Hughes Construction Consultancy (HCC)

After 44 years in the UK and Ireland construction industry, Gerry Hughes retired in 2024 and relocated to Praia da Luz in the Algarve. Rather than step away from the industry altogether after rounding off the last two decades as Construction Director of Gilbert-Ash – where he oversaw turnover growth from €88 million to €310 million – Gerry set up Hughes Construction Consultancy (HCC). HCC offers developers and self-builders in Portugal and Ireland access to the kind of board-level construction advisory expertise that’s usually locked inside large contractors. 

The challenge was that HCC was a brand-new venture with no identity, and no collateral – just one man’s exceptional track record. Gerry needed a brand and a professional brochure that could open doors in a new market, build instant credibility with developers who’d never heard of him, and translate a career’s worth of major-project experience into something a prospective client could pick up, read in five minutes, and trust immediately. 

We started with the brand itself. The HCC monogram and full “Hughes Construction Consultancy” logo were built to feel established and authoritative – a mark that could sit on a hotel developer’s desk in Cambridge as comfortably as a self-builder’s kitchen table in the Algarve. 

A confident amber/yellow was paired with a deep navy: yellow for energy, visibility and the industry itself, navy for stability and trust, giving the brand a palette that felt unmistakably “construction” without leaning on hard-hat cliché. A custom line-art illustration of a large-scale building under construction – crane, steelwork, site team – became the brand’s signature visual device, used large on cover pages and as a subtle watermark throughout. Gerry wanted something unique to denote his large-scale project ability, yet nothing too bold to distract in design. 

With the identity established, we turned to HCC sales materials, structuring it around the question every prospective client would actually be asking: why should I trust HCC with my project?   

The brochure carries Gerry’s biography and track record alongside flagship projects like the £136m Canalside regeneration and the £49m Turing Locke & Hyatt Centric scheme, giving prospective clients everything they need to trust HCC at a glance. Clear service pages then split the offer in two, Construction Project Advisory and Business Growth & Transformation, so a reader finds what applies to them immediately, backed by testimonials from names like Whitbread, Citzen M and ThamesWey.

We designed a matching business card to carry the brand into every first meeting, and, since a large part of HCC’s client base is based locally in the Algarve, worked with an overseas translator to produce a full Portuguese-language version of the brochure, ensuring the brand landed just as credibly with Portuguese-speaking clients as it did in the UK and Ireland. 

For most new consultancies, that kind of trust takes years to build. HCC’s brand and sales materials show why it earns that trust from day one.