Working with illustrators is one of the joys of our job. It is also where projects most often go sideways. A practical guide for art directors, with notes on briefs, fees, revisions and the email we send before the first sketch.
Every three months we collect what we have been reading, watching and quietly stealing from. This issue: a Japanese binding manual from 1978, a podcast about civic typography and the gallery show that has us rethinking colour entirely.
We switched to value-based pricing in 2021 and never looked back. The transition was bumpier than the LinkedIn posts make it sound. A frank account of what changed, what we got wrong and how we explain it to clients on the first call.
We spent six months working alongside the festival team to develop a flexible visual language that can scale from a passport-sized programme to a forty-metre banner. A short case study, the rejected directions and what we learned about working with installation typography.
Our first proprietary typeface was never meant to leave the studio. It began as a single lowercase a sketched in the corner of a layout and grew into a small family we now use across most of our work. Process photos and a few honest reflections.