Retail banking rebuilt around the one number that matters.
Twelve projects, with the numbers left in.
A cross-section rather than a highlight reel. Where a project underperformed, that is on the page too — the useful part of a case study is usually the bit that did not work.
- 148 projects since 2014
- 31 countries
- 12 shown here
The index
Filter by practice.
Select a practice to narrow the index. Choosing a project jumps to its notes further down this page.
Ninety years of metalwork, repositioned for architects.
Nine restaurants that had been operating as nine brands.
A referral tool designed for ninety seconds of attention.
An independent publisher with 900 titles and no shop window.
Forty-two markets that had drifted into forty-two designs.
A pantry brand whose checkout was losing a third of its carts.
A games studio with eleven trailers and no visual grammar.
A civic service used in a hurry, often on an old phone.
A developer who wanted to stop sounding like a developer.
A mill selling to designers through a catalogue from 1998.
Eleven instrument lines that never read as one company.
Nothing in that practice yet.
Case notes
Twelve, in order.
01 · Fintech · 2026 · Brand, product, design system
Halcyon Bank
Halcyon had a good product buried under a nineteen-screen onboarding flow and an identity borrowed from a challenger bank two funding rounds ahead of them. We started by cutting rather than adding: eleven screens went, the marketing site lost half its pages, and the app opened on a single number instead of a dashboard. The identity followed the interface rather than the other way round.
The hardest part was compliance. Every simplification had to survive a regulatory read, which is why the project ran eleven months rather than seven.
+38%Activation
−42%Support tickets
11 moTo launch
02 · Industry · 2025 · Brand, identity
Northgate Foundry
A ninety-year-old sand-casting foundry selling almost entirely to contractors on price, while the architects specifying the work never heard their name. We rebuilt the identity around the thing that was actually rare — the pattern shop and the people in it — and put the making at the front of every touchpoint.
Six months on, direct architect enquiries had gone from a handful a year to two a week. Turnover barely moved in year one; margin did.
×9Specifier enquiries
+7ptGross margin
14 wkEngagement
03 · Hospitality · 2025 · Brand system, web
Ember & Ash
Nine restaurants opened over twelve years, each with its own logo, menu format and booking widget. We built one system with deliberate room in it: shared typography and grid, per-site colour and photography. The booking flow was rebuilt around the only two questions people actually answer — when, and how many.
Direct bookings more than doubled inside two quarters, which mattered because every one of them avoided a platform commission.
2.4×Direct bookings
−31%Booking drop-off
9Sites, one system
04 · Healthcare · 2024 · Product design
Solstice Health
A referral tool for clinicians who had, by our own stopwatch, about ninety seconds per patient to use it. We shadowed eleven clinics, cut the form from four screens to one, and moved everything optional behind a single disclosure. Nothing was added; a great deal was removed.
Worth noting: the first release was slower than the paper process it replaced. It took two further rounds of testing to beat it.
72sMedian completion
−58%Incomplete referrals
11Clinics observed
05 · Publishing · 2024 · Brand, web
Vellum Press
Nine hundred titles, a devoted readership and a website that could only be browsed alphabetically. We modelled the catalogue around how readers actually describe books — mood, length, translator, series — and let the identity stay quiet so the covers could carry it.
The typographic system was drawn to work at 11px in a footnote and at 200px on a poster, which turned out to be the whole project.
+64%Pages per session
+29%Direct sales
900Titles remodelled
06 · Transport · 2024 · Design system, product
Kestrel Mobility
A ticketing platform in 42 markets that had been localised into 42 different products. We consolidated it into a single token architecture and component library across web, iOS and Android, then wrote the contribution and deprecation rules — the part that decides whether a system survives.
Removing three quarters of the CSS was satisfying. Getting six regional teams to agree on a review process took considerably longer.
0.9sLCP, from 3.1s
42Markets unified
−74%CSS shipped
07 · Retail · 2023 · Ecommerce, web
Atlas Provisions
A pantry brand with excellent products and a checkout losing a third of its carts. Most of the loss was a delivery estimate that only appeared at the final step. We moved it to the product page, rebuilt the basket around substitutions rather than removals, and simplified the range architecture.
No new features. The gain came entirely from moving information earlier.
+22%Checkout completion
+18%Average order
6 wkTo first release
08 · Media · 2023 · Motion, art direction
Fable Interactive
A games studio with eleven trailers that looked like eleven studios. We wrote a motion grammar — how things enter, how type behaves, what the cut rhythm is, what the sound does — and rebuilt the title sequence and store presence around it.
The rules fit on two pages. That was deliberate: a motion guide nobody reads is a motion guide nobody follows.
11Titles unified
+41%Trailer completion
2 ppMotion rules
09 · Civic · 2023 · Service design, product
Lantern Public
A public service used by people in difficult circumstances, frequently on old devices and metered data. We set the design target as a five-year-old Android on 3G and let everything else inherit from that. The result is 84kb on first load and no layout that depends on hover.
This project is the reason accessibility moved to week one for every engagement after it.
+61%Task completion
84kbFirst load
AA+Audited contrast
10 · Property · 2022 · Brand, web
Quarry & Co
A developer who wanted to stop sounding like one. We cut the renders, photographed three finished buildings with people in them, and rewrote the copy in the first person. The identity is deliberately plain so the buildings do the work.
Enquiry quality changed more than enquiry volume — which is what they had asked for.
+52%Qualified enquiries
−19%Total enquiries
3Buildings shot
11 · Manufacturing · 2022 · Identity, art direction
Meridian Textiles
A mill selling to interior designers through a printed catalogue last redesigned in 1998. The archive was the asset: 4,000 sampled weaves nobody outside the building had seen. We built the identity around the archive and made the sample request the primary action on every page.
A physical swatch still converts better than any image, so the site is designed to get people to ask for one.
×3.1Sample requests
4,000Weaves digitised
10 wkEngagement
12 · Science · 2023 · Brand, web
Orrery Labs
Eleven scientific instrument lines, each named and styled by whichever team happened to ship it. We gave the catalogue one visual grammar and a naming convention that encoded what each instrument does, so the range finally read as a company rather than an acquisition history.
The sales team stopped having to explain that they were one business. That was the entire return, and it arrived in month four.
11Lines unified
−35%Sales-cycle length
4 moTo measurable effect
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