Tabono, the African investment group behind mining, energy and logistics operations across the continent, is named after a symbol that means "oar." I found that symbol, proposed the name, and set the creative direction the brand still runs on today — through the original identity and, years later, the current tabono.com website. This is what fractional creative direction looks like over the life of one brand: different designers, different years, one accountable creative holding the concept.
Where does a brand name actually come from?
Not from a word generator. The brief was a South African investment firm with a clear promise — helping African businesses realise their full potential — and a conviction I stand behind: boring companies have boring names. So instead of shortlisting safe finance words, I went looking in the Adinkra symbols of West Africa, a visual language where each mark stands for a proverb or a value.
One symbol stopped the search. Tabono: four paddles joined at the centre. It means "oar," and it stands for unity of purpose, strength, confidence and hard work to reach a destination. For an investment firm built on partnering — not just funding — it wasn't a name that suited the strategy. It was the strategy, compressed into three syllables.
The proverb that anchored the original presentation made the same point: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
The logo I didn't draw
I'll say this plainly, because case studies that blur credit are worthless: I did not produce the final logo artwork. Brand Smiths developed the finished logo and CI — the strategy phase ran as a BrandingLab collaboration with Jack Be Nimble. What I brought was the concept and the direction: the tabono symbol itself as the mark, rendered in orange against deep navy, sitting beside a clean wordmark with one orange accent on the T.
That division of labour is how strong identities usually get made. The test of a logo concept is whether it survives someone else's hands. This one did, because it could be described in a single sentence before it was drawn: the name is a symbol — use the symbol.
From name to brand system
The rest of the brand fell out of the name rather than out of a values workshop. Unity and inclusion. Purpose. Hard work. Commitment. Those became Tabono's stated values because the symbol already meant them — the CI document, the palette (navy and orange), and the first website's positioning all extended one idea instead of inventing four.
That's the practical payoff of concept-first naming: every downstream deliverable gets cheaper and more coherent, because nobody has to re-decide what the brand is at each step. I've written about treating a website as a business system rather than a brochure — the same logic applies a level up. A name can be a system too.
Does the concept still hold years later?
This is the only test that matters, and most naming case studies are written too early to run it. The company Tabono is today has outgrown the original deck several times over — the group now spans minerals and metals, energy, sourcing and procurement, logistics and transaction due diligence.
The current website, which I designed together with Pelumi in Figma and which is live at tabono.com, looks nothing like the first one. It's bold and editorial: oversized type, "Where resources meet results" as the opening line, "Equity. Expertise. Experience." as the frame, and the tabono symbol used as a window cut into photography of the operations themselves. Different design language. Same oar.
That's the point. When a name is just a sound, every redesign is a small identity crisis. When the name is a concept, a redesign is a reinterpretation — the idea stays, the expression moves with the company.
What does a fractional creative director actually do?
A fractional creative director owns the brand's creative decisions end to end without being a full-time hire — and Tabono is the long-form proof of what that ownership buys. The deliverables are easy to list: name, logo concept, identity direction, two websites. The service underneath them is the continuity — one senior creative holding the thread while Jack Be Nimble ran strategy alongside me, Brand Smiths executed the CI, and Pelumi built the current site with me. Direction is the constant; execution is cast per project.
That's the model I run at BrandingLab — brand, build, ship, owned by one accountable creative — and it's the same discipline I apply when the client is me: the Gazette-Search build is the software version of this story. If your company has grown past its name, its identity, or the website wrapped around them, talk to me.