Brand identity.
Marks that survive a fax machine, a billboard, and a six-pixel favicon. We design the logo, then we design what happens when the logo runs out of room.
— visual systems / wordmarks / type lockupsPLATE 01.A — circuit traces, bubblegum, monochromatic. Bleed edges intentional.
Marks that survive a fax machine, a billboard, and a six-pixel favicon. We design the logo, then we design what happens when the logo runs out of room.
— visual systems / wordmarks / type lockupsAnnual reports, broadsides, exhibition catalogs, zines that get reprinted. We treat ink like it costs money, because it does.
— layout / typography / press supervisionSites that work on a borrowed phone. Interfaces that don't apologize for being interfaces. Every animation justifies its load.
— design systems / interaction / front-endNaming, manifestos, the difference between a tagline and a tag. We write before we draw, and we draw to test the writing.
— naming / messaging / brand voice“Hold one thing too tightly and you drop the other six.”
— studio rule 003We start with a closed mouth and a notebook. Two weeks of interviews, archive trawls, and competitor teardowns before a single sketch. The brief we hand back is rarely the brief we received.
Every project gets one question, written on a wall, that the work must answer. “What does this brand do when no one is watching?” usually arrives by week three.
Forty rough directions on the wall before any pixel is pushed. We cull aggressively. Two survive. One ships. The other goes in the drawer marked “next time”.
Even the web work. We mock it on paper at scale, tape it to the wall, walk past it for a week. Things that survive that week tend to survive the internet.
Files named the way you would name them. Documentation written in sentences. A two-hour walk-through, then we leave. We are not the kind of studio that camps in your office.
PLATE 02.A — oscillator pattern, sour-lime, monochromatic. Salt-bloom visible at upper right.
A type foundry's complete rebrand. Wordmark, specimen book, and a web platform that catalogs 240 fonts without ever loading them all.
A 384-page anthology of Latin American printing. Two-color offset, deckle-edge cover, a typography that breathes between Cervantes and Borges.
A navigation tool for radio astronomers. The interface is mostly empty space and one sharp line. Built it because they asked us to make the line sharper.
A regional bank that wanted to feel like a regional bank again. We took away every gradient, gave them back a wordmark, and helped them write a manifesto that read like a letter from a teller.
An archive of broadcast graphics from the long Canadian winters of public TV. We treated it like a museum of motion. Mostly stills, on purpose.
co-founder · identity & print
Trained as a letterpress operator. Still keeps a Vandercook in the back room. Believes a baseline grid is a moral position.
co-founder · web & product
Writes the front-end before the back-end exists. Will rewrite your form for free. Listens to the page load like other people listen to records.
principal · strategy & voice
Names things for a living. Once renamed a city park. Carries a small Moleskine in which only verbs are allowed.
principal · editorial & press
Has supervised more press checks than birthdays. Owns three densitometers and has opinions about all of them.
Send work, send leads, send broadside ideas. We answer within two working days, in sentences, with a punctuation mark at the end of each one.