Fermo Nove · brand design · Contrà del Guanto 9, Vicenza
Thirty-four projects since 2016. Each one is a sheet on the wall with four things written under it — who it was for, the year, the weeks it took, the people on it.
The case wall at four o’clock, Contrà del Guanto 9 · the sun reaches it for nineteen minutes in March
We will not write you a paragraph about a project before you have seen it. The sheet goes up, and under the sheet goes the same strip of four fields we have used since the first job in 2016. If a project cannot be described that way, we have not finished thinking about it.
Numbering type from the studio's own case · bought at the Zovencedo sale, 2018
Three off the wall
A spring bottler in Belluno that had six labels and no agreement about which one was theirs. We printed all six at full size, put them on the wall, and let the family argue in front of them for an afternoon. The one they kept was the oldest.
Nine weeks, three people, one bag. The co-op bakes at four in the morning and wanted something a wet hand could still read at six. We tested four kraft weights on the counter for a fortnight before anyone drew anything.
Thirty-one weeks for an arts foundation that publishes eleven things a year and had eleven ways of doing it. The answer was not a logo. It was one grid, one paper, and a rule about who signs off a cover.
How a sheet gets on the wall
Week two: the first cut proofs, studio bench, 08.40
Week eleven: pulling a test at the screen bench
Two weeks, no drawing. Invoices, complaint letters, the delivery driver's route, whatever exists. For Dolomia that meant three days in an archive in Belluno and a bottling line at five in the morning.
We bring a single direction and the argument for it. There is no board of nine marks and no vote. If you hate it we say why we were wrong and go again, which has happened eleven times out of thirty-four.
Everything is printed, folded, filled and handled before it is approved. Half of what we send back in week eleven is wrong — the fold is in the wrong place, the ink dries two shades down. That is what the middle weeks are for.
We come to you, print the rules at A3, pin them up where the work actually happens, and leave the originals. You get the files too, but nobody has ever opened a folder at six in the morning in a bakery.
Client, year, weeks, people. Same four fields as every other sheet in the room.
We are nine: four designers, two strategists, a writer, a production manager and a bookkeeper who also runs the archive. Everyone sits in one room on the first floor above a locksmith, which is loud on Tuesdays.
The wall is thirteen metres of plywood along the north side. Every live project has a sheet on it. On Friday at six we take down what is finished, pin up what is new, and whoever is nearest reads the four fields out loud. It is the only meeting we have never cancelled.
Before you write
There is no free creative round and there never has been. If you need to see work before you commit, the wall is the work — thirty-four sheets, with the weeks and the people written under every one of them.
Tell us the client, the year you need it out, the weeks you actually have and who on your side will decide. Four fields, same as ours. We answer within two working days and we will say no in the first one if it is not for us.
Smallest job we took last year: €4,200, four weeks, two people. Largest: €46,000 over twenty-six weeks.