Duties roots Amby's identity refresh in a hand motif

Duties began by surveying the recruitment category. Across competitors, the visual conventions converged: stock photography of professionals, corporate palettes, and neutral typography choices that left little room for individual brand voice.

"We looked at the competitive landscape and discovered that the majority of brands and websites in the space defaulted to the same playbook," explains Paul Conley, founding partner and senior designer, Duties. "Going for illustration would be the obvious strategic response, as it forces a brand to develop a genuine visual point of view rather than licensing it from a photo library."

From there, the team tested several illustration directions. Some were ruled out on technical grounds, detailed, textural styles that held up at large scale but broke apart at smaller sizes, and techniques too complex to translate into Lottie animations. A cooler, tech-influenced direction survived longer in the process, and Amby initially responded well to it. As Conley puts it, "It looked credible, but it didn't feel like Amby. The warmth and personality they wanted to project just wasn't there."

The warmer, character-driven option won out, and that choice shaped what came next: how the illustrations were drawn, how the system would carry motion, and who would be brought in to animate them.

Around the illustrations, the rest of the system covers wordmark, typography, colour, and photography. The wordmark was redrawn using Lastik, a serif with subtle quirks, featuring a custom ligature that fuses the "A" and "M" into a single unbroken form. Switzer handles body copy, subheadings, and UI, providing a neutral counterpart to Lastik's expressive headlines. The colour palette anchors on beige and off-white, with pinks, purples, and greens as supporting backgrounds and two shared accent colours running between the illustrations and smaller graphic details. Photography uses high-contrast flash work, candid and energetic, capturing how people look when at ease rather than performing for a camera.

With the static system locked, motion was next.

The illustrations themselves were produced inside Duties, but motion was the work of two outside specialists. Because motion was scoped from the start, the illustrations were drawn as vectors using live paths, built to be rigged and animated cleanly later. Federico Leggio, a Sicily-based motion designer Duties has collaborated with across previous projects, took on the new wordmark and the graphic assets for the brand launch reel. Stephen Ong, a UK-based illustrator and motion designer specialising in character animation, animated the hand illustrations themselves through a series of looping Lottie files for the website and other digital channels.

"Initially we had asked Federico to animate the illustrations too, but he suggested we reach out to Stephen Ong for the character animation since that's his specialty. Stephen understood the brief and the brand from the start," explains Paul Conley, founding partner and senior designer at Duties.

Once the static assets were locked, Duties compiled storyboards with basic key frames, sketching how each hand should move and where the logo characters might morph, and handed those over to Leggio and Ong to interpret.

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