Full source handover
Working files, tokens, repositories and documentation transfer to you on the final day. No licence, no lock-in.
Six practices. One team running all of them.
Most engagements use three or four of these at once. They are listed separately because they are scoped and costed separately — not because they happen one after another.
- Typical engagement 3–6 months
- Team size 2–5 people
- From £6,500 / month
Jump to a practice
01
Brand & identity
Naming, positioning, identity systems, typography, verbal language.
02Digital product design
Research, IA, interaction design, interface craft, prototyping.
03Web & ecommerce
Marketing sites, storefronts, CMS modelling, front-end build.
04Motion & art direction
Motion language, photography direction, launch film, sound.
05Design systems
Tokens, components, contribution rules, documentation, governance.
06Research & strategy
Interviews, category analysis, positioning, measurement design.
Practice 01
Brand & identity
An identity is a set of decisions that other people have to keep making after you leave. We design for that second year, not the launch deck.
Work usually starts with language. Getting the sentence right — what this company is, for whom, instead of what — makes every visual decision downstream faster and less arbitrary. Then typography, colour, layout logic, photography direction and the rules that hold them together.
- Positioning statement and messaging hierarchy
- Naming and nomenclature (where needed)
- Logotype, marks and a full type system
- Colour system tested to WCAG AA in context
- Art direction and photography guidance
- Brand guidelines your team can actually apply
Typical: 8–14 weeks · from £38,000 · or inside a Spectrum retainer
Practice 02
Digital product design
Interfaces are read under pressure, on bad connections, by people trying to do something else. We design for that person rather than the one in the case study.
We spend the first weeks watching people use what exists. After that: information architecture, flows, states, and interfaces built out far enough to click through. Empty states, errors and permissions get the same attention as the happy path, because that is where products are actually judged.
- User research and usability testing
- Information architecture and flow design
- Interactive prototypes, not slide decks
- Full state coverage: empty, loading, error, edge
- Accessibility review at WCAG 2.2 AA
- Design QA through to release
Typical: 12–24 weeks · from £9,500 / month · Signal or Spectrum
Practice 03
Web & ecommerce
A website that your marketing team cannot edit is a website you will pay for twice. We model the content first and design the components second.
Everything is built from a component library with a weight budget set in week one. That constraint is what keeps a site fast three years and forty pages later, when nobody remembers who added the third analytics script.
- Content modelling and CMS structure
- Component-led design, not page-led
- Front-end build: semantic, responsive, fast
- Core Web Vitals budget agreed up front
- Ecommerce flows, checkout and merchandising
- Analytics and event design that answers a question
Typical: 8–16 weeks · from £32,000 · build included
Practice 04
Motion & art direction
Motion is grammar. Once a product has consistent rules for how things enter, settle and leave, people stop noticing the interface and start using it.
We define durations, easings and choreography as tokens, alongside a reduced-motion path that is designed rather than switched off. Then the wider art direction: photography, film, and the launch piece that introduces the whole thing.
- Motion tokens: duration, easing, choreography
- A designed reduced-motion experience
- Photography and illustration direction
- Launch film and social cutdowns
- Production-ready implementation notes
Typical: 4–10 weeks · from £18,000
Practice 05
Design systems
A system is not a component library. It is a set of agreements about who can change what, and what happens when someone needs an exception.
We build the tokens and components, then write the part most systems are missing: the contribution process, the deprecation policy and the review that stops it quietly forking. We hand it over with two working sessions and a check-in ninety days later.
- Token architecture across brand and product
- Component library in design and code
- Contribution and deprecation rules
- Accessibility baked into every component
- Documentation written for engineers
- Adoption plan and training sessions
Typical: 10–20 weeks · from £44,000 · Spectrum or Observatory
Practice 06
Research & strategy
The point of strategy work is a decision. If the output is a document everyone agrees with and nobody acts on, it failed.
We run interviews with customers and the people who sell to them, map the category honestly, and come back with a position and the trade-offs it commits you to. Then we design how you will know whether it worked.
- Customer and stakeholder interviews
- Category and competitor analysis
- Positioning with explicit trade-offs
- Messaging architecture
- Measurement design and baselining
Typical: 4–8 weeks · from £16,000 · often runs first
Every engagement
Included, whichever practice you buy.
These are not upsells and they are not conditional on the size of the contract.
Weekly critique
Thursday, open to your team, recorded if you cannot make it. Plus a written note on what changed and what we are unsure about.
Accessibility to AA
Contrast, focus order, keyboard paths, motion preference and screen-reader review, audited before handover rather than after.
30 and 90 day check-ins
Two sessions after the engagement closes to see what broke, what got misused and what needs a second look. Not billed.
Scoping questions
Before you write the brief.
Yes, and roughly a third of our work is single-practice. The exception is design systems: we will not build one without either designing the product surfaces it serves or reviewing them thoroughly first, because a system built from an unexamined product just canonises its problems.
Yes. We work in your files, your repository and your ticketing system by default. It costs us a week of setup and saves a fortnight of migration at handover.
Then we work inside it. An audit in the first week tells us where it is load-bearing and where it has been improvised, and we will tell you plainly if we think a rebrand is unnecessary — it usually is.
In Spectrum and Observatory, yes — markup, styles, components, motion and integration into your framework. Signal is design-only; if you need build on a Signal engagement we will quote it as a separate track rather than quietly absorb it.
For defined pieces of work — an identity, a site, a research programme — yes, and the figures on this page are those prices. For open-ended product work we use the monthly model, because a fixed price on an undefined scope is a fixed price on an argument.
Next step
Not sure which of these you need?
Neither are most people at this stage. Describe the problem instead of the deliverable and we will tell you which practices it actually touches.