudio.com within two business days.
Montréal · branding
An identity for a Québec business has a requirement identities elsewhere do not: French has to lead, on the sign, on the packaging, and in the system. Retrofitting that onto an English-first identity produces awkward lockups and expensive signage revisions. Designing it in from the first sketch produces something better in both languages.
Montréal · Québec · serving the Greater Montréal
Montréal brand market
Québec signage rules require French to be markedly predominant where another language also appears, which is a design constraint before it is a legal one. It changes the proportions of a storefront lockup, the hierarchy on packaging, and how a bilingual wordmark can be built at all. A system designed with that from the start absorbs it. One designed in English absorbs it badly.
Length compounds it. French phrasing generally runs longer than the English equivalent, so a lockup whose proportions were set by a short English name will look cramped when the French goes in at greater prominence. Setting the proportions with French first solves both problems at once.
The upside is that Montréal rewards genuine design confidence. This is a city with a deep design culture and an audience that reads visual language closely, so a timid identity is noticed here more than it would be elsewhere.
How it works
Full scope on the branding page.
An hour or so on a call. The business, the customers, the words people already use about you, and the identities you wish you had instead. Whatever comes out of that call is the brief.
Three real directions, each shown as a small system: the mark, a wordmark lockup, a colour, a typeface. No moodboards, no Pinterest stitching. Three honest choices to react to.
Two rounds of revision on the direction you pick. Logo, wordmark, colour, and type tuned together so they read as one identity rather than four parts pretending to match.
One document. The marks, the colour values, the typography, a short do and do not, a note on voice. Short enough to actually use, not a sixty-page brandbook nobody opens.
The pieces you need on day one: business card, email signature, social profile and post templates, letterhead. One folder, source files on request.
What changes locally
A Montréal identity engagement sets the system in French first, so the lockup proportions, the signage hierarchy, and the packaging layouts are correct from the beginning rather than adjusted under pressure at the fabricator. English is built as a real parallel version rather than the original with a translation dropped in. The brand sheet documents which version goes where. Ownership transfers on final payment.
Note
Every engagement starts with a free written audit, including the Montréal ones. If we think the budget is better spent somewhere else, we will say so before you commit to anything. See everything we do in Montréal.
Montréal branding questions
Don’t see yours? Ask us directly.
From the journal
Aug 1, 2026
7 min
Aug 1, 2026 · 7 min
One page listing forty towns ranks for none of them. A page per neighbourhood gets flagged as spam. The level in between is where local rankings actually live, and almost nobody builds it.
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Jul 31, 2026 · 6 min
No law requires it, which makes this a market decision rather than a compliance one. How to work out from your own data whether French pays for your business, and what building it properly actually involves.
Jul 23, 2026
6 min
Jul 23, 2026 · 6 min
Four different things get bundled into a monthly website fee, and only two of them are unavoidable. How to tell which one you are paying for, and how to spot the arrangement where you never stop paying and never own anything.
Free written audit. No call required, no commitment, no upsell at the end.
Reply within two business days
