Skip to content CDG is a brand, technology and marketing agency in Dublin, working with organisations across Ireland and internationally since 1989.
Below are answers to the questions clients most often ask us about our three core areas: brand and graphic design, web design and development, and digital marketing including SEO and GEO. If your question isn’t covered here, get in touch and we’ll answer it directly.
A brand design agency defines how a business looks, sounds and is understood by its audience, then builds the systems that keep that consistent everywhere it shows up. At CDG, that spans brand strategy (positioning, tone, values), visual identity (logo, colour, typography), and the guidelines that keep every touchpoint — from a website to a van livery — recognisably on-brand. The goal isn’t a nicer logo; it’s a business that communicates more clearly and is easier to trust.
Brand strategy is the thinking: who you’re for, what you stand for, and how you’re positioned against competitors. Brand identity is the expression of that thinking: the logo, colour palette, typography and visual system people actually see. Strategy should always come first — an identity built without a strategy behind it tends to look good but say nothing. CDG treats the two as one continuous process rather than separate jobs.
CDG’s brand strategy process is built around two structured two-hour sessions with your team, working through positioning, audience, tone of voice and values in detail. Techniques used include market and competitor assessment, customer journey mapping, brand archetypes and personas, and design-thinking workshops. The output is a clear, documented strategy — not just a workshop deck — that guides every design and marketing decision that follows.
Not every business needs to start from zero. If your positioning still holds but the visual identity feels dated or inconsistent, a refresh — tightening the logo, palette and guidelines — is usually faster and less disruptive than a full rebrand. A full rebrand makes sense when the strategy itself has changed: new market, new audience, a merger, or a reputation the business needs to move away from. CDG typically starts with a brand audit to establish which one you actually need.
A brand guidelines document (or “brand book”) sets out exactly how your identity should be used — logo spacing and colour variants, typography, imagery style, tone of voice, and rules for sub-brands or campaign work. Without one, consistency erodes as more people (staff, agencies, printers, partners) touch the brand, and it starts looking different in every channel. It’s the reference document that keeps a growing organisation looking and sounding like one business.
A logo is one piece of a much larger system. CDG builds full identity systems that include colour palettes, typeface families, iconography, photography and graphic style, sub-branding frameworks for departments or product lines, and templates for common materials. Building it as a system, rather than a set of one-off assets, means it holds up consistently as the business grows, adds products, or expands into new markets.
CDG has designed brand identities across a wide range of sectors, including aviation, construction, education, engineering, finance, FMCG, food service, hospitality, industrial, pharma, property, public sector and retail, for organisations ranging from state bodies to consumer brands. Sector experience matters less than the process used to get there — but a design partner who has already worked through the specific compliance, stakeholder or market pressures of your industry will usually get to a stronger result faster.
A rebrand should be judged against the strategic problem it was meant to solve — clearer market positioning, easier recognition, stronger trust, or better conversion — not just whether people like the new logo. CDG ties identity work back to the original brand strategy and business objectives, so success is measurable in things like brand recall, consistency across channels, and downstream marketing performance, rather than subjective opinion.
Yes. Brand identity and guidelines are designed to be handed off and used by other teams — internal marketing staff, other agencies, developers, or print partners — which is exactly why the guidelines document matters. CDG can deliver identity work as a standalone engagement that plugs into your existing setup, or run it alongside our own web and digital marketing teams for a single joined-up rollout.
Web design is how a site looks and how users move through it — layout, visual identity, user experience. Web development is the engineering that makes it work — the build, the code, the integrations, and the systems behind the scenes. CDG runs both as a single process rather than handing a design over a wall to a separate build team, so the visual identity and the underlying functionality are considered together from the start.
Timelines depend heavily on scope — a brochure site is a very different project to a custom web application or eCommerce platform with integrations. What determines the timeline more than anything is how quickly content, brand assets and feedback come back from the client side. CDG scopes each project individually after an initial discovery conversation, rather than quoting a single blanket timeframe that doesn’t reflect the actual work involved.
Yes. CDG builds eCommerce platforms alongside brochure sites, custom web applications and digital integrations, choosing the underlying technology and content management system based on what the business actually needs rather than defaulting to one platform. All builds follow best-practice standards for accessibility, performance and long-term reliability, which matters as much for a transactional store as it does for a marketing site.
CDG works across a range of technologies and content management systems and selects the right one for each project’s requirements, rather than being tied to a single platform. The right choice depends on factors like content volume, who will be updating the site day-to-day, integration needs, and budget — which is why platform selection happens after discovery, not before it.
