START A PROJECT
SHEET 02 — THE STUDIO
EST. 2019 / LONDON
Six people who would rather specify it once than guess at it three times.
We started as two people doing production work for studios that had run out of hours. The work kept coming back with the same problem attached: nobody had written down what the thing was supposed to do.
So we put the specification first. Before a pixel is drawn, there is a document that says what every state does, what every token is worth, and what happens when the content is twice as long as anyone planned for. It reads like a datasheet because that is what it is.
We take four engagements a year. Four is what lets us document the work and still pick up the phone about it eighteen months later.
PRACTICE
FOUNDED
2019
PEOPLE
06
LOCATION
LONDON
ENGAGEMENTS / YR
04
TYPICAL BUILD
8 WEEKS
DISCIPLINES
BRAND, UI, ENG
02.3 — METHOD
Five operations, in order.
Nothing is drawn before it is specified, and nothing is built before it is drawn. An eight-week site and a twelve-week system run the same five operations. Only the durations move.
TYPICAL BUILD
8 WEEKS
START A PROJECT ↗
01
Survey
We read what already exists. Analytics, support tickets, the previous agency’s files, and the sentence the founder keeps repeating in meetings.
SURVEY NOTE
WEEK 01
02
Specify
Every state, token and edge case written down before anything is drawn. This is the document the build is later measured against.
SPECIFICATION
WEEK 02–03
03
Draw
Plates at full size. Type scale, grid, motion curves, and the four widths that actually matter.
PLATE SET
WEEK 03–05
04
Build
Production in the real medium, not a picture of it. Reviewed against the specification line by line.
BUILT SITE
WEEK 05–08
05
Hand over
Files, tokens and a maintenance note in plain English. You own all of it.
HANDOVER PACK
WEEK 08
02.4 — PERSONNEL
SIX SIGNATORIES
MH
M. Halloran
Writes the specification, signs the drawing, and takes the call when something breaks.
PRACTICE
2019
JO
J. Okonkwo
Type systems and marks. Owns the argument about the logo, and usually wins it.
BRAND
2019
SV
S. Väisänen
Owns the grid, the type scale, and every motion curve on this sheet.
INTERFACE
2020
RD
R. Diallo
Turns plates into something that ships, and keeps shipping after handover.
ENGINEERING
2021
AP
A. Petrescu
Finds the edge case before the client has to. Runs every accessibility pass.
PRODUCTION
2022
TL
T. Lindqvist
Decides what the pages say, and cuts the half that says nothing.
EDITORIAL
2023
02.5 — STANDARDS & TOOLING
WHAT WE HOLD TO
A specification is only worth what it is measured against. Every plate is checked on these before handover. If a line below stopped being true it would come off the sheet.
WCAG 2.2 AA
HELD
Contrast, focus order, target size and motion preference, checked on every plate.
W3C
CORE WEB VITALS
HELD
LCP, CLS and INP measured on the built site, not on a staging box with no network.
CHROME UX
REDUCED MOTION
HELD
Every animation has a still state, and CSS decides which one you get.
MEDIA QUERY
SEMANTIC MARKUP
HELD
One h1 per page, landmarks that mean what they say, alt text written by a person.
HTML LIVING
COLOUR TOKENS
HELD
Every colour is a token. Nothing is typed as a hex twice and the theme inverts whole.
INTERNAL
BROWSER FLOOR
HELD
Last two versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge. Older degrades, never breaks.
INTERNAL
02.6 — RECOGNITION
AWARDS & CITATIONS
2026
SITE OF THE DAY
Halcyon Instruments, cited for the specification-led process rather than the visuals. We take that as the compliment.
AWWWARDS
2025
TYPE IN USE
Northbank Refinery. The annual’s only entry set entirely in one grotesque, at one weight.
TDC
2025
BEST INTERFACE
Ferrous, nominated and not won. It is on the sheet because the nomination is the honest fact.
FWA
2024
DESIGN SYSTEM
Kiln Works, for a token set still in production three years later without a fork.
D&AD
2021
NEW STUDIO
The practice, at eighteen months old, on the strength of four finished projects.
CREATIVE REVIEW
02.7 — CLIENTS OF RECORD
ENGAGEMENTS 2019–2025
