Arsenal Testhouse Rebranding Project

About the Company Arsenal Testhouse is an independent accredited laboratory based in Austria, specializing in the testing and certification of contactless technologies. They are the only facility authorized by NXP Semiconductors to conduct official MIFARE certification — the standard used in contactless payments, transit systems, and access control worldwide. The company has been operating for over 25 years, serving more than 500 clients and certifying over 10,000 products across Europe. The Problem Despite holding this level of authority, Arsenal Testhouse had a visibility problem. The brand didn't communicate the weight of what the company actually is. Prospective clients — particularly those encountering the certification process for the first time — had no way of understanding from the website or brand materials alone that they were looking at the single most important laboratory in their product's path to market. This wasn't a cosmetic issue alone. Arsenal Testhouse was expanding its commercial offering and preparing to strengthen its position across new client segments. The existing identity couldn't support that growth. It undersold the company at every touchpoint. They came to us for a full rebrand — identity, logo, design system, and a complete website — with a clear objective: build a brand foundation that reflects the company's actual market position and converts that authority into commercial momentum.

Identity Concept The identity is built on a single idea: the continuous testing process. Arsenal Testhouse's work isn't linear. It's cyclical — signals transmitted, data read, standards verified, repeated. We wanted the brand to carry that sense of precision in motion, not as an illustration, but as a structural principle. In the logo, this translates into intentional breaks within the custom wordmark — gaps in the letterforms that reference a signal mid-transmission. It's a quiet, specific detail that directly connects the visual identity to what the company does every day. That same principle scales across the entire system. Functional lines run along the edges of every layout, acting as the structural grid for all communications. One element, applied consistently, holding the visual language together across digital and print without needing additional decorative layers.

The aesthetic is driven by the lab environment itself - clean, precise, nothing unnecessary. White serves as the dominant base, establishing the clinical character of the brand. Orange and green, inherited from the previous identity, were retained as accents to maintain continuity — but repositioned so they guide attention rather than compete for it. The typographic system is built on TWK Lausanne across three weights. Typography carries the primary expressive load: where the design stays restrained, the type creates hierarchy, contrast, and voice.

The website redesign was a project within the project. Arsenal Testhouse's existing site had accumulated years of content — certification services, testing equipment, technical documentation, industry standards — without a unifying structure. Before any design work could begin, we spent a lot of time auditing the full site, mapping every page, user path, and content category to understand what was there and how it all connected. The scope of the engagement was focused: we had the time and budget to design five key pages. But to design even those five well, we needed to understand the entire system — how sections relate, where users enter and exit, and how our pages would function within the broader structure. The audit wasn't overhead; it was the foundation. From there, we built a new sitemap and information architecture that serves two distinct audiences: technical specialists who need direct access to certification specs, and business users encountering the process for the first time who need clarity on what Arsenal Testhouse does and how to start working with them.

For individual test services, we developed a scalable template — a product passport that structures compliance standards, sample requirements, testing tools, categories, and industries in a consistent format. Each page includes a built-in contact point so users can ask questions without leaving the context of the service, and category tags that link directly to filtered catalogs of related services. Building the filtering system required a deep understanding of the industry itself — how standards like MIFARE, EMVCo, and ICAO are classified and how they intersect — to create a multi-level navigation that works for specialists and newcomers alike. MIFARE certification received its own dedicated architecture as the strongest proof of Arsenal Testhouse's expertise, positioned not as one service among many but as a central element of the site. Throughout the process, we worked closely with the founders to ensure every navigational decision and content label accurately reflected the technical standards the company operates within. In this industry, precision in language matters as much as precision in design.

The Outcome 

The brand identity, design system, and website are live and working together. The founders are satisfied with the result and feel that Arsenal Testhouse now has a visual identity that accurately represents the level of service they provide. The expertise was always there. Now the brand reflects it.