Here are the stories behind some of our work. Projects that were completed in just a few weeks sit alongside programmes that lasted eight years. Clients range from global companies to individuals.

Melodramatic Records is the musical hot-house, producers and managers who are behind the huge success of singers like Amy Macdonald. Their new site, soon to be launched, is designed to provide a simple CMS system so that staff can keep content up to the minute. It also provides visitors with the facility to book tickets for gigs and tours directly with venue operators. The media rich presentation is supported by a rigorous approach to clarity and ease of use.

The site for Charles Strohmer faced us with some interesting (not a euphemism for 'difficult') tasks. Chief among these was the archive of long articles with fairly academic content and how these could be presented on screen with typography that is every bit as sophisticated as any printed publication. The architecture of the site and the subtlety of page construction has been very helpful to us as well in terms of exploring just how far we can go with typography on a fully content managed site.

Bourne Development is a training and development company with a remarkable breadth of vision and depth of experience. This site, still in development, has to establish a personality quite distinct from others in the field. The content, as always, is manageable by their staff, but unusually it has to enable a high level of personal support for clients, both through online coaching forums and an online course booking system complete with course material provision.

The story of the British Library is the story of more than a dozen eminent and scholarly institutions forced to operate as a single entity by an Act of Parliament. (The British Museum Library, The Patent Office Library, The Newspaper Library, The National Sound Archive, The National Lending Library for Science and Technology and so on) The diverse cultures and histories of these formerly independant bodies made for an uncomfortable process when it came to devising a single corporate brand for the new body. At first the Library's leaders had gone down the usual path of commissioning a design company to devise a symbol to be worn as a badge by every 'division' (what a telling and eloquent word that is, and how ironic). As a result there wasn't a single part of the Library that had not experienced that process as one of loss.

When Legend's leaders were brought in we realised that damage to the very idea of having a brand had already been made irrevocable. So we took a different line, one that might help resolve the tension and still produce a strong brand. This we did by proposing an 'anti-identity'. There would be no corporate symbol or logo, there would be no overbearing image, no designed device.

There was something vaguely absurd about the idea of a new symbol for the Library anyway. By definition the British Library holds the most complete collection of human thoughts and mark-making of any organisation. Concocting a tricksy little piece of graphics seemed to us to be almost an insult to those incredible collections.

Instead we developed a very simple way of writing the Library's name. This was to be supported by the liberal use of imagery from the collections of each part of the library so that it was the diversity of the component functions that was emphasised. All this was to be supported by focusing on the use of the finest traditions of typography used to express the clearest and most refined use of language in all literature, in building signs and on the new building's site hoarding, in process information and in exhibitions.

By doing this, and by doing it together, we managed to achieve something remarkable. The British Library's brand became a celebration of all that was richest and most valuable. In everything the Library produced it proclaimed, by the way in which those things were produced, 'This is what we are about and it is wonderful!"

Did the strategy work, though? Did it help heal the tension between the departments and the main board? Looking at the Library now, more than a decade on, and with its brand at least one iteration further on, we can see that the old department names have all but disappeared. The British Library now expresses a singular identity, with the distinctions of its parts defined by purpose and subject, not by historical name. The divisional structure is no longer divisive. So, yes, we'd say it worked.

Known predominantly as a manufacturer of electronics products and for their position in the market delivering value, Samsung was not known as a company delivering service packages in the business to business sector. But when presented with a new approach to the management of huge fleets of office printing machines, an approach that could open the door to strategic relationships with the biggest client companies in the world and all the dominant resellers, the opportunity demanded a fresh approach.

For the first time Samsung had to define part of its busines by telling the story not of a product but of a relationship and what this would deliver. And for the first time Samsung had to think in terms of having clients rather than customers.

As members of the strategic development team, we worked to develop a compelling narrative for SamPage, the first truly open print management system. In just a few weeks, working with Akiko, one of our favourite digital design and development companies, we built the content and narrative architecture for a micro site and wrote the scripts for exhibition animations which would tell the story of this radical development at CeBit.

The launch was headline news in trade journals and among resellers, achieving the targets set for the first year of operations in just six weeks of follow-through from the exhibition.

Royal Mail needed to give every business in the UK access to postcode information and vital intelligence on the benefits of correct addressing. While digital media would eventually answer this need there was a period of some ten years while a nationally distributed printed directory would have to be produced.

