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.
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.
Half the project is decided in the first two days. After a few too many awkward kickoff meetings we built a small playbook that mixes interviews, archive walks and one slightly silly exercise. Here is the agenda and what each part is trying to surface.
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 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.
A small museum commission asked us to design a wayfinding system that could breathe. The constraints were unusual, the budget was modest and the result is still the project we point to most often when explaining what we do.