Should we rebrand at the same time as the website redesign?

The right answer depends on what is actually changing, and most people asking this question have not said it out loud yet. Say it, then pick the row below.

The middle case is the common one. In our projects, the client who says the brand looks dated almost always means the site looks dated, and the logo is fine.

• New name, or a new story about what you sell. Stop. Do the brand work first. A site cannot be laid out around a value proposition that is still being argued about, because every page is a claim and the claims keep changing.
• Same story, tired visuals. Refresh the brand inside the redesign. This is the cheapest case and the most common one.
• Brand is fine, site is bad. Do not touch the brand at all. Spend the money on the site.

Four things, and none of them is a brand book. Everything else can be decided in the browser while the pages get built.

These are the items that stop work if they are missing. A type licence is the one that catches people out. Desktop licences bought for a print designer often do not cover web serving, and finding that out in build week means either buying a licence in a hurry or swapping the typeface and redoing the type scale.

• Logo files that work: a vector original, a version legible at 24 pixels tall, and a single-colour version for dark backgrounds and favicons.
• One primary colour that passes 4.5:1 contrast against white, plus a decision on what happens in a dark section. A mid-tone brand blue that fails on white is a two-week argument if it surfaces late.
• Typefaces with a licence that covers web serving, checked against the actual licence document, not assumed.
• One sentence describing what the company does and for whom. Not a tagline. The sentence the homepage headline is built from.

Anything you can judge better on a real page than on a moodboard should be decided on a real page. Deciding these upfront in a brand project costs money twice, once to specify them and again to change them when they look wrong at full size.

Secondary palette and accent shades. Illustration and icon style. Photography direction, assuming there is budget to shoot or license anything. Motion and hover behaviour. All of these get chosen faster and better once there are three built pages to try them against.

The delay is never the design work. It is the approvals.

A rebrand and a redesign usually have different sign-off chains. The brand goes to the founder and maybe the board. The site goes to marketing. When both run at once, each chain waits on the other, and a single week of holiday in either group stops everything.

Brand review with no page attached turns into taste debate. There is nothing to test the choice against, so the discussion runs on preference and never converges. Put the same colour on a live pricing page and the conversation takes ten minutes.

Every palette or type change after design has started is rework you pay for. Change the primary colour and every button, link, focus state, chart and dark section has to be rechecked for contrast. On a marketing site that is a day of work, and it repeats each time.

The worst version: a launch date tied to a campaign or a funding announcement, held hostage by a logo debate. Customers will not remember the logo in a year. They will remember that the site was not there when the campaign ran.

Most sites read as dated because of spacing, type size and stock imagery, not because the logo is wrong. Change those four things and people will tell you the brand looks new.

Here is the method, in order. It costs nothing but decisions.

When it is done, write down what you changed and why. That list is the honest brief for a real rebrand later, and it is worth more than a moodboard because every item on it was tested on a page people actually visited.

1. List what is actually failing. Usually: body text at 14px, headings too close in size to body, sections crammed together, and stock photography of people in meetings.
2. Fix only those. Body text to 16 or 18px, a wider gap between heading sizes, more space between sections, and either real photography or none at all.
3. Build three real pages with real copy: homepage, the main product or service page, and one deep page nobody thinks about.
4. Judge it built, on a phone and a laptop, not as a moodboard. A palette that looks confident in a Figma swatch grid can look grey and flat at page scale.

Three situations where spending money on a redesign now is a waste, and we will say so before quoting.

You are mid-acquisition, mid-funding round or mid-repositioning. The story will change and the site will be rebuilt around the new one. Wait. A landing page for the announcement is a better use of a few thousand dollars than a full site you will redo.

A brand agency is already booked. Sequence it. Let them finish, then start the site. Running in parallel means we design against a moving palette and you pay for the revisions.

The budget only covers one. Choose the site. Customers use the site, read the pricing, fill in the form. Almost nobody looks at a logo on its own. A refreshed site carrying the old logo converts. A beautiful new logo on the old site does not.

Brand first, then a gap, then the site. In our experience the gap is two to four weeks, and it is not idle time. It is when the brand deliverables get turned into things a build can use.

Before handover, lock four things in writing: the final logo set including a small and single-colour version, the primary colour with its contrast checked against white and against your darkest background, the web font licence with the domain listed, and the one-sentence description. Anything still described as under review is not locked.

To avoid paying twice for the same page, do not let the brand agency design website pages. Comps of a homepage from a brand agency are useful as a mood reference and useless as a specification, because they are drawn at one width with invented copy. They will be rebuilt. Ask for the system, not the pages.

Realistic total: a small brand project plus a marketing site redesign runs six to ten weeks end to end, and the site portion of that is 2 to 3 weeks of it. If someone tells you both can be done together in three, ask which approval chain they have decided to skip.

Write the sentence that describes what you sell and to whom. If you can write it and the whole leadership team agrees, you do not need a rebrand before the redesign. Refresh the visuals inside the build and go.

If you cannot write it, or three people write three different sentences, that is your brand project, and no amount of new typography will cover for it. Solve the sentence first.