In 1972, before there was a USAJOBS.gov, before there was a federal resume as a category, Resume Place placed its first ad in the Washington Post classifieds. "RESUMES. Excel. quality professional resumes, type-set & printed. The Resume Place. 298-7890." The studio was a print shop on K Street with storytellers on staff. People walked through the door with a job announcement and walked out with a federal resume.

Five decades later, Kathryn Troutman, who founded the business in 1971, still leads it. In 2024 Resume Place hired us to design the system that carries that history forward: a complete identity, the program marks behind the Ten Steps curriculum and its certifications, a rebuilt site, and a campaign program tied to the federal-news cycle. The brand carries fifty years of Washington-rule changes as a working credential.

Resume Place writes federal resumes, publishes the Ten Steps to a Federal Job® curriculum, certifies trainers, and trains federal agencies. Each line arrived in a different decade and built its own materials, so the company looked like several companies, and none of them carried the fifty years of authority that is the actual asset.

The brief: an identity worthy of the original, a mark system for the programs the business actually runs on, a site a customer can navigate by business line, and a production rhythm that answers federal news as it breaks.

Twenty years of Washington Post ads read as the company becoming itself: one line in the typing column in 1972, a display ad by 1974, the SF-171 specialty by 1981, a listed seminar by 1988, SES leading by 1993 with Kathryn Troutman signing as owner.

We read this archive before drawing anything. The order of the business in 2024, resumes into curriculum into training, is the order the classifieds established fifty years earlier.

The site had accumulated the way twenty-year-old sites do: one-off links in the top menu that belonged to no section, a fourteen-item certification dropdown, the same links repeated across three menus. The founder set the constraint that fixed it, and she was right: every line of business is named at the top level, in descriptive words. Certification and government training are half of revenue. Each line has its own customer who arrives looking for that exact term.

Seven business lines and one call to action. Every section follows the same order: who we help, then services, then one priced next step. And nothing was lost. All sixty-five destinations in the production menu stayed reachable; we reorganized them. A structure that protects the search rankings fifty years of content earned.

When we started in 2024, the typical customer was someone applying for a federal job. By 2026, reductions in force and reorganizations across the government had changed that. Two groups moved to the front: feds leaving for private-sector work, and senior executives. The federal applicant is still the steady base of the business. Agencies and trainers still matter, just less often, so they sit lower on the list.

Each profile names what someone came to do, and what it costs them if it goes wrong. No biographies.

The consultation form is where the site turns visitors into clients: five steps, ending in a choice. Pay now and go straight to checkout, or ask for a quote and keep a payment link that holds the reservation until the client is ready. Both paths follow the same rules, and we tested every one of them end to end before the new site went live, every email included.

The company name, set as a logo, is the primary mark. The circle-checkmark symbol works as a separate shorthand: the box on the form, checked. It stands alone on banners, certificates, and the screens of the online tools, and it rarely pairs with the name. When both appear together, the approved combinations do that work.

How much empty room the logo needs is measured off the logo itself: the height of the R around the name, the gap inside the checkmark around the symbol. Rules a client can apply without calling us.

Fifty years of federal credibility needed institutional weight without reading like an agency itself. Tangelo Orange holds the recognition the brand already owned; the Deep and Midnight Blues carry the seriousness a government buyer expects. Eleven colors, each matched to a standard print ink, because this brand still prints: books, certificates, capability statements.

Messina, from Lineto, is a complete family. The Sans does the everyday text and the Serif takes the magazine-style moments. Mono is there for the OPM and SES shorthand this audience reads daily. All three were drawn together, so they share the same proportions and the same underlying shapes and can sit on one page without clashing. A book interior and a web form never disagree about what a heading is.

Most customers meet a program before they meet the company: a Ten Steps class, a trainer certification, a free builder. Each program needed a mark that can stand alone on a partner’s slide deck or a military transition office wall and still resolve to Resume Place up close. We drew eighteen approved logo combinations across four systems: Ten Steps to a Federal Job®, the CCAR Accomplishment Builder, the Executive Leadership Training Program, and Online Learning.

The certification badges came out of that same work: ornamental seals redrawn as clean, simple shapes, one tier for Certified Trainer & Coach, one for Master Certified. A trainer puts that badge on their own site, so it has to survive at the size of a browser-tab icon and still look earned.

The v1.1 book was delivered in September 2024 and then kept living. Every change is tracked and dated the way software is, and the book updates the moment we change it. Alongside the human-readable book, the brand publishes a version AI tools can read directly, plus a ready-made set of instructions with banned and preferred words, so those tools can write on-brand copy without a designer reviewing every piece.

Federal hiring rules change, and the brand answers in kind: a banner program on a monthly cadence against OPM guidance and hiring-rule shifts, a newsletter, and the book covers, certificates, and presentation decks that carry the system into print.

Print leads with Tangelo. Screens invert it. On screen the dark blues become the background, the book-cover blue does the work for links, page numbers, and whatever you are currently on, and the orange appears once per page: the main button. The same family does the structure, Messina Serif for headlines, narrow capitals for menus and labels, Mono for data only.

The sections below are built from the same master file the brand book reads.