Legend researched the nature of the information that would be most useful to small businesses and worked with Royal Mail on the conduct of the preliminary procurement process for the printing, assessing the bidders who responded to the Journal notice. We then wrote and designed the service information and designed the technical typography for the listings. This was the beginning of a project that lasted eight years where we functioned as their publisher, addressing both tactical and strategic issues.

But the real product of our work was not the achievement of eight annual rounds of publication, it was the successful outcome of a cycle of publishing and design projects to reduce production cost. The first tranch of work reduced production costs by more than £2millions a year with a further reduction of more than a million in the third year through revisions to the publishing model.

Directories are not the most glamorous product upon which to work. But with outcomes this concrete and performance measures this clear, the long and happy relationship with Royal Mail was a very satisfying one.

Safe Productions is a dynamic social enterprise based in Bootle. They work with a wide community with a hugely varied demographic and significant deprivation. Safe have grown substantially over their first ten years and now have to to tread that very fine line to remain entirely accessible to their constituent communities and speak about what they do in ways that work for large funding agencies and public sector commissioners. No easy task. Their new site, content and design, is the result of very close collaboration and some quite penetrating conversations.

Pink Homes specializes in the development of affordable housing. Energetic and intelligent, the company is addressing head-on the complexities of the affordability systems and regulatory controls as well as taking a mature and balanced view on rural regeneration. This meant that their new website had to both make the issues of affordable housing easy for the visitor to understand and to address the politically sensitive lobbies surrounding rural development.

The United Nations UNDP programme is another of those that cannot be shown. It does not have an appearance. As another purely consultative process it is for the client alone to demonstrate its effect. We were commissioned to consider a wide range of scenarios, audiences and messages and to devise both a governing policy and supporting documenation to facilitate a new approach to public advocacy.

Reflecting increasing concern over public opinion of UNDP policies and projects, this project established ground rules for public advocacy that could function away from the country desks and regional diplomacy. Aware that much of this opinion was being generated by the representations of press and media, which were not always as independent of political agendas as one might like, the task of public advocacy was being made more difficult because of the traditional reluctance of the UN to defend itself in the eyes of the public. The question rapidly became about the balance between truth-telling and self-defense! And not least about what sort of narrative tools and what sort of public speach is appropriate for such an organization. In practice, however, this often came down to issues of emotional intelligence. For example, if UNDP maintained its rather statesman-like dignity how does this not come across as aloofness? As ever, the answers were found in the process of story-telling.

This was the root from which most of our thinking has grown. Chris Bourne, the founder of Legend, was on the senior management team in British Telecom through the period of the liberalisation of the telecoms market through to the privatisation of BT. As Head of Environmental Design and Information Design part of his portfolio was to act, effectively, as BT's corporate publisher.

When a brand as big as BT's is facing change as fundamental as privatisation it is absurd to discuss the brand in terms of symbols and logotypes. These are but a tiny fraction of the real task of the brand. In this case the task of the brand was to point the way forward, internally and externally, through some very concrete and challenging realities. Not least of which was to develop the language and behaviours of a service driven corporation. The loss of monopoly was, in the event, far easier to handle than the erosion of the attitudes and values that thrive within monopoly.

BT had to learn to talk to people very differently and this was a task that occupied the imaginations of the leadership teams for probably fifteen years or more. Perhaps it still does. But it was in this period and within the complexities of BT that the foundational understanding that now guides Legend were forged.

The situation that all companies now face with the erosion of the power of advertising slots, the increased discretion available to audiences, the need to win the attention and the interest of customers and staff alike were all prefigured in the changes within BT twenty years ago.

That's why there are no pictures in this section. To show any individual project would be misleading. Through those years Chris worked with almost every major design company in the UK, providing the leadership that this level of design management demands. And with all this, developing the first truly coherent philosophy of the brand as a relational, narrative-driven expression of corporate personality.

Silver Fox is the site of a young creative social entrepreneur who is facing severe health issues and seeking a way to maintain her creative output and build social enterprise that fits better with her restricted capacities. The site features a full content management system, a subscription based forum and full dual language versions.