Low-carbon website design means building sites with lighter, more efficient code and hosting them on energy-efficient infrastructure, so each page load uses less energy without compromising quality or performance. CDG treats this as good practice by default: efficient sites are typically faster and cheaper to run as well as lower-impact, so the sustainability benefit and the performance benefit point the same way.
Accessible websites work properly for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology — which in practice also means faster load times, cleaner code and better usability for everyone. It’s increasingly a legal requirement in many sectors, and it directly affects how well search engines and AI systems can read and understand your site. CDG builds accessibility into every site as standard practice, not as an add-on.
Yes — every site CDG builds is designed responsively across desktop, tablet and mobile from the outset, rather than being designed for desktop and adapted afterwards. Given how much traffic now arrives on mobile, and how directly mobile usability affects both search rankings and AI search visibility, this is treated as a baseline requirement rather than an optional extra.
Yes. CDG builds custom integrations that connect a new website to existing business tools — CRM systems, booking platforms, inventory, marketing automation and similar — so a rebuild doesn’t mean starting your operational systems from scratch. Integration needs are mapped out during discovery so the underlying architecture is built to support them rather than bolted on afterwards.
A website is treated as a long-term system rather than a one-off project: CDG designs for long-term reliability and maintainability from the start, and can continue to support updates, performance monitoring and content changes after launch. Ask about the specific support arrangement for your project during scoping, as this varies depending on the platform and complexity of the build.
SEO optimises a website to rank in traditional search engine results pages, like Google’s blue links. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimises content to be found, understood and cited by AI-powered search tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and similar — which increasingly answer questions directly rather than sending people to a results page. The two overlap heavily (both reward clear structure, authority and genuinely useful content) but GEO puts extra weight on natural-language Q&A formatting, structured data, and content that directly and concisely answers a real question.
It covers SEO and content strategy, paid media, email campaigns, social media, video and content creation, and campaign automation, run as one integrated system rather than separate disconnected channels. The approach is data-driven: analysing how people discover, interact with and respond to a brand, then continuously refining targeting, messaging and budget based on what’s actually working, with a focus on measurable ROI rather than activity for its own sake.
It depends on the audience and the objective, not a fixed rule. CDG typically manages LinkedIn (strong for B2B and lead generation), Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (visual storytelling and consumer reach), and X, tailoring the strategy, content and tone to each platform rather than posting identical content everywhere. The starting point is always who you’re trying to reach and what you want them to do next.
Through performance tracking tied to business outcomes — not just impressions or likes, but measurable results like leads, conversions, engagement quality and cost-efficiency over time. Campaigns are treated as systems to be continuously optimised: targeting, messaging and budget allocation are adjusted based on real performance data rather than set once and left alone.
Performance marketing is advertising and content designed around measurable outcomes — clicks, leads, sales, cost per acquisition — with budget and targeting adjusted continuously based on that data. Traditional advertising is often bought and evaluated on reach or impressions alone. CDG’s approach ties performance marketing back to brand strategy as well, so campaigns stay recognisably on-brand while still being accountable to real numbers.
A website and social media do different jobs: the website is where people go to evaluate and convert, while social media is where most people first discover a brand, build familiarity with it, and get reminded to come back. Without an active social presence, a strong website can end up under-discovered. CDG treats social, web and brand as parts of one connected system rather than competing priorities.
Every channel — web, social, paid media, email — runs on content, and CDG’s content production covers photography, videography, photo and video editing, scriptwriting, copywriting and voice-over, all produced to align with brand strategy rather than as generic stock-style assets. Producing this in-house, aligned with strategy from the outset, keeps messaging and visual tone consistent across every channel it appears in.
SEO and GEO are compounding disciplines rather than instant fixes — meaningful movement typically takes a number of months, since both search engines and AI systems need to crawl, evaluate and build trust in content before ranking or citing it consistently. Quick wins (technical fixes, clearer page structure, better-answered questions) can show up sooner, but sustained ranking and citation improvements build over an ongoing programme of work, not a single project.
They work best together. Marketing that isn’t grounded in a clear brand strategy tends to be inconsistent and forgettable, while a brand strategy that never reaches an audience delivers no commercial value. CDG runs brand, web and digital marketing as one connected discipline, so positioning defined in a strategy session shows up consistently in the identity, the website and every marketing channel that follows.
