Our focus
Where design decides.
Health, civic life and small business. In each one, an unreadable letter or an unusable form is the difference between someone getting what they need and not. We take on work outside these areas too.
The three
What each one means.
Health
Read at the worst moment of the week.
Discharge notes, appointment letters, consent forms, ward signage, anything a patient or a carer has to act on. People read these tired, frightened or in a hurry. The writing and the layout decide whether the instruction is followed.
Appointment letters · Discharge instructions · Consent forms · Wayfinding · Patient-facing web
Civic life
No one can take their custom elsewhere.
Notices, applications, benefit and permit forms, public signage, council and nonprofit sites. A public service is often the only one there is. When the form is hard, the cost lands on the person least able to carry it.
Forms and applications · Public notices · Signage · Plain-language documents · Service websites
Small business
Competing with much larger budgets.
Identity, menus, signage, packaging, a first website. A small business is judged against work made for companies a hundred times its size. Design is the cheapest advantage it can buy, and usually the one it is told to do last.
Identity and logos · Signage · Menus and packaging · First websites · Print
How we judge it
Three checks we run on everything.
Whichever area the work sits in, it has to pass the same three. They are not opinions, and you can run them here.
Check one
Does it hold all the way through?
A service can be careful at every step and still fail, because a person only gets the thing if all four hold. Pick a step to stop the signal there and see what goes wrong.
Check two
Can it be read?
Contrast is not a matter of taste; it is a ratio you can measure. Put in two colours and see what they do — including to a reader who does not separate them the way you do.
Check three
Can it be understood first time?
Take a notice of the kind that actually arrives and pull it apart a phrase at a time. Plain language is not swapping long words for short ones: watch where the reading level really falls.
Tell us what you need.
Inside these three or outside them. We will say whether we are the right studio for it.