Journal

Notes fromthe studio

Short pieces on type, process and tools, written when something is worth writing down. Roughly once a month.

Showing all 8 notes


Type, Process

Why we set every number in tabular figures

Timetables, prices, dashboards: when digits line up, people read them faster and trust them more.

Most typefaces ship with proportional figures by default: a 1 is narrower than an 8, which looks lovely in a sentence and terrible in a column. On the Seeline departure boards, proportional figures made 11:11 and 18:48 different widths, so the eye had to hunt for the minutes.

We now switch on tabular figures for anything a reader will compare: times, prices, balances, statistics. In CSS it is a single line, font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums, and most good typefaces support it.

The exception is large display numbers, where the uneven spacing of tabular 1s becomes visible. There we set proportional figures and kern by hand.


Case notes, Type

One grid for a pier, a phone and a paper timetable

How eight columns ended up carrying the whole Seeline system.

We started the Seeline project with three grids: one for print, one for signs, one for the app. Within a month they had drifted apart, and every new timetable needed three versions designed by hand.

So we threw two away. The pier sign, the pocket timetable and the app’s departure screen now share one eight-column grid, scaled to the medium. A departure time always sits in columns one and two; the destination always starts in column three.

The result is less elegant in places than three bespoke layouts would have been. It is also why the ferry company’s own team now publishes a new timetable in an afternoon.


Process

What we ask for in a brief, and what we don’t

A good brief is a page long. Here is what we hope is on it.

We don’t need a forty-slide deck or a mood board. We need to know what you do, who it is for, what is not working and what would make the project a success a year from now.

A budget range helps more than people expect. It doesn’t mean we will spend all of it; it tells us whether to propose a careful refresh or a rebuild from the ground up.

What we don’t ask for: a list of logos you like. We would much rather hear what you want people to feel the second time they see it. If you want help writing a brief, our brief estimator is a good start.


Studio

Four-day weeks, two years in

We close on Fridays. Clients mostly haven’t noticed, and the work got better.

In 2024 we moved to a Monday-to-Thursday week on full pay. We were nervous about two things: deadlines and clients. Neither turned out to be a problem.

What changed is how we use the four days. Internal meetings are on Monday morning only. Presentations are never on a Thursday afternoon. And Céline protects one full day a week of uninterrupted design time for everyone.

We have delivered every project since on schedule, and nobody has left. We would recommend it to any studio our size.


Tools, Process

Design tokens a developer actually wants

Fewer tokens, named for what they do rather than what they look like.

Our first design system for Fondo had 214 colour tokens. The developers used eleven of them. Tobias rewrote the set around roles: surface, text-muted, positive, focus.

A role-based token survives a rebrand: when the green changes, nobody has to rename anything. It also makes the design files easier to read, because a designer can see the intent of a colour, not just its hex value.


Case notes

Writing the care label first

For Moräne, the brand voice came from the smallest piece of text in the shop.

Brand voice workshops tend to produce adjectives. We asked Moräne to write us a care label instead: what the jacket is made of, how to wash it, and what to do when it tears.

The best version was 41 words long, specific and slightly dry. It became the template for everything else, from product pages to the shop window. If a sentence wouldn’t fit on a care label, it was probably too pleased with itself.


Tools, Studio

Proofing on the risograph

A second-hand printer in the back room changed how we review work.

Screens flatter everything. So every Wednesday we print the week’s work on the risograph, pin it to the long wall and look at it from across the room.

It is cheap, fast and slightly imprecise, which is the point: if a layout only works at perfect registration, it won’t survive a real print run either. Selin keeps the drum clean; everyone else keeps their hands off it.


Case notes, Process

Designing signs for 5 lux

What we learned measuring light in a cinema corridor at 21:00.

For Kino Riff we borrowed a light meter and walked the building during a late screening. The corridors measured between 3 and 8 lux, darker than most guidelines assume.

We tested sign mock-ups at full size in the actual corridors. Back-lit numerals 180 mm high could be read from 20 metres; anything printed and unlit could not be read at all. The final signs use one light source each and nothing else.

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