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Atelier
Booking winter 2026 · Two places left
Start a project
Atelier
Independent design studio · Est. 2019
Six people in a converted print works. We take eight projects a year — identities, books, signage and websites for people who make real things — and stay with each one until it is out in the world and working.
Plate 01The long table this week: Ferrous posters back from the printer, a Marrow Press proof and a box of Herald & Co cards.
The studio
A small studio, on purpose. The person who answers your first email is the one who sets the type at midnight before the press run, and the one standing beside the press the next morning. That is not a flaw in the model. It is the model.
Selected work
A foundry, a publisher, a hotel and an archive. We judge the work by how long it goes without needing us, and these four have gone years.
All sixteen projectsA nameplate identity for a small-batch iron foundry — a mark heavy enough to be cast, stamped and poured.
A grid, a type system and a cover language for twelve long essays a year, in one voice.
A booking site that reads like the place feels — slow, bright and quiet. Loads in under a second.
“Each of these is still in use, unchanged, years later. That is the only review we collect.”
From the studio's own rules
An identity and a catalogue for four hundred weaves, searchable by fibre, region and decade — and a card for every one of them.
Practice
Most projects touch at least two of them, and the joins are where the work gets good. An identity that ignores the website it has to live on is only half an identity.
Naming, marks, type systems and the written rules that keep them coherent after we leave. An identity is a tool your team uses every day, not a poster.
Books, journals, catalogues and annual reports — grids and hierarchies built for the text you actually have, then supervised on press until the sheet matches the proof.
Marketing sites and small products, designed and built to stay fast, legible and maintainable by whoever inherits them. No analytics you did not ask for.
Signage and exhibition graphics for buildings that were never meant to be navigated. We prefer paint to plastic, and we never drill a listed wall.
The studio, counted honestly — seven years of the same small numbers.
8/yr
Projects we take on. The year we took eleven is why.
14wk
The median project, first call to handover.
11
Clients who have come back for a second project.
0
Unpaid pitches. We show thinking once you have hired us.
Method
Five phases in the same order every time. Changing your mind is free until the end of week six, and we say so in writing before we start.
The whole processAfter week six a change of direction is a new project with a new fee — and we will tell you at the time, rather than absorb it quietly.
In their words
“They gave us a visual language the whole company can speak. Two years on, we still have not needed to call a designer for the everyday work — which I suspect was the point.”
“They showed us the direction they thought was wrong, and explained why. No other studio we spoke to did that.”
Ines Duarte · Fieldnote
“Our front desk used to answer the same question four hundred times a week. Now it answers it about ninety.”
Tomas Weir · The Ironworks Museum
Journal
Eight or nine pieces a year, mostly about the parts of the job that do not photograph well.
Read the journalEnquiries
We book two projects a quarter and answer every enquiry ourselves, usually within two working days. Tell us what you are making, and the date it needs to exist by.