Willmott Dixon is a nation-wide construction company with a huge portfolio of public sector and infrastructure projects to its name. Remarkably it has been voted the best place to work in the industry for several years. Less remarkable, perhaps, is that a leadership team that has the wit and imagination to earn this award has also created a corporate culture and management style second to none, in any industry. Maybe it takes people like this to want to commission a publisher in the preparation of some of their most important public sector negotiations. But when the presentation of information, in bids that require several feet of shelf space for a single copy, counts for ten percent of the marks awarded, the idea begins to make a lot of sense.

We have now worked with Willmott Dixon and several different consortia on four complete negotiations under BSF (Building Schools for the Future). This is a massively complex and costly process, PFI on steroids, which is enormously demanding of the private sector actors. In most cases we took the role of consortium publisher, coordinating and collating the technical responses to exam questions and architectural solutions, then writing and editing these into cogent and coherent arguments for sample schemes through the ITD stages and then packaging the outcome in various media. Three of the four schemes were won. The fourth was withdrawn by the LEP for commercial reasons.

Martina Nagel is a film maker from Germany, now working in LA. We have worked together on a number of feature and documentary projects, pitches and synopses so it only seemed appropriate, when it came to developing her showreel website, that we should continue to do this together. A relatively simple site, this has to demonstrate movie clips, stills and sound files in an elegant manner and deliver easily copies of the many articles Martina has written for ScreenWriter magazine. Her philosophy of film and the obligatory credits list and other material are all accommodated in a site with few pages but with some warmth and wit.

Legend is a provider of services with very extensive experience of being a client! We have seen thousands of presentations, portfolios of work and websites from Design Companies. The good ones, the ones that really have something to say, stand out a mile.

So when one of our favourite digital design groups asked us to work on their brand narrative the project was a pleasure and a privilege. Unlike so many design companies Akiko do have something to say. They are an exception to the inarticulate majority. They are also exceptional because they are as adept and sophisticated as back end developers as they are as front end designers.

We have worked some great projects in collaboration with and in pleasant development for Akiko for a while now... long may it continue!

Our aim for this site was to provide an interim solution while much more radical rethinking is underway. We found form, structure and language for Akiko's perceptions and skills, and we developed a way for them to describe the work they have done (this is still basically a portfolio site) and, more importantly, a way to describe the effect of their work for their clients.

Era Gallery is a Fine Arts Trade Guild approved arts presentation company. We like their approach very much largely because of their commitment to working with people who are marginalised or suffering mental health issues and consequently find it difficult to find employment. Oh, and they are very good framers too.

Legend wrote and developed the site through its first stage of evolution and is looking forward to continuing this process as Era grows.

Codex is a highly specialised strategic media consultancy providing expert guidance geared to the needs of large pharmaceuticals companies and medical media organisations. Its audience is high level, and therefore so is its approach to content.

Legend devised the name, audited the IP issues and provided the narrative architecture for the website which is pretty much the only public manifestation of the brand. We wrote the advocacy structure (the logic of the argument and the sort of rhetoric that befits this sort of specialised subject) and then we did the easy part, writing the text. The site design and engineering is by our friends Akiko.

Genius says that it is not a company, it is a joined up way of thinking. Having been involved with the idea of Genius from its inception we would say that it is really a conversation - a wonderful, inspiring, exploration of possibility. It's subject? Not disimilar to our subject here at Legend and very much part of our inspiration. Genius is a conversation about making stories for places, integrating the work of artists, writers, theatre designers, film makers and architects.

This piece of work grew from one of those conversations. A triple acrostic, three intermingling stories that all mean the same thing but are expressed differently depending on which level of the text you are reading.

We got to this point in the development of this site and thought 'We've been really sniffy about symbols and logos.'

So, just to show that this important aspect of brand development isn't ignored completely and that we are not slaves to our own rhetoric...

Here's a symbol for a small dynamic property development company. E-Build likes Es. Energetic, Elegant, Efficient and caring for Environment, E-Build needed the shortest sort of shorthand that would evoke these qualities.

The cross section of a nautilus shell is one of nature's wonders. The astonishing perfection of its internal geometry, the simple beauty of its shape, its way of echoing the shape of the letter e, and the fact that the shell is home for the nautilus, together with the fact that its legacy is not only harmless but rather lovely, made its use pretty easy to argue.

So, there you go, some graphics.