Applications
Four artefacts are drawn and measured: the business card, the ID card, the LinkedIn covers and the team profile images. The Instagram work is still exploration, and the six documents a client actually receives have not been made yet.
Almost nobody opens a logo page. Clients open a proposal, a card and an invoice, and those artefacts decide what they think of the studio.
The brand is judged on what arrives in the inbox
An identity is only as good as the documents it ships inside.
What follows is an inventory rather than a rulebook. Four artefacts are drawn at real dimensions and can be specified precisely; everything else is either exploration or missing, and both are labelled as such.
Reading it that way is the point. A guideline that presents unfinished work as settled rules produces artefacts that contradict each other, and afterwards nobody can say which one was wrong.
Four artefacts specified. Seven post styles unresolved. Six templates that do not exist.
Status, August 2026
Five surfaces, measured off the artwork. Where a value looks arbitrary it was read rather than chosen, and the ratio behind it is given alongside.
Seven variants on one artboard, governed by a single margin that repeats on all four edges.
Artboard, radius, margins
The card is drawn at 1000 × 647px, which is the 85 × 55mm European card at a working resolution. Corners are 40px. Margins are 80px on all four sides, leaving an 840px content column that every element on both faces aligns to.
Hold the 80px. It is the only measurement that repeats on all four edges, so an element breaking it is obvious even to someone who has never seen the artwork before.
Scale the margin with the artboard, not with the content. At 2000px wide the margin is 160px, not 80px plus a guess.
Seven variants, and no eighth
Four front variants and three back variants are settled. Treat those seven as the full set: adding an eighth because one particular client would suit it is how a card system turns into a folder of one-offs.
The back
The back carries the tagline inside a coloured highlight, with two selection-handle marks flanking it. The device reads as text caught mid-selection, which is why the handles sit tight to the highlight and never drift away from it.
A contact row is pinned 80px from the bottom edge and laid out justify-between, so it spreads across the full 840px column. Items are added to or removed from the row rather than re-centred, and the outer two always touch the margin.
Artboard and ground
The badge is 1000 × 1432px with a 60px radius, on a near-black ground, with the same 80px margins as the card. The larger radius is proportional: at 1432px tall, a 40px corner would read as sharper than the card’s, not the same.
Front
Three zones run down the artboard: a name and role header, the aura at the centre, and a foot carrying the wordmark with an "est. 2026" row. Only the centre zone is allowed to grow, so a long name pushes the aura down rather than crowding the foot.
Back
The back is a single oversized mark rendered as a checkerboard halftone, dissolving from invisible at the top to hot colour at the bottom. It is the one place in the system where the mark is allowed to be illegible, because at badge distance the gradient reads before the shape does.
The halftone is a raster effect. Rebuild it at output resolution rather than scaling an export up, or the checkerboard aliases into a moiré.
The 6:1 problem
4200 × 700px is a 6:1 band, the most hostile ratio in the identity. Two variants are settled, and both solve it by holding a single object instead of composing across the width.
Dark variant
The wordmark is centred on both axes and nothing else sits on the artboard. Centring is doing real work: the lower left of a cover is covered by the profile photo on most layouts, and a centred object survives every crop.
Orange variant
Content is a right-aligned block where the small wordmark and the tagline share one right edge, set 134.5px (3.2%) in from the artboard edge. The two are matched optically rather than metrically: the tagline’s text height equals the cap height of the centred wordmark on the dark variant, so the covers read at the same weight when swapped.
The 3.2% matters more than the 134.5px. Rebuild the cover at another width and the percentage still holds, while the pixel value does not.
Circles and gutters
Portraits are 838.5px circles set on a grid with 54px gutters. The gutter is tight on purpose: a row should read as one object rather than as five separate avatars.
The 1.2× overscale
Each portrait is a background-removed cut-out, scaled to 1.2× inside its circle so that the shoulders overflow at the sides and the bottom. The subject then reads as pushed forward, in front of the circle rather than inside it, and the crop is what produces that.
Crop at the shoulders, never at the top of the head. Overflow at the bottom edge is the effect; overflow at the top is a mistake.
What sits behind
Behind each portrait is a fragment of the mark at roughly 2.1× the circle diameter, so only part of it is ever visible. It is textured with a grunge PNG masked by the mark silhouette and set to multiply, which keeps the texture inside the shape instead of dirtying the whole circle.
Everything above is the identity applied to small surfaces. The artefacts a studio is actually hired through are missing, and they are the highest-value work outstanding.
The six documents that do not exist
Proposal template
The document that wins or loses the work has no master. It needs a cover, a scope and pricing layout that survives a long table, and a signature page that does not look like a different document.
Pitch deck masters
Slides are rebuilt per pitch, which is why no two decks look alike. Five masters at 16:9 would end that: title, section divider, full-bleed image, two-column and data.
Case study format
Without a fixed format, every project write-up is designed from scratch and none of them compare. It needs a repeatable order (problem, approach, artefacts, outcome) and a fixed set of image ratios, so past work can be re-laid without being re-cropped.
Email signature
Every message currently carries whatever the mail client defaults to. It needs one plain-text version and one HTML version, both legible in dark mode, and no image-only logo that disappears when images are blocked.
Invoice and contract templates
These are the two documents a client reads most carefully, and both are unbranded today. The invoice needs a fixed line-item table and a payment terms block; the contract needs a layout that stays legible across ten pages of body text.
Letterhead
Anything printed or signed needs one, in A4 and US Letter. Draw the continuation sheet at the same time, because a continuation sheet that is page one with the header deleted is how the margin drifts.
#Two formats
Feed posts are 4:5 and stories are 9:16. Both are settled as formats; most of what goes inside them is not.