From embroidery to vinyl, without drifting
Brand identity with its own manual, applications across uniform, stationery, signage and vehicle, plus the migration of their website from WordPress to a custom-built site, for a residential and commercial painting company in San Jose, California.
- Client
- Dezma Pro Painting
- Business type
- Residential and commercial painting
- Service area
- Branding
- Location
- San José, California
- Year
- 2026
Services delivered
- Brand Design
- Identity Manual
- Stationery
- Uniforms & Textiles
- Signage
- Vehicle Wrap
- WordPress Migration
- Web Design
The challenge
A painting company is judged by its finish, and the first finish a client sees isn't a wall: it's the van parked outside their house and the overalls of whoever steps out of it. Dezma did good work and had no way of proving it before walking in. What was missing was the brand that would make the vehicle lettering, the uniform embroidery and the sidewalk sign read as one single company. And their website was a WordPress template: pretty on the surface, with its content tied to a page builder and nothing separating it from the other forty painting companies in the Bay Area.
What we did
The mark comes from the initials themselves: the “D” and the two “P”s resolve into a single shape that also draws a paint roller, so the trade reads before the name does. The construction is fixed on a grid with a constant 80-degree tilt, and from there come the clear space —measured on the logo itself—, the reduction scale down to 20% and the monochrome variants. Two primary colors —Azul Francés and Verde Brillante— and three secondary ones, each with its HEX, RGB and CMYK equivalents written down, because a vehicle wrap and a printed card aren't ordered the same way. All documented in a twenty-page manual, with a full page devoted to the six ways of breaking the brand, drawn out. Then we brought it down to what gets touched: uniform, business card, cap, the sidewalk A-frame and the van lettering. And on that base we rebuilt the whole website, off WordPress and with no page builder in between, with the manual's palette turned into code variables so it can't drift. The piece that sets it apart from any template is the colour tester: it shows any tone applied to a real wall —and two at once, across the two walls in the scene— before anyone asks for a quote.
The result
The brand no longer depends on who applies it: the uniform embroidery, the van vinyl and the sidewalk sign all come from the same file and the same rule, and the page a client opens on their phone uses exactly the same colours as the van parked outside. The new site is in development and will replace the WordPress one: no page builder in between, and with the colour tester as a piece of its own —the one thing on the whole site a competitor can't copy by pasting a template—.
The brand manual
The manual was delivered to the client in Spanish; the pages shown here are the originals.
The initials draw a roller
The mark is built on the initials of the name: the “D” and the two “P”s resolve into a single shape that, read whole, is a paint roller. That's what makes the brand say what the company does before anyone reads the name —useful on a van, which gets seen for three seconds from a moving car—. The construction is fixed on a grid, with a constant 80-degree tilt that keeps proportions and stroke weights uniform at any size.
The air it needs, and how far it shrinks
The protection zone is measured on the mark itself and stays clear on all four sides: that's what keeps it from ending up flush against the edge of a card, or crowded by a headline on a website. The reduction is tested and written down too: at 100% and 60% the full logo still reads, and 20% of the original scale is the floor below which it stops working. That's where the symbol takes over.
Azul Francés and Verde Brillante
Two primary colors and no more: the blue carries the brand and the green is the accent that moves it. Each arrives with its HEX, RGB and CMYK equivalents, and that isn't manual decoration — a vehicle wrap, a printed card and a screen aren't ordered with the same number, and without all three written down each supplier ends up picking their own.
Platino, Negro Carbón and Amarillo Llama
The secondary range comes in where the primary one doesn't reach: platinum for backgrounds and large surfaces, carbon black for text and contrast, and flame yellow for whatever has to be seen from a distance —a sidewalk sign, a warning stripe—. They're kept apart from the primaries on purpose: they're support, and the manual is clear that they don't compete with the blue.
Over a photo, always in its capsule
A painting company lives surrounded by color, so the mark is going to land on backgrounds we don't control: a freshly painted wall, a stack of cans, a job site. The rule is a white capsule around the logo, which guarantees contrast and legibility whatever photo sits underneath. It's the difference between a logo that reads and one that dissolves into the background.
When there's no color available
Single-thread embroidery, a stamp, an engraving or a one-ink ad can't take the color version. That's what the monochrome variants are for, resolved in positive and negative, with the full logo and the symbol separated. They're in the manual because if they aren't handed over, somebody improvises them —and what comes back is a different brand every time—.
Malking Modern, and the lines that order the rest
The brand typeface is Malking Modern: sans-serif, with defined shapes and strong visual presence, chosen so messages land clear rather than decorated. Alongside it, three visual resources that compose everything else —diagonal lines, sinuous lines and photography— which exist so a new piece can be built without inventing anything.
Six ways to break it
The manual devotes a full page to what isn't done, and draws it rather than merely stating it: moving the elements around, splitting them apart, touching the colors, swapping the typeface, and placing the mark over images without enough contrast between figure and ground. They're not there to limit whoever is designing, but so the brand survives the hands it's going to pass through —which in this trade are many: the sign maker, the embroiderer, the printer and whoever builds the next ad—.
The project in pictures
The website, screen by screen
On mobile, where the colour tester works just the same
Try it yourself
This is the piece from Dezma's site, working. Pick a combination —or both colours yourself— and the two walls get painted. It's a single photograph: the colour is masked and multiplied, so it keeps the render's shadows instead of sitting there as a flat patch.
- Your own combination
#254483 · #f2ede4
The accent wall is the smaller one, on the left: roughly a quarter of what gets painted. On Dezma's own site this also works with no JavaScript at all, using native radios and CSS.
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