Ombra Studio, Chicago Illustration, photography and digital design
Every identity we shipped this year began as a page of thumbnails no wider than a thumb. It is not nostalgia. A pencil is the fastest way to find out whether an idea survives being drawn badly, and most of them do not. This is how we run the first week of a brand project, and why the laptop stays shut until it is over.
Process Identity Sketching
We cut the studio’s print run by half last year and nobody noticed, which was the point. Notes on choosing a paper stock for how it ages, running fewer proofs, and the one job we still insist on printing on press.
Print Sustainability Studio
Once a year we photograph every desk in the studio and write down what is on it. This year the tablets are gone, the notebooks are back, and nobody can explain the rubber duck.
Tools Studio Hardware
Half the studio now works from kitchen tables, trains and one houseboat. What we lost, what we gained, and the three habits that keep a distributed team feeling like a room.
Studio Remote Process
Ten records that got us through the last quarter, chosen by whoever was closest to the speaker. There is a lot of piano this time, and one album of field recordings from a shipyard.
Music Studio
Twelve columns is a habit, not a law. For an editorial site we built a grid that changes its column count with the reading width rather than at fixed breakpoints, and it removed more code than it added.
Layout Typography Web
The most effective posters we saw this year were made with one colour and a blunt tool. A short history of why the woodcut comes back every time people have something urgent to say.
Posters Print History
A third of the interfaces we shipped last year are used by someone who never looks at them. Screen readers, voice control and a switch: what changed in how we design once we started testing with all three.
Accessibility Digital Process
We designed three record sleeves this year and none of them for streaming. Notes on working at twelve inches square, and why the constraint is the point.
Music Packaging Print
Pixel joined the studio in January and has since knocked over one monitor, two coffees and a client presentation. What a cat taught us about pace, and about leaving the good chair alone.
Studio Cat
