01 / Selected work

Three businesses that looked like three different companies until one system tied them together.

Work from our brand studio in Austin, written the way we write it up internally: what the client asked for, what we decided, and what changed after handover. Clients are described by trade, not named, because most of them asked us not to.

A roaster whose bags, site and sign were set in four different typefaces.

Coffee roaster Wordmark Labels Starter site

Coffee bags with the new labels from the roaster case on a steel counter — Fig. 01Matte kraft bags, labels on 70 lb uncoated with a slate single-colour print. One label template, four origin variants, printed in-house on the roaster's own label printer.

Labels before a wholesale push

New bag labels before a wholesale push. The owner had a logo from a friend, a site on a website builder at $39 a month, and a chalkboard sign. Each used a different face. A café buyer had told him his bags looked homemade, which is the kind of comment that gets a studio called.

The ask was labels only. We said labels alone would make the mismatch worse.

Wordmark first, one ink, one system

Redraw the wordmark first, keeping the name's existing shape so regulars still recognised it, and tighten the spacing that collapsed at label size. One serif for the mark, one sans for everything else. A single slate ink, because the label printer he already owned printed one colour well and two colours badly.

Then a five-page starter site built from the same type and colour, so a wholesale buyer clicking through from a bag would land somewhere that matched it.

Labels printed in-house, subscription gone

He prints labels himself now, from a template with locked margins and four fields: origin, roast date, weight and notes. The website builder subscription is gone; the site is static HTML on ordinary hosting he controls. The chalkboard sign was repainted by a local sign writer from our use sheet.

Delivered: wordmark in mono and inverse, label template, starter site, use sheet.

An architecture office whose website buried the buildings under a slider.

Architecture office Website redesign Content model

The architecture firm's new website on a large display behind building models — Fig. 02Project page on a 32 in display in the client's meeting room. Full-width photograph, project facts set in mono below the fold, no carousel anywhere on the site.

A site that looks like the buildings

A website redesign in Austin for a small practice with about thirty built projects. The old site opened on an autoplaying slider of twelve images, took several seconds to show anything on a phone, and had project pages that were a gallery with no words.

The partners wanted it to look more like their buildings. That is a brief about restraint, so we treated it as one.

Same URLs, new code, one project template

Keep every project and every existing URL, so links from press and award listings kept working. Replace the code entirely. One project template: a single large photograph, a short paragraph from the partner who led it, and a mono fact block with year, size, status and collaborators.

Our writer interviewed both partners for an hour each and wrote the practice page from the transcript. Images were re-exported at four widths in WebP so a phone downloads the one it needs.

A project link instead of a PDF

Most sites we rebuild weigh around 6 MB; this homepage now lands under 400 KB. The partners send prospective clients a project link instead of a PDF portfolio, because the page now says what the PDF used to.

The office manager adds new projects by duplicating a folder and editing one text file. We showed her how in a 40-minute call at handover.

A physiotherapy clinic that photocopied its own appointment cards.

Physiotherapy clinic Stationery Signage

New appointment cards and a wall sign on the reception counter of a physiotherapy clinic — Fig. 03Appointment cards on 16 pt uncoated, writable with a ballpoint. Wall sign in slate on white acrylic, routed by a local fabricator from our files.

The front desk was the brand. Nobody had designed it.

This one had no website work at all. The clinic's site was fine. Their counter was not, and the counter is where a patient decides whether the place is careful.

Cards for three new therapists

Business cards for three new therapists. Reception was handing out appointment cards photocopied four to a sheet and cut with scissors, and the sign by the door was a laminated printout.

The owner thought it was a small job. It was, in hours. It was not small in effect.

One stationery set on stock you can write on

Use their existing logo, cleaned up from a JPEG into vector. Design one stationery set: therapist cards, appointment cards with ruled lines for date and time, a letterhead for referral letters. Choose an uncoated stock because coated cards smear when you write on them in pen, and the receptionist writes on two hundred a week.

Supply sign files to a fabricator rather than letting the printer guess the size.

Reorders by email, the laminated sign gone

Appointment cards are reordered from the printer with one email, because the file and the stock are written on the use sheet. Referral letters go out on letterhead from a Word template that keeps the margins fixed. The laminated sign is gone.

Delivered: vectorised logo, stationery set, letterhead template, sign files, use sheet.

The failure in all three was the same one.

A decent logo, and everything around it improvised. We see it more than any other problem. The fix is never more design; it is fewer decisions, written down once and handed over.

2016Year the studio started taking this kind of work in Austin

4peopleDirector and designer, designer, front-end developer, writer-producer

2roundsRevision rounds included on every case above, named in writing first

100%Source files handed to the client at the end of each job

If one of these sounds like you

Start from the piece that embarrasses you most.

None of these clients came in asking for a brand. They came in for labels, a site, some cards. That is usually the right way in, as long as the first piece is designed from a system the next one can reuse.

Read the service pages for what each line costs: websites from $2,400 for a five-page starter, logo and identity from $1,800 per mark, and cards, menus and templates from $240 a piece. The process page shows how the weeks run and where your two revision rounds fall.

We do not take on campaigns, ad buying, apps or online stores. If that is the job, we will say so on the first call and, where we can, point you to someone who does it.

Tell us what you have now.

Set pages, pieces and identity in the estimator and see a planning range in a minute. It is not a quote; a written one follows a call.

Estimate a project