Dominating the digital frontier

Nephos was formerly known as DS Accountancy, a name born from the initials of the firm’s original founders – an ultimately safe and steady name, albeit dull and predictable. However, they wanted to revolutionise the world of accountancy and lead the industry’s drive to adopt digital accounting practices.

It was up to us to develop a name and brand that would help the company position themselves as the accountancy firm to turn to if you wanted better data, valuable insights and an easier way of working.

We looked high and low for inspiration that would accurately sum up founder Joe David’s mission statement without dating quickly, and found it in Nephos – an ancient Greek term for ‘cloud’. Nephologist is a term still used to this day, meaning someone who analyses patterns in clouds to help forecast the weather. That’s exactly what Joe and his team do – through cloud software, they analyse their client’s figures to help predict what’s coming.

A brand to change the world

As well as choosing a new name, we developed a more contemporary, tech-focused brand that wouldn’t look out of place on the Xero marketplace with other leading fin-tech companies. Our new brand architecture included bespoke icons and illustrations that would remove a typically heavy reliance on the same old generic photography style that seems to be the mainstay of accountancy firm collateral.

Once the brand was agreed, a new website that was more in keeping with the Nephos values became top of the agenda, complete with a decisive tone of voice and stylish design. As with all of our websites, we created a fully responsive site that would look great on every device, and included a full content management system (CMS) so the Nephos team could add news articles and make updates on the fly.

Expert advice

Since the rebrand, we’ve continued to work with Nephos and provided valuable consultancy, with a particular focus on support throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. From the beginning of lockdown to the gradual reopening of the country, we’ve created e-newsletters, designed seminar presentations and helped Nephos to develop a COVID information hub about the latest financial guidelines and support systems.