Capabilities
Most engagements use three or four of these at once, which is the entire argument for keeping them in the same building. You can buy one on its own — we will tell you when that is a bad idea.
Deciding what is true before deciding what it looks like.
Positioning, naming, narrative and the audience research underneath them. We run this as a small number of long conversations with the people who actually decide things, not a survey of everyone. The output is a written argument you could disagree with, which is the only kind worth having.
A mark is the small part. The system is the job.
Wordmarks, typography, colour, layout measure, motion behaviour and the guidelines that keep them alive after we leave. We design for the worst reproduction first — the embroidery, the 8 mm application, the badly lit photograph — because that is where most identities quietly fail.
Design systems and the front-end engineering to hold them up.
Websites, platforms, editorial tools and the component libraries behind them. We build and hand over the code; we do not design screens for someone else to interpret. Accessibility and performance budgets are set in week one and reported against at every review.
Wayfinding, exhibition and the graphics a building has to live with.
Signage schedules, exhibition graphics, retail and workplace applications, produced with fabricators from the first sketch. We specify materials that age in a way you have agreed to in advance, and we write the schedule the installer actually works from.
Print that has to survive a warehouse and a bookshelf.
Books, reports, periodicals, packaging and the production management to get them made properly. We work in stock, ink and cutter guide from the start — a packaging idea that has not been costed against a run length is not yet an idea.
Moving work made from the same system as the still work.
Direction, animation, title design and sound, produced in-house in Lisbon. Motion is treated as a property of the identity rather than a separate campaign language, so a title sequence and a poster obey the same rules.
How to buy it
We price the shape, not the hour. Every engagement has a named team, a fixed window, a written scope and an agreed definition of done.
Two or three weeks to find out whether there is a project here.
A fixed-scope, fixed-fee piece of work that ends in a written position and a recommendation — including, sometimes, the recommendation not to proceed. Roughly a third of sprints do not become programmes, which is the point of running them.
One workshop a week, one document at the end.
The full piece of work, from position to production.
Our usual shape. A named team for a fixed window, working in three-week cycles with a review at the end of each. Scope is agreed at the start and re-agreed in writing whenever it changes, which it does.
Three-week cycles, a review at the end of each, one decision-maker in the room.
A part of the studio inside your team for six to twelve months.
For organisations that have the system and need the capacity — two or three of our people on your standups, your tooling and your release schedule. Priced per month, cancellable with one month's notice, reviewed every quarter.
Your rhythm, not ours. We show up to your ceremonies.
Scope builder
Pick the disciplines and the shape. The panel gives an indicative duration and band, worked out in your browser from the numbers in our own scoping sheet. It is not a quote and it does not send us anything — it is here so the first conversation starts in the right place.
Rhythm: Three-week cycles, a review at the end of each, one decision-maker in the room.