Studio

We are a design and technology studio of fourteen people, and we work almost entirely with cultural institutions — museums, galleries, archives, heritage sites and publishers. We do identity, wayfinding and digital products, which in this sector are rarely separable: the sign, the ticket and the collection site are all the same institution talking to the same visitor. We take on a small number of engagements a year and stay on them from the first conversation to the last release.

The studio was founded in 2014 by two people who had spent the previous decade on opposite sides of the client relationship and had reached the same conclusion from both directions: that the expensive mistakes are made in the first six weeks, before anyone opens a drawing tool. Almost everything about how we work follows from that. We start with a short paid phase whose only deliverable is a brief, written jointly, that either of us can walk away from.

There is no account layer here. The people you meet in the first week are the people who do the work, and the engineers are in the room from the beginning rather than receiving a specification later. This is partly a matter of taste and mostly a matter of arithmetic: a design decision whose cost is discovered after it has been approved is the single most reliable source of overrun we have seen.

We build what we design, and we build it to be handed over. Every system we have delivered comes with the documentation, the contribution rules and the training for the client team that will maintain it, and we stay for the first months afterwards to review what they change. We consider an engagement successful when someone else has extended our work without asking us, and we keep count.

We work in English and French, from one studio, with clients in culture, finance, science, publishing, transport and industry. We are usually booked one to two quarters ahead. If the timing does not work, we will say so in the first conversation, and we are happy to point you at someone else.