Brand systems
Identity built as a set of rules rather than a set of pictures, so it survives contact with people who were not in the room.
- Positioning
- Naming
- Identity
- Guidelines
Brand and product systems, London
We build the system,not the page.
A brand and product practice for organisations that have outgrown improvisation. What we hand over is a set of rules — a palette that derives itself, a scale that holds, and components that survive the people who were not in the room.
- Founded
- 2016, London
- Practice
- Eleven people
- Capacity
- Four engagements
Latest
Transport ·Halcyon Rail
Halcyon Rail: wayfinding as a token set
19 stations, 1 spec sheet
Read the case study →Capabilities
Four things,done properly.
A practice narrow enough to be good at what it does, and broad enough that the work does not stop at the handover.
Product design
Interface work that starts from the data model and the failure states, not from the happy path on a big screen.
- Discovery
- Prototyping
- Design system
- Accessibility
Web & content
Sites that a marketing team can actually run afterwards, written in the browser rather than approved as flat images.
- Editorial
- Front end
- CMS build
- Performance
Design operations
The unglamorous half: tokens, naming, review, and the documentation that stops a system rotting in eighteen months.
- Token pipeline
- Component audit
- Governance
- Training
Selected work
Six practices.One way of working.
All case studies
Transport
Halcyon Rail: wayfinding as a token set
Nineteen stations, three contractors and a sign shop that needed values it could cut vinyl from.
Finance 
Lumen Savings: the interface, not the marketing site
The tokens were bought for a brochure site and ended up running the account dashboard.
Industry 
Pallant Works: a ninety-year-old foundry, legible online
Sand casting for the rail and marine trades, sold almost entirely on the phone. The website had to earn the first call.
Food and drink 
Orbit Foods: forty products, one packaging grammar
A wholesaler moving into own-brand, with a range that had to expand without a redesign every quarter.
Legal 
Verity Legal stopped arguing about grey
A litigation practice with a 240-page brand manual and a website that matched none of it.
Health 
Northbank Health: a whole estate, derived from one hue
Eleven sub-brands, four languages and a print estate nobody had audited since 2014, rebuilt as a single derived palette.
By the numbers
Small on purpose.Booked on purpose.
We have turned down more work than we have taken since 2021. These are the numbers that explain why.
0
People in the practice. Everyone bills; nobody only sells.
0
Engagements delivered since 2016, across six sectors.
0%
Of last year’s revenue came from clients we had already worked with.
0
Engagements running at once. It is a ceiling, not a target.
Method
Derive it once.Then stop deciding.
Most design debt is accumulated one reasonable exception at a time. The way out is to make the exception harder to write than the rule.
Frame
Two weeks with the people who will run the thing after we leave. We come out with the five values and a written reason for each — not a moodboard.
- interviews
- audit
- token brief
Derive
The palette is generated from one hue in a perceptual colour space, so every tint has the same lightness relationship no matter which hue you started from. Nobody picks a grey.
- OKLCH ramp
- modular scale
- contrast check
Compose
Components are built to ask their own container how wide they are, so the same card works in a three-up grid, a sidebar and a phone without a second set of rules.
- container queries
- subgrid
- states first
Hand over
The tokens end up in the CMS, where a marketing lead can move them without opening a code editor or booking us for a day.
- Customizer
- docs
- two training sessions
Sectors
Six industries we know well enough to disagree with you in.
Where the workactually lands.
The method does not change between them. What changes is who has to live with the result, and that is the part we scope around.
01
Finance
Retail savings, lending and the compliance layer around both.
1 case study → 02Food and drink
Producers, wholesalers and the brands sitting on top of them.
1 case study → 03Health
Clinics, insurers and the public bodies that fund them.
1 case study → 04Industry
Manufacturing, energy and the long tail of businesses that make physical things.
1 case study → 05Legal
Chambers, in-house teams and the regulated end of advisory work.
1 case study → 06Transport
Operators, infrastructure owners and the people who have to read the signs.
1 case study →In their words
The part thatmatters later.
“Two years on we have changed the palette twice and the sub-brand three times. We have never once had to reopen the CSS.”
“Our compliance team signs off on colour contrast now instead of arguing about it. The ramp is generated, so there is nothing to argue with.”
“We bought it as a marketing site and ended up using the tokens in the product. That was not the plan and it is the best thing about it.”
Engagements
Three ways in.
Fixed scope, fixed price, and a written note on what is deliberately not included.
Audit
£4,800Two weeks
- Component and token inventory
- Contrast and accessibility pass
- Written findings, ranked by cost
- One workshop with your team
System
£22,000Six to eight weeks
- Everything in the audit
- Derived palette and type scale
- Component library, built in code
- CMS integration and docs
- Two training sessions
Retainer
£3,400Per month, rolling
- Four days a month, used as you like
- Design review on your pull requests
- New components as they are needed
- Cancel with one month’s notice
Questions
Asked oftenenough to answer.
How soon can you start?
Six to eight weeks out, usually. Audits can often start sooner because they need one person rather than three. If the timing does not work we will say so on the first call instead of holding a slot we cannot honour.
Do you work with our existing developers?
Preferably. The handover is the whole point, and it goes better when the people who will maintain the system helped build it. We review their pull requests during the engagement and for a month afterwards at no extra cost.
What happens if we want to change the brand colour later?
You change it yourself, in the CMS, in about ten seconds. The palette is generated from one hue at fixed perceptual lightnesses, so every tint moves with it and the contrast relationships hold. That is not a convenience feature; it is the reason the system survives us leaving.
Can you just do the website?
Yes, and it is often the right first project. What we will not do is build a site on top of an identity we think is broken without telling you first — you can overrule us, but you will have it in writing.
Who owns the work?
You do, on final payment, including the source files and the repository. We ask only to show the work in this portfolio, and we will delay that for as long as a launch date requires.
What is deliberately not included?
Advertising, SEO retainers, copywriting beyond the interface, and photography. We have people we trust for all four and no interest in marking their work up.
Journal
Working notes.
All notesHello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
We stopped picking greys
A pure neutral is the one colour on a page that tells the reader nobody chose it.
The ratio is the design
One number decides whether a page reads as a prospectus, a product or a menu.
Next
Tell us what youare actually trying to do.
Most engagements start with a ninety-minute call and a one-page note back. No deck, no discovery invoice.