If you’re a business owner in Manchester, especially in the creative and digital industry then you’ve been seeing my work for a for a few years now. I support a number of local businesses, creatives, developers, PR and SEO agencies with website design and development, graphic design support, photography and branding expertise. Typeface is very much a collaborative offering and I enjoy working with local business owners to help elevate the overall digital scene here in Manchester. Manchester has a thriving digital creative and tech industry, helped in part by an underlying ethos of support and collaboration. It’s exciting to be a part of that and something I’ve always tried to foster with Typeface.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with Manchester SEO aficionado Charlie Whitworth for a few years now.

Charlie originally came to me, like many business owners do, as Whitworth SEO was going through a growth phase. With a new streamlined focus and tone of voice, Typeface produced a confident brand and a great new website to showcase Whitworth.

Manchester has had its fair share of marketing and search conferences but truth be told, things had been a little quiet over recent years. It almost felt that there was something missing from the industry and the mantle hadn’t quite been picked up. With many of the main marketing and SEO/Search conferences being based down south it felt that Manchester was missing an important platform for knowledge sharing and networking. As it happens, a lot of Manchester’s digital scene felt the same way, times had moved on, the scene had shifted and it was time for a new conference format.

The first Hive conference was launched in 2024 to an excited audience and nobody knew what expect, or how popular the concept would be.

The one where everybody sat up and took notice

2025 saw a further refining of the brand and the format. With speakers including Aledya Soils, Mike King, Lou Ali and a host of marketing and agency names, Charlie cemented Hive as the northern conference to be for agency owners, marketing professionals and people wanting to immerse themselves in Manchester’s rich digital culture.

Hive has very much become its own event now and with Hive ‘26 taking on a larger and more ambitious tone, it was a perfect time to tighten the branding and presentation, to offer more coherency and to build on the creative from the previous two years.

HiveMCR ‘26

While I worked on the creative for 2024 and 2025, I didn’t have the opportunity to work on the original logo. That’s been something of a bugbear for me but with the launch of Hive26 we’ve had the time to invest in the brand from the ground up. This means taking the creative, feel and pedigree from the first two events. Seeing what worked and what could be worked on, and building it in to something that feels like it belongs to and represents HiveMCR and its growing community of creatives and professionals.

A new logo and a refined suite of brand material

Typeface has created a polished, confident new brand for Hive26. A suite of logos for every application as well as a monogram that can be tweaked and repurposed as needed.

A new website and focused online presence

As well as a new brand, a new website was in order to show it off. The Hive website boasts an informative lineup page, individual SEO friendly speaker pages and a clean, refined look.

Social media graphics? We’ve got those covered. From sponsors to speakers, each has its own language and visual style, all unmistakably Hive.

Hive 2026 Speakers

Hive 2026 Expert Training

Much more to come

Marketing for the event is now in in full swing, you’ll be seeing various digital creative shared on linkedin and Instagram over the next couple months. As HiveMCR 2026 approaches, I’ll be working on the physical creative, screens, banners and posters which I’ll be sharing on the Typeface website so check back to see how those turn out. In the meantime, don’t forget to grab your early bee ticket for HiveMCR ’26 while they’re still available and hopefully I’ll see you there.

“Pete’s been on the HiveMCR journey with me from the start, and the brand wouldn’t be what it has become without him. From his first class design skills, to last minute dev requests he’s been priceless.”

– Charlie Whitworth