Invent a company once — mark, wordmark, palette, typefaces, address, telephone, year founded — and every
other studio wears it. The legal form, the postcode and the telephone are dated: Ltd needs 1856,
plc needs 1981, GmbH needs 1892, S.p.A. needs 1942, and nobody has a telephone number
before 1880. Every firm, person, address and number is invented, and no real trade mark is drawn anywhere.
Part of Chronotype · Free to use.
Licence for paid productions ·
the research behind it
The firm — who this is
The mark — the device it trades under
Forty things, filtered to the ones this trade would have put
on a letterhead. Press Everything to see the rest.
The four beasts this device draws. Choosing one moves the mark’s
seed, so the same beast comes up in every studio that wears the firm.
A device has a period and a trade, and both are enforced: the winged wheel is not offered after
1945 and the benzene hexagon is not offered to a draper. The gallery shows what this year and this trade
could actually have worn — press Everything in it to see the rest and take the decision yourself.
Colour — what the printer could hit
Or set them by hand
Type — two classes, not two faces
A brand carries a class of type and not a named face, because each studio has its own case
and a brand that named a face would only work in one studio. Newspaper Press will set a didone in Bodoni and
Sign Shop will set it in Playfair; both are didones, and both are right for the year.
Particulars — all invented
What each studio takes
A studio takes what it has a place for. Nothing is forced: a studio with
no telephone line on the sheet simply ignores the number.
Carry it to another machine
The shelf — the firms you have kept
The shelf lives on this machine only, in one small key. A firm is a
description — about six hundred bytes — so the mark is redrawn wherever it is needed rather than
stored as a picture, and the mark on a dispensing label is the same mark as the one on a shop fascia.
The billing block — the firms at the foot of the sheet
Eight marks of eight different shapes do not look the same
size in a box of the same height: a solid disc puts three times the ink on the page that a hairline
ring does. Each one is drawn to an offscreen canvas, its ink counted, and scaled until the counts
match — which is the thing a designer spends an afternoon doing by eye.
On the block
For the art department
The brand sheet is what goes in the folder: the mark at working sizes, the
palette with its values, the two type classes, and the particulars set the way the country sets them.
Print at 100% / actual size, margins none. Every firm, person,
address, telephone number and mark on this page is invented. Nothing here reproduces a registered trade mark,
a granted coat of arms, a royal warrant or any official device.