The manifesto

Five rules we've never broken. Read them before you email us — rule five is about you.

  1. Boring is the only bad idea

    Safe work is expensive work — you pay for it twice, once in fees and again in silence. Every project gets one genuinely risky move, argued for out loud, tested in the wild. If nobody at your company is slightly nervous, we haven't started.

  2. One page that works beats forty that don't

    We've deleted more brand books than we've written. Rules nobody can remember are rules nobody follows. If your team can't recall the system after one read, the system failed — not the team.

  3. Type is the loudest instrument

    Before illustration, before photography, before motion — the typeface does the talking. We choose type the way casting directors choose leads: it has to hold the whole screen alone.

  4. Ship it ugly-fast, polish it famous

    The first version goes live embarrassingly early. Real reactions beat boardroom guesses every single time. Polish is applied to things that are already working in public — never in private.

  5. We pick clients who pick fights

    Six new brands a year. We choose the ones trying to unseat somebody bigger, louder, and better funded. If you want to blend into your category, there are wonderful studios for that. We're not one of them.

Agree with rule five?

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