Bonatar

Forty-five years on shuttle systems, AGVs and automated intralogistics, most recently as Safety Director at Movu Robotics. Now independent, and needing to look it.

He had a logo and a short brandbook. No website, no brand system to apply, and a market that reads across Dutch, French and English, because that is what selling into Belgian and EU automated warehousing actually requires.

The constraint that shaped everything: this is a practice of one. Whatever we built had to be operable by a machinery safety engineer, not a marketing team.

We measured his logo instead of looking at it. Three faults, none of them visible until the geometry was computed.

The E was sixteen units out of alignment. The three bars of the CE monogram were centred on y=240. The arc beside them is centred on y=256. Every application of that mark had been slightly, invisibly wrong.

The arc’s radius was fiction. The file said r=170. That radius cannot close a 372-unit chord, so every browser and every print RIP silently inflated it to 186. The artwork did not describe its own output.

The two supplied files disagreed with each other. The icon drew its bars with square ends; the horizontal lockup drew the same path with round ones.

All three were corrected, and the mark rebuilt from a written construction spec. Every dimension is expressed in units of one variable, so anyone can redraw it from the brand guide alone.

A brand system around the logo he already owned. Three directions, none of them touching his mark. The chosen one, Marking Plate, takes its language from the machine rating plates his practice assesses: chamfered nameplate blocks, hazard banding, rating-plate data fields.

An eight-variant seal. Gold on deep navy as primary, plus brand blue, black and white fields, and four single-colour versions for stamps, engraving and one-colour print. Hand-built vector throughout, with a real cut of clear space around the check so it stays legible reversed, in one colour, or over photography.

A 14-page brand guide, and a custom WordPress block theme written for Bonatar, where the navigation, the call to action, the mark, the language switcher and the SEO head are each generated in one place, so a change lands in all three languages at once.

Five pages in three languages. Localised URL paths, language detection and hreflang built into the theme. No multilingual plugin, no per-language duplicate of the template, nothing extra to license or maintain.

Advisory, written down. Booking platforms compared on the one criterion that decides it. Mail deliverability audited: the domain had no MX records, so anything sent to it bounced. Both were written up as decisions with prices attached, for him to make.

Design directions were built as real pages, not mood boards. The static build came before the CMS, because it is faster to iterate and it becomes the reference the theme has to match. Photography shows AGVs and automated intralogistics, which is what he actually works on.

Every deployment was verified against the live URLs in all three languages rather than assumed.