Hayley Lim turned 60+ explorations into Estelle Metalworks’ identity

The Brand Identity: Sixty explorations of a single symbol is a lot of ground to cover for one letterform. But when Hayley Lim set out to design the identity for Estelle Metalworks, a boutique metal shop in Montreal specialising in bespoke furniture and décor, she kept returning to the same starting point: the humble machine screw. It’s one of the smallest components in building and fabrication, easy to overlook yet structurally essential.

The company was named after its founder’s grandmother – a woman described as tough as nails and as resilient as metal – so that quiet, foundational strength felt like the right place to begin. The symbol that emerged from those 60-plus explorations merges a screw with the structure of a capital 'E,’ two forms that have very little in common geometrically. “I troubleshooted different widths, ridges and curvatures,” Lim shares. “The horizontal beams were deliberately square edged to nod towards a machine screw.

Four horizontal bars on each side ended up being the sweet spot, enough to read as a screw without being literal about it.” The result sits in an ambiguous space between its two reference points, recognisable as both and fully committed to neither. “It’s not quite either of those two shapes but feels balanced, almost as if it is its own totem,” she adds. That screw motif doesn’t end at the symbol. Before starting any project, Lim maps out what she calls her “ingredients” – the recurring elements that will carry through every touchpoint.

The machine screw had provided the founding idea for the mark, so she wanted to reinterpret that same concept through a different method. Small circular details placed at the corners of layouts became the answer, nodding to the way screws function as anchor points in construction and making each composition feel as though it’s about to be drilled into a surface. What keeps the device from becoming repetitive is the way it shifts expression depending on the application. Laid over imagery, the circles feel like they’re pinning photographs down to coloured backgrounds.

On an aluminium poster, they dissolve into a halftone pattern that builds an illustration. On business cards, they’re physically punched out. “Another motif but with three different expressions,” Lim explains. “That’s when the system started to feel more like a language rather than a stamp.” A pivotal insight arrived during the strategy intake interviews with Estelle’s founder. Lim learned that in metalworking, achieving perfectly straight edges alongside flawless curves is among the most technically demanding feats – and honestly, it surprised her.

“Learning it was actually a point of tension, I ended up threading that insight through the photography, the type setting, and symbol,” she recalls. What might have remained an interesting footnote about the craft became the conceptual thread binding the entire identity together: the coexistence of hard and soft, geometric and organic, the precise and the fluid. Typography carries that duality with clarity. Aether by DDOTT Foundry was Lim’s choice from a shortlist of typefaces that all balanced between precision and fluidity, though the others played it safer. What drew her to Aether specifically was a detail in the letterforms themselves.

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The article discusses a unique approach to branding in the metalworking industry, highlighting a significant rebranding effort that could influence design strategies, making it relevant and novel for brand strategy professionals.