2025
Branding
A wordmark and type system for a furniture maker moving from workshop to retail.
Details
Alder & Co. had outgrown the hand-painted sign on their workshop door. We built an identity that keeps the directness of that sign while surviving a shopfront, a website and a stamped timber mark. The wordmark is drawn from a single pen angle, so it reads as made rather than specified.
Client
Alder & Co.
year
2025
Challenge
One mark, every surface
The existing mark only worked at one size, in one colour, on one surface. Everything beyond the workshop door was improvised.
We needed a system that could be stamped into oak, printed on a delivery note and set as a favicon without redrawing it each time.
The workshop has been making furniture for nineteen years and had never had a second version of its logo. When something needed to be smaller, someone scaled it down and accepted whatever came back.
End-grain oak sets the floor. A stamp die cannot hold a hairline, so the lightest any weight could ever be was decided by the timber rather than by us.
Working up from that constraint rather than down from a screen drawing is the whole project. Three weights, each drawn for a real surface, none of them an optical afterthought.
My Process
Research
Two days in the workshop, photographing the hand-painted sign, the tool wall and the stamped end-grain on finished pieces. The old mark was never designed — it was painted once and copied ever since. How it was made mattered more than how it looked.
Brainstorming
We put every possible surface on one wall: a shopfront, a delivery note, a favicon, a hot stamp in oak. Anything that only worked on paper was cut on the spot.
Drawing
The wordmark was drawn at a single pen angle so the thick and thin strokes fall where a brush would put them. Three weights followed, each tested at the size it would actually be used.
Testing
We cut a trial stamp die and marked fifty offcuts to find the weight that survives being pressed into open grain. The lightest weight lost its joins, so the stamp uses the middle one.
Outcome
Three weights and a working specimen
A three-weight wordmark, a timber stamp die and a type specimen the team sets their own signage from.
Retail rollout across two stores
Stamp die cut for end-grain marking
Specimen handed over as a working document
The specimen is the real deliverable. It is a printed book showing each weight at the sizes it was drawn for, with the surfaces named — oak, card, enamel, screen — so the choice is made by the job rather than by taste.
Both stores were rolled out in a fortnight, largely by the workshop team. We were on site for one day of it.
The stamp die has since turned up on things nobody specified, including invoices and the side of a delivery van. That is the point at which an identity stops being a document.
