Designing brand, identity and web presence for a defence M&A firm, Steen Associates
Product Strategist
Brand Design
Web Development
My Role
Product Designer
Deliverables
Logo redesign, responsive website, and new colour palette for all communications
Time
Feb 2026 - May 2026
Who is Steen Associates?
Steen Associates is an international mergers and acquisitions boutique specialising in the defence, aerospace, and industrial sectors.
With offices in London & Frankfurt, they guide clients through the entire deal process, from strategy and deal origination to completion. For years, word of mouth and results brought them their work.
01/ The context & challenges
Steen Associates had the credibility. What it lacked was a presence that showed it.
They needed more than a new website. They needed a presence that matched the weight of what they do.
Challenge 1 - Industry
Steen's visitors range from senior bankers to curious finance students and interns, on very different devices. The site had to work for all of them and still feel as serious as the work behind it.
Challenge 2 - Inconsistent communication
Steen's logo looked slightly different across their communications. They also had no set palette beyond blue, with no secondary colour to support it. So each team member picked their own highlight colour, and it showed up as a different shade of orange, green or red in the sea of blue.
Challenge 3 - Too much, too soon
The homepage showed everything at once, with no clear starting point. Long text had no structure, and a side navigation on every page took space from the content. The new design gives the content the most room and keeps navigation simple.
02/ Discovery & where I started
The Approach
Starting with identity
Before any screen was designed, I brought in a brand and visual identity collaborator to work alongside me on this. Together, we approached the rebrand with one question at the centre: What does trust look like in a high-stakes industry?
The brief was clear from the start: update the brand, but don't walk away from it. Steen wanted to look current without losing the identity their clients already knew.
Where I started
On visual design front
Colour & Tone
Steen had always used blue for their brand, and it made sense. Blue feels trustworthy, which matters in finance, and they've built their identity around it from the start. So instead of replacing it, we introduced a second colour that could sit alongside the blue without clashing, while still feeling right for their niche.
Together, this gave the logo and the rest of the brand a clear, simple system to follow, so every part of the identity worked as one.
Main Colours
Primary
#182350
Secondary
#B9915E
Other hues and tones
Lighter blue
#606AA9
Cool neutral
#F5F6FA
Warm neutral I
#F4F2EF
Warm neutral II
#F1E9DF
Lightest neutral
#FBF9F7
On experience design front
Information Architecture & User flow
To begin with, I focused on the contents of the exisiting page and conducted a discovery workshop to uncover the following
Compartmentalise the existing information on the homepage with visual breaks to break the monotony
A lot of questions about services were unaswered on the website, which often had to be answered offline.
04/ Branding artefacts
The Logo
The original word-mark was sharp and deliberate for a firm operating in a serious industry. But sharpness had come at a cost. The kerning was off in places, and to maintain that lean, precise quality, the letterforms had been drawn narrow enough that the logo lost some of its presence.
We explored two directions:
Variation 1
The first leaned into the personal. Since Steen is the founder's surname, we explored a version that drew from the fluidity of a signature. It had character, but it pulled the brand in a more personal direction than the firm's positioning called for.
Variation 2
The second direction held on to the sharpness of the original but approached it differently. The letterforms were drawn bolder, giving the wordmark the weight and authority it had been missing. To keep it from becoming heavy, the strokes taper toward their endings, so the logo reads with both strength and precision.
05/ Website artefacts
Designing with clarity
The old website was brief and to the point. But the hero section tried to do too much at once. It had information about who the firm is, what they do, and their latest news all cycling in one scrolling block. If you wanted to find transactions or services, you had to go looking on your own.
The old design packed everything into one place.
The new homepage gives each piece of information its own space. The hero now only introduces the firm. Who they are, that they specialise in M&A, and that they operate in aerospace, defence, and industrials. That is it. Nothing else is competing for your attention at that point.
The homepage now acts as a connection point to all the detailed pages, sectors, services, news, insights, and leadership. But it gives you enough that you do not have to go there immediately. People are spending more time on the homepage now. That tells us the structure is working.
This was especially important to get right for two kinds of visitors.
Senior professionals who already know the space and do not want to dig around.
And potential collaborators who are new to the defence world and need a clearer picture before they can even know what questions to ask.
Building a new kind of touchpoint
One of the more strategically interesting additions to the site was the Insights page. Steen Associates publishes reports relevant to their sector, and previously those reports had no real distribution mechanism tied to the business. The new page gates access to those reports behind a simple email request.
For the visitor, it is a frictionless way to get valuable content.
To access a report, a visitor submits their name, email, and organisation, and the report is sent directly to their inbox. For the firm, this is a quiet but valuable tool. They can see who is reading their work, and follow up with the right people at the right time.
It tells them how their reports are performing and surfaces potential clients they can reach out to directly. A small page with a long tail of value.
What the project delivered
A brand with a clear visual language. A website that works as a business tool, not just a digital brochure. And a firm that now has the kind of online presence that reflects the seriousness of what they do.
Sometimes the work is about building something new. Here, it was about making the outside finally match the inside.
