A brand and website for one of Ireland's leading cabinet makers and Corian fabricators, built to carry six decades of craftsmanship into a modern market.
FitzGerald's of Kells have been making furniture since 1963 and are one of Ireland's leading cabinet makers and Corian fabricators, with award-winning work in both the Irish and international markets. Their reputation is built on precision and finish, and it travels almost entirely by word of mouth.
The problem was visibility, not quality. Anyone who had seen the workshop understood the standard immediately. Anyone meeting the brand for the first time, particularly an architect or specifier abroad, saw a trade supplier rather than a maker of considered, commissioned pieces.
“Take 50 years of tradition and make it modern, and at the same time be respectful of our heritage, history and craftsmanship.”
The client briefThat brief set the tension deliberately: modern and traditional at once. Rather than resolving it with a compromise, I split the identity so each element carries one side of it. The logo device speaks to engineering and precision. The typography holds the heritage.
The device is drawn from the FitzGerald coat of arms, then reduced and re-cut so the geometry reads as engineered rather than illustrative. It is the family history stated in the language the work itself uses: clean lines, exact tolerances, nothing decorative that is not structural.
A deliberately limited palette was the single most consequential decision. Furniture photography is full of warm timber tones, stone, white Corian and shifting light. Any strong brand colour competes with the product.
The trade-off was a system that looks quiet in a presentation deck and correct in the wild. The brand recedes so the joinery does not have to fight it, which is the right priority for a maker whose portfolio is the sales argument.
The device did not start from a blank page. The FitzGerald coat of arms was stripped of its crown and laurel, then the saltire re-cut into an interlocking FG monogram, so the shape reads as engineered joinery rather than heraldry. Six decades of family history stated in a mark that belongs on a modern site.
Three rules the identity had to obey
01
The coat of arms earns its place because the family and the workshop are genuinely continuous. It is reduced to a mark, never treated as an antique.
02
Spacing, alignment and construction are visibly exact. A brand for makers of millimetre-tolerance joinery cannot be loosely set.
03
Limited colour, generous space, minimal ornament. Every layout decision defers to the photography of the finished pieces.
The logo comprises a device and a wordmark. The device, based on the FitzGerald coat of arms and altered to represent the precise engineering and quality of the work, carries the modern half. The typeface keeps the traditional element intact.
Walnut
#2C211A
Timber
#6B4B32
Brass
#A5813C
Stone
#CFC7BB
The site has one job: convince an architect, developer or private client that this workshop can execute their commission. Structure follows how that decision is actually made, by looking at completed work in detail.
01 / Home Page
The homepage leads with full-width photography of finished pieces, then sets out the disciplines, the Corian fabrication capability and the sixty-year history. Nothing asks to be read before the work has been seen.
02 / Case Study Pages
Each project page follows a fixed order: the brief, the materials, the detail shots, the finished installation. A repeatable template means new commissions can be published without a designer, and every project reads with the same authority.
The measure of this one was whether a workshop that had never needed to explain itself now looked, on a screen, exactly as good as it does in person.
Reflection