CDG is a brand, technology and marketing agency in Dublin, working with organisations across Ireland and internationally since 1989.
Below are answers to the questions clients most often ask us about our three core areas: brand and graphic design, web design and development, and digital marketing including SEO and GEO. If your question isn’t covered here, get in touch and we’ll answer it directly.
A brand design agency defines how a business looks, sounds and is understood by its audience, then builds the systems that keep that consistent everywhere it shows up. At CDG, that spans brand strategy (positioning, tone, values), visual identity (logo, colour, typography), and the guidelines that keep every touchpoint — from a website to a van livery — recognisably on-brand. The goal isn’t a nicer logo; it’s a business that communicates more clearly and is easier to trust.
Brand strategy is the thinking: who you’re for, what you stand for, and how you’re positioned against competitors. Brand identity is the expression of that thinking: the logo, colour palette, typography and visual system people actually see. Strategy should always come first — an identity built without a strategy behind it tends to look good but say nothing. CDG treats the two as one continuous process rather than separate jobs.
CDG’s brand strategy process is built around two structured two-hour sessions with your team, working through positioning, audience, tone of voice and values in detail. Techniques used include market and competitor assessment, customer journey mapping, brand archetypes and personas, and design-thinking workshops. The output is a clear, documented strategy — not just a workshop deck — that guides every design and marketing decision that follows.
Not every business needs to start from zero. If your positioning still holds but the visual identity feels dated or inconsistent, a refresh — tightening the logo, palette and guidelines — is usually faster and less disruptive than a full rebrand. A full rebrand makes sense when the strategy itself has changed: new market, new audience, a merger, or a reputation the business needs to move away from. CDG typically starts with a brand audit to establish which one you actually need.
A brand guidelines document (or “brand book”) sets out exactly how your identity should be used — logo spacing and colour variants, typography, imagery style, tone of voice, and rules for sub-brands or campaign work. Without one, consistency erodes as more people (staff, agencies, printers, partners) touch the brand, and it starts looking different in every channel. It’s the reference document that keeps a growing organisation looking and sounding like one business.
A logo is one piece of a much larger system. CDG builds full identity systems that include colour palettes, typeface families, iconography, photography and graphic style, sub-branding frameworks for departments or product lines, and templates for common materials. Building it as a system, rather than a set of one-off assets, means it holds up consistently as the business grows, adds products, or expands into new markets.
CDG has designed brand identities across a wide range of sectors, including aviation, construction, education, engineering, finance, FMCG, food service, hospitality, industrial, pharma, property, public sector and retail, for organisations ranging from state bodies to consumer brands. Sector experience matters less than the process used to get there — but a design partner who has already worked through the specific compliance, stakeholder or market pressures of your industry will usually get to a stronger result faster.
A rebrand should be judged against the strategic problem it was meant to solve — clearer market positioning, easier recognition, stronger trust, or better conversion — not just whether people like the new logo. CDG ties identity work back to the original brand strategy and business objectives, so success is measurable in things like brand recall, consistency across channels, and downstream marketing performance, rather than subjective opinion.
Yes. Brand identity and guidelines are designed to be handed off and used by other teams — internal marketing staff, other agencies, developers, or print partners — which is exactly why the guidelines document matters. CDG can deliver identity work as a standalone engagement that plugs into your existing setup, or run it alongside our own web and digital marketing teams for a single joined-up rollout.
Web design is how a site looks and how users move through it — layout, visual identity, user experience. Web development is the engineering that makes it work — the build, the code, the integrations, and the systems behind the scenes. CDG runs both as a single process rather than handing a design over a wall to a separate build team, so the visual identity and the underlying functionality are considered together from the start.
Timelines depend heavily on scope — a brochure site is a very different project to a custom web application or eCommerce platform with integrations. What determines the timeline more than anything is how quickly content, brand assets and feedback come back from the client side. CDG scopes each project individually after an initial discovery conversation, rather than quoting a single blanket timeframe that doesn’t reflect the actual work involved.
Yes. CDG builds eCommerce platforms alongside brochure sites, custom web applications and digital integrations, choosing the underlying technology and content management system based on what the business actually needs rather than defaulting to one platform. All builds follow best-practice standards for accessibility, performance and long-term reliability, which matters as much for a transactional store as it does for a marketing site.
CDG works across a range of technologies and content management systems and selects the right one for each project’s requirements, rather than being tied to a single platform. The right choice depends on factors like content volume, who will be updating the site day-to-day, integration needs, and budget — which is why platform selection happens after discovery, not before it.
