Best Design Awards 2026: Two GEORGE DESIGN Brands Named Finalists
You can’t design a reputation, but you can influence one.
For the first time in ten years, GEORGE DESIGN entered the Best Design Awards — New Zealand’s annual awards celebrating excellence in design — and two projects we entered, GRANDA Developments and Heights Recruitment, have been named finalists in the 2026 Small Brand Identity category.
We find out in a couple of weeks where they land. For now, having two pieces of work recognised by our industry peers feels like a pretty significant marker of where GEORGE DESIGN has got to.
Over the past 18 months, our Christchurch studio has grown significantly, our team has grown and so has the calibre of work we’re producing for businesses across New Zealand. We’ve been increasingly deliberate about the kind of studio we want to be: commercially minded, strategically led and creatively brave, with the capability to take a business from positioning and naming right through to identity, website and marketing.
The Best Design Awards recognition is a nice external nod to that.
How does brand influence market perception?
We think about brand a lot like reputation. It exists in other people’s minds, built from every interaction they have with your business and everything they hear about it when you’re not in the room.
Design is one of the ways you influence that.
The name on the door, the words on your website, the price you charge, the way your team behaves, the photography you choose, the businesses you associate with and the identity you put into the world all send signals about what kind of business you are.
Which is why we don’t start a branding project by asking what colours you like.
We start with strategy and positioning: what should this business become known for, where is the opportunity in its market, who needs to choose it and what would give them a compelling reason to do so? From there, naming, identity, messaging, website design and marketing become ways of reinforcing that position.
Good work needs good clients
Although the brands are distinctive, GRANDA and Heights have a few things in common.
Nick from GRANDA and Cody from Heights cared deeply about the businesses they were building and trusted us enough to push them beyond what they might have chosen on their own.
That trust wasn’t passive. They asked questions, challenged ideas, brought their own thinking to the table and, in turn, pushed us further too. Both understood that if you’re creating a brand intended to represent your business for the next ten years, choosing the safest answer because it feels comfortable today probably isn’t the smartest approach. It’s also a pretty good description of the clients we want to work with.
Good people doing good work, who care about what they’re building and want more of the right people to find them, notice them and choose them.
If that sounds like you, we’d love to talk. Fill out our enquiry form here and we’ll book a complimentary creative strategy call to discuss your business goals and how a creative project with GEORGE DESIGN can help achieve them.
Best Design Awards 2026 project credits
GRANDA Developments
Creative Director — Georgia van Zoelen
Contributors — Gareth O’Connor
Lead Designer — Thalia McPhillips
Heights Recruitment
Creative Director — Georgia van Zoelen
Contributors — Gareth O’Connor
Client Director / Project Lead — Lori Kingan
Lead Designer — Thalia McPhillips
GEORGE DESIGN is an independent brand strategy, branding, website design and marketing studio based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Founded by Georgia van Zoelen, the studio works with businesses in Christchurch and across New Zealand to define how they’re positioned, build distinctive brand identities and turn that thinking into websites, campaigns and marketing.
Our work spans brand strategy and positioning, naming, visual identity, messaging and copywriting, website strategy and design, campaigns, social media and ongoing marketing.
In 2026, two GEORGE DESIGN projects — GRANDA Developments and Heights Recruitment — were named finalists in the Small Brand Identity category of the Best Design Awards.
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Look beyond whether you like the portfolio aesthetically and consider the thinking behind it. A strong branding studio should be able to explain the commercial problem it was solving, the position the business needed to own and why the resulting identity, messaging and website make sense for that particular business.
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Branding is worth investing in when the business underneath it is good, but the way it’s perceived isn’t keeping pace. A strong brand can help you look credible at the level you’re trying to operate, communicate why someone should choose you, attract better-fit customers and give your website and marketing a much stronger foundation to work from.
It won’t fix a bad product, poor service or a business without a market. But if you’re already doing good work and people aren’t seeing the value, choosing you over competitors or understanding what makes you different, your brand may be part of the problem.
We tend to see the best return when businesses treat branding as a long-term business asset rather than a cosmetic exercise. If you’re building something you expect to be representing you for the next five or ten years, the question becomes less about what a logo costs and more about what the right perception of your business could be worth.
