The Peptide Branding Checklist

1. Positioning — before any visual work

The endorsed-versus-standalone question is the one people skip and it changes everything downstream. A program offered under an existing practice's brand inherits trust and must match that practice's aesthetic. A standalone brand starts from zero and has to build credibility into the design itself.

• One sentence describing what you do, that a stranger would understand
• The specific buyer, named precisely enough to build a list from
• What you compete on, given that the product is not differentiated
• Three competitors and what specifically you do differently — not “better quality”
• Whether this is a standalone brand or an endorsed sub-brand of an existing practice
• The price position — premium, accessible, or wholesale — because it constrains every design decision

2. Terminology — the deliverable people underestimate

Settle the vocabulary before the name. What the offering is called. What buyers are called. What each stage of the process is called. And the specific list of words you will never use.

This is a two-hour conversation that saves months. Once it is written down, every writer, agency, and staff member has the same reference, and you stop relitigating the same question every quarter. It is also what makes eventual legal review a single pass instead of four.

• The offering, in one phrase, used identically everywhere
• What you call buyers — members, clients, partners, accounts
• What each process stage is called — application, intake, assessment, onboarding
• The never-use list, agreed with counsel
• How you describe any practitioner or review role
• How you describe what you do not do
• Approved boilerplate for bios, decks, and directory listings

3. Naming and clearance

1. Define constraints first: tone, descriptive versus abstract, and words that are off the table.
2. Generate broadly — forty to sixty candidates across several strategies. Most die immediately, which is the point.
3. Screen availability together: exact-match .com and the primary social handles at the same time. Available on three of four is usually a skip.
4. Run a preliminary trademark database search to eliminate obvious conflicts before anyone gets attached.
5. Shortlist five to eight with rationale and availability, set as wordmarks so you can see them.
6. Take the chosen name to a trademark attorney. Screening is not clearance and the gap is where expensive mistakes live.

4. The identity system

• Primary logo in SVG plus PNG at every size, built to work at 24 pixels and at large scale
• Secondary mark for tight spaces — app icons, avatars, favicons
• Favicon set covering the sizes browsers and platforms actually request
• Color system with hex values and documented contrast ratios for every text pairing
• Colors that fail AA marked explicitly as accent-only
• Type system with a full scale from caption to display, and licensing resolved
• Social profile assets sized per platform
• Business card, letterhead, and email signature templates
• A written guide covering voice, terminology, and usage rules

5. Visual clichés to avoid

Three motifs dominate this category and all three cost credibility. The molecule — connected spheres in a hexagon, gradient blue — appears on hundreds of sites, says nothing specific, and signals a logo commissioned from a search for “science logo”. The syringe or vial pushes your marketing into visual territory that raises exactly the questions you do not want raised. The purple-to-blue gradient has become shorthand for generic technology.

None of these are unusable. They are crowded, and in a category where buyers are already unsure who to trust, looking like every other entrant is an active disadvantage.

The alternative is unglamorous and effective: wordmark-led identity, restrained palettes, real typographic craft, and a monogram or geometric device that works at small sizes. Look like a business, not like a stock illustration of science.

6. Test it in situ before you approve it

An identity presented on a white slide always looks good. The test is how it behaves in the places it will actually live, and identities that pass the slide test regularly fail the real one.

• The logo at favicon size, in a browser tab, next to other tabs
• The wordmark in a website header at real scale
• The palette across a full page, not as swatches
• Body text in the chosen typeface at 16 pixels on a phone
• The mark as a social avatar, cropped to a circle
• The palette in an email client that strips your CSS
• Everything in greyscale, for the documents that will inevitably be printed in black and white