Low-carbon website design means building sites with lighter, more efficient code and hosting them on energy-efficient infrastructure, so each page load uses less energy without compromising quality or performance. CDG treats this as good practice by default: efficient sites are typically faster and cheaper to run as well as lower-impact, so the sustainability benefit and the performance benefit point the same way.
Accessible websites work properly for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology — which in practice also means faster load times, cleaner code and better usability for everyone. It’s increasingly a legal requirement in many sectors, and it directly affects how well search engines and AI systems can read and understand your site. CDG builds accessibility into every site as standard practice, not as an add-on.
Yes — every site CDG builds is designed responsively across desktop, tablet and mobile from the outset, rather than being designed for desktop and adapted afterwards. Given how much traffic now arrives on mobile, and how directly mobile usability affects both search rankings and AI search visibility, this is treated as a baseline requirement rather than an optional extra.
Yes. CDG builds custom integrations that connect a new website to existing business tools — CRM systems, booking platforms, inventory, marketing automation and similar — so a rebuild doesn’t mean starting your operational systems from scratch. Integration needs are mapped out during discovery so the underlying architecture is built to support them rather than bolted on afterwards.
A website is treated as a long-term system rather than a one-off project: CDG designs for long-term reliability and maintainability from the start, and can continue to support updates, performance monitoring and content changes after launch. Ask about the specific support arrangement for your project during scoping, as this varies depending on the platform and complexity of the build.
SEO optimises a website to rank in traditional search engine results pages, like Google’s blue links. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimises content to be found, understood and cited by AI-powered search tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and similar — which increasingly answer questions directly rather than sending people to a results page. The two overlap heavily (both reward clear structure, authority and genuinely useful content) but GEO puts extra weight on natural-language Q&A formatting, structured data, and content that directly and concisely answers a real question.
It covers SEO and content strategy, paid media, email campaigns, social media, video and content creation, and campaign automation, run as one integrated system rather than separate disconnected channels. The approach is data-driven: analysing how people discover, interact with and respond to a brand, then continuously refining targeting, messaging and budget based on what’s actually working, with a focus on measurable ROI rather than activity for its own sake.
It depends on the audience and the objective, not a fixed rule. CDG typically manages LinkedIn (strong for B2B and lead generation), Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (visual storytelling and consumer reach), and X, tailoring the strategy, content and tone to each platform rather than posting identical content everywhere. The starting point is always who you’re trying to reach and what you want them to do next.
Through performance tracking tied to business outcomes — not just impressions or likes, but measurable results like leads, conversions, engagement quality and cost-efficiency over time. Campaigns are treated as systems to be continuously optimised: targeting, messaging and budget allocation are adjusted based on real performance data rather than set once and left alone.
Performance marketing is advertising and content designed around measurable outcomes — clicks, leads, sales, cost per acquisition — with budget and targeting adjusted continuously based on that data. Traditional advertising is often bought and evaluated on reach or impressions alone. CDG’s approach ties performance marketing back to brand strategy as well, so campaigns stay recognisably on-brand while still being accountable to real numbers.
A website and social media do different jobs: the website is where people go to evaluate and convert, while social media is where most people first discover a brand, build familiarity with it, and get reminded to come back. Without an active social presence, a strong website can end up under-discovered. CDG treats social, web and brand as parts of one connected system rather than competing priorities.
Every channel — web, social, paid media, email — runs on content, and CDG’s content production covers photography, videography, photo and video editing, scriptwriting, copywriting and voice-over, all produced to align with brand strategy rather than as generic stock-style assets. Producing this in-house, aligned with strategy from the outset, keeps messaging and visual tone consistent across every channel it appears in.
SEO and GEO are compounding disciplines rather than instant fixes — meaningful movement typically takes a number of months, since both search engines and AI systems need to crawl, evaluate and build trust in content before ranking or citing it consistently. Quick wins (technical fixes, clearer page structure, better-answered questions) can show up sooner, but sustained ranking and citation improvements build over an ongoing programme of work, not a single project.
They work best together. Marketing that isn’t grounded in a clear brand strategy tends to be inconsistent and forgettable, while a brand strategy that never reaches an audience delivers no commercial value. CDG runs brand, web and digital marketing as one connected discipline, so positioning defined in a strategy session shows up consistently in the identity, the website and every marketing channel that follows.
