Identity and wayfinding for museums, galleries and archives
A design and technology studio. We work on the things a visitor actually touches — signage, ticketing, collection sites, and the identities that hold them together.
Selected workMost briefs arrive describing a solution. The useful work happens earlier — in deciding what is actually being asked.
We are a small team of designers, engineers and writers. We take on a handful of engagements a year and stay on them from the first conversation to the last release.
Six things we made for museums, galleries and archives.
The membership that got simpler every release
Thornbury Art Gallery · 2023 A gallery membership rebuilt around the three things members actually open it to do.
Two million specimens and one search box
The Weatherby Collection · 2025 A public collection site for an archive catalogued by specialists, for specialists, since 1904.
Four hundred spines that have to look like one shelf
Harker and Vine · 2022 An identity and cover system for an independent publisher with six imprints and one backlist.
One visit, three buildings
Loxley Galleries · 2023 Visitor routing and a plan-your-visit tool for a gallery whose collection is split across three sites.
A furnace that had to become a front door
Cordell Ironworks Trust · 2021 Identity and wayfinding for a steelworks that stopped making steel and started taking visitors.What institutions hire us to do
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Strategy and positioning
Working out what the institution is for before deciding what it should look like.
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Brand identity
Identities that survive contact with a building, a shop, an exhibition and a funding bid.
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Digital product design
Ticketing, membership, collection sites — the things a visitor actually has to operate.
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Engineering
We build what we design, and hand it over in a state someone else can maintain.
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Interpretation and editorial
Label copy, gallery text and the long documents an institution has stopped reading.
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Wayfinding and signage
Getting a visitor from the street to the thing they came for, in buildings never designed for it.
The people who will actually be on your project
No account layer, no handover to a delivery team. The people you meet in the first week are the people who do the work.
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Iness Karoui
Principal, strategy
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Rune Halvorsen
Principal, design
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Priya Ramanathan
Design director, digital product
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Mateus Okonkwo
Head of engineering
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Sun-Woo Bae
Editor
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Ilse Grootveld
Design systems lead
Notes from the work
Design system debt is not a backlog item
A system that nobody on the client side can extend is not an asset. It is a dependency with good…
The brief is the deliverable
Most briefs describe a solution someone already chose. A good one describes a situation and what would count as better.
Research that changes the roadmap, and research that does not
If you cannot say in advance what finding would cause you to cancel something, you are not doing research.
Tell us what is not working yet
[email protected]We reply to everything, usually within two days, including the ones we are not right for.