The first month is for questions
Why we do not show design work for four weeks, and what we do instead — including the meeting most clients find uncomfortable.
Read itEleven people. Brand systems, digital products and motion for companies at a hinge point — a merger, a new category, a business that has outgrown the way it looks.
Selected cases
The brief, the answer, and what it did. The rest of the archive is below.
Meridian Rail — Transport
BriefFour regional operators merged into one network with four sets of signage, four ticket designs and four apps. Passengers did not know which company they were dealing with, and neither did staff.
What we didOne identity built around a wayfinding system rather than a logo. A typeface drawn for platform legibility at distance, a colour system that codes by line, and a component kit that took the app from nine screens to four.
Halo Bio — Biotech
BriefA biotech going into a Series C with a story only three people in the building could tell. The deck ran to ninety slides and the website explained the chemistry before it explained the point.
What we didA narrative structure first, identity second. One diagram system for the science, a site that puts the outcome above the mechanism, and a data-visualisation kit their team can extend without us.
Ossa — Consumer
BriefFour hundred products, eleven categories, and a shelf where every one of them competed with the others instead of with the competition.
What we didA grid and colour architecture that reads as one family at three metres and as individual products at thirty centimetres, plus artwork templates their internal team runs without design supervision.
Practice
Usually two of these at once. We do not sell them separately if the problem does not split that way.
Identity built as a system rather than a logo and a mood board — typography, colour architecture, art direction and the rules that let a team of forty stay consistent without asking us.
Interface work with the same care as the brand — design systems, prototypes and front-end built with your engineers rather than thrown over a wall to them.
Titles, brand motion and short film. Made in-house, which means the motion language is drawn at the same time as the static one instead of retro-fitted a year later.
The studio
Who you work with
The person who pitches is the person who designs. We are too small for it to work any other way, which is rather the point.
Partner, Brand
Founded the studio in 2012 after eight years at Pentagram. Leads identity work and draws most of the type.
Partner, Digital
Runs the Lisbon studio and the product practice. Writes production front-end alongside client engineers.
Design Director
Packaging and print. Has the best eye in the studio for the thing that is one millimetre out.
Motion Director
Directs the film and motion work. Trained as an animator, thinks like a typographer.
Recognition
Useful mainly because clients’ boards find them reassuring.
Clients
They spent the first month refusing to design anything and asking questions instead. That month is the reason the rest of it worked.
Our engineers asked to keep working with theirs after the project ended. That has never happened before.
The packaging templates saved my team roughly two days a week, every week, forever.
Small studio, senior people, no account managers in the middle. Worth every penny of the difference.
Notes
Occasional, unedited, mostly about process.
Why we do not show design work for four weeks, and what we do instead — including the meeting most clients find uncomfortable.
Read itLegibility at forty metres, in rain, at an angle, on a screen with a failing backlight. What that does to a letterform.
Read itEvery studio ships a 120-page PDF that dies in a drive. What we ship instead and why it costs more to make.
Read itNew work
We take on roughly nine projects a year. The ones that go best start with a conversation months before anyone mentions a deadline.