Deloitte Sustainability & Climate BrandingZerograding: A Sustainability Brand Built on Reduction
Sector
Sustainability
Role
Design Lead
Year
2021
The Challenge
The Approach
From the start, we agreed one principle with stakeholders: the urgency of the climate crisis calls for clarity, not embellishment. Through Deloitte's two-stage process, we presented three directions, refined the chosen one, and then rolled it out. Reduction became the driving force, in the story and in the design.
The Solution
Deloitte launched a dedicated sustainability unit to help businesses turn decarbonisation from a costly obligation into a business opportunity. It needed a positioning, narrative and identity that would stand out both inside the Deloitte universe and in a sustainability market where branding tends to look the same.
We coined “Zerograding”: upgrading to zero. The Deloitte circle was reduced to its minimum, a thin, elegant ring. The system works as if printed in black ink on coloured paper, with no unnecessary elements or complicated compositions. It carried across the campaign and a full set of templates.
Impact
“Zerograding” still leads the unit's headline on Deloitte's site in 2026, and the identity carried the launch film “The Winning Piece” (84K+ YouTube views).