A brand only works once other people use it without you.
PLINTH is eight people in Bristol. We do naming, identity systems, typography, packaging, editorial design, and the guidelines that keep all of it intact once the launch is over and we are no longer in the room.
We are not a web studio and we do not pretend to be one. What we hand over is a name, a mark, a type system, artwork, and a document your printer and your new starter can both follow.
II
Contents
Selected work, 2022 to now. Pull the index sideways. Every project below was named, drawn, specified and documented in this building.
- Shown
- Seven of about ninety
- Years
- 2022 to 2026
- Sectors
- Food, drink, culture, print
Drag the index →
III
Marrow
Naming, identity and packaging for a fermentation company that had outgrown a name it never chose. Eleven weeks, three of us, fourteen pack formats.
The company arrived called Bristol Ferment Company, which is what the founder had typed into the registration form in 2019 because something had to go in the box. Five years later it was on fourteen products, two vans and a lease. It described a postcode and a process, and it stopped being true the week they started shipping to Dublin.1
We spent the first fortnight not designing anything. Naming work is mostly reading: the trade press, the shelf, the register, the classes the mark would need to cover. We came back with a longlist of ninety and a screening note explaining why sixty of them were already gone.
Marrow won because it did two jobs at once. It is what is inside the bone and it is the vegetable, and both readings land on food without either one being a pun. It is also two syllables, unregistered in class 29, and pronounceable by a Dutch distributor, which is a duller set of reasons and the ones that actually decided it.
Three routes went to the founder in week five. We told her which one we would pick, and why, before she asked, because a studio that presents three routes without a recommendation is asking the client to do the hard part of the job.2
Three routes, and a written reason for the one we would pick. A studio that hands over three options and no recommendation is asking the client to do the difficult half of the work.
The identity is a wordmark, a monogram, one variable serif and one grotesque, four colours, and a rule about how the range is stacked on a shelf. That last one mattered more than any of the drawing. The products sit next to each other in a chiller in a shop the company does not control, and a system that only works when a designer places it is not a system.
Artwork ran to fourteen formats, from a 40ml sample bottle to a catering-sized tub. The guidelines came to 92 pages, of which fourteen are about the mark and the rest are about everything that happens to it afterwards: minimum sizes, exclusion zones, print stocks, the two things you may never do to the monogram, and what to send a printer who asks for a Pantone breakdown at five o'clock on a Friday.3
- 1 The name was still legally the trading name until the following September, which is normal and is the reason a naming engagement runs alongside a solicitor rather than ahead of one. ↩
- 2 Route two, the one we recommended, is the one that shipped. Route three survived as the pattern used across the catering range. ↩
- 3 The answer to that question is in section 6.2 of the guidelines, which is the section that has been opened most. ↩
IV
Practice
Six disciplines. Most engagements use three or four of them, and the timings below are what they actually take, not what they take if nothing goes wrong.
01
Naming
Longlists, a legal and linguistic screen, then a shortlist we can defend in a room. You get the reasoning in writing, not just the word.
02
Identity systems
A mark, a type system, a colour system, and the rules that make the three of them behave together at any size and in any hands.
03
Typography
Selection, licensing, and where the budget allows, a drawn face. We handle the foundry conversation and the licence schedule.
04
Packaging
Structure, hierarchy and artwork through to print-ready files. We come to the press pass if you want us there, and we usually do.
05
Editorial design
Reports, catalogues, books and journals. Grids that survive an editor, a late photograph and a print deadline in the same week.
06
Brand guidelines
The document your agency, your printer and your new starter all read. Usually around 90 pages, and written to be used rather than admired.
V
Voices
They named the company, then spent a fortnight arguing us out of the name we had fallen for. They were right, and they had it in writing before we admitted it.
The guidelines are the part everybody forgets to ask for. Ours get opened every week by people who have never met anyone at PLINTH.
Three routes, one recommendation, and a written reason for it. No theatre, no reveal, no music. We signed off in one meeting.
VI
Enquiries
Tell us what the work is and roughly when it has to exist. We reply to everything within two working days, including the ones we turn down.