Design system

Every part, and where it lives.

Twenty-one sections, nine primitives and seventeen tokens, rendered from the theme.css that ships with the download.

Sections: 21
Primitives: 9
Tokens: 17, two modes

The palette

Seventeen tokens, two modes.

Every value below is read from theme.css at render time, so a rebrand recolours this page with the theme.

Every token

--background

--foreground

Warm paper. Every page starts on it.

--card

--card-foreground

The only pure white: a sheet laid on the paper.

--muted

--muted-foreground

The alternating band, and quieter copy on it.

--secondary

--secondary-foreground

Warm sand. Ledger headers, monogram tiles, this page.

--accent

--accent-foreground

Coral tint, with the darker coral that carries small text.

--primary

--primary-foreground

The coral. Display type, fills and marks.

--border

--ring

Hairlines rule the page. The ring is the darker coral, so focus survives every surface.

--radius 0.25rem

--font-sans · --font-mono

One radius, nearly square. Round is for status dots and nothing else.

Type scale

Display d4 — hero h1

Carry weight.

font-display type-d4 · 5.0625rem / 1.05 / −0.03em

Display d3 — page h1, section h2

Published prices.

font-display type-d3 · 3.375rem / 1.1 / −0.02em

Display d2 — row h3, figures

Halcyon Rail

font-display type-d2 · 2.25rem / 1.2 / −0.01em

Display d1 — card h3, wordmark

Design systems

font-display type-d1 · 1.5rem / 1.25 / −0.01em

Lead

We quote a fixed price after a paid discovery, never before.

type-lead · 1.125rem / 1.6

Body

Wordmark, palette, a type system, and the rules that keep it honest after we leave.

type-body · 1rem / 1.55

Small

Fixed price, not a day rate.

type-small · 0.875rem / 1.45

Label / eyebrow

Before you ask

font-mono type-label · 0.75rem / 1.4 / +0.08em, uppercase

Figures

£8,0004–6 wks

font-display type-d2 tabular-nums, mono type-label metadata

Shape, rules and focus

Chips, cards and buttons share one radius; full-bleed plates are square; the dot is a status dot.

rounded-themed

rounded-none

rounded-full

Sets of equal things sit in a hairline grid. Ordered lists sit in ruled rows.

gap-px on bg-border, bg-card tiles

Ruled row

border-t on the list, border-b on each item

Three offsets, one per element type. Drawn here; in use they appear on keyboard focus only.

Control

outline-offset-2

Full-bleed row

-outline-offset-2

Inline link

outline-offset-4

The inventory

Twenty-one sections, one file each.

Each frame is the real component with its shipped content, labelled with the file it lives in.

hero

src/components/hero.tsx

Brand & digital studio

Brands that carry weight.

We make identities, design systems and websites for companies that have outgrown the logo a founder drew in a hurry.

Start a project See the ledger

Founded: 2016; Arch 41, Bermondsey
Studio: 12 people; four projects at a time
Engagements: 4–12 weeks; fixed price, not day rate
Next opening: November; two slots left

Carries the h1 on the home page.

client-band

src/components/client-band.tsx

Thirty-one companies since 2016, eight of them twice

Halcyon Rail
Marlow & Kite
Verity Health
Northbank Press
Aldous Coffee
Tessellate
Field & Furrow
Ostrom Capital

selected-work

src/components/selected-work.tsx

Selected work

Four projects that explain the studio.

Every case names the client, the year, and the number the work moved.

The four cases in full

Each row links to the matching entry on the work page.

work-index

src/components/work-index.tsx

Case studies

The brief, what we made, and the number it moved.

What each engagement costs

01
2026
Halcyon Rail
Overnight rail · Zürich
- Naming
- Identity
- Wayfinding
The brief
Europe's first all-night sleeper network had eleven weeks, four operating territories and a working title on a spreadsheet — Project Nightjar — that legal had already refused twice. The first carriages were in the paint shop before the name existed.
What we made
A name that cleared a trademark screen in four jurisdictions, a livery system drawn to the coachbuilder's panel spec rather than to a moodboard, and wayfinding that has to work at 03:40 for someone who has just woken up and cannot find the buffet car.
Berth bookings, first quarter
+34%
Brief to painted carriage
11 wks
Stations rebadged
9
- Name
- Trademark screening
- Logotype
- Livery system
- Wayfinding
- Ticketing UI
02
2025
Marlow & Kite
Bookbinding · Clerkenwell, London
- Identity
- E-commerce
- Packaging
The brief
Forty-one years of hand-bound ledgers, a trade counter that shut at five, and a website that took payment by emailing an invoice the next morning. Two thirds of the enquiries arrived after ten at night, from people who were never going to make it to Clerkenwell.
What we made
We kept the 1984 wordmark — it was drawn by hand and it is better than anything we would have made — and rebuilt everything around it: a second type system, a packaging range that survives a courier, and a shop that takes money at midnight.
Of revenue online, from 12%
61%
Average order value
2.4×
Wordmark redrawn, not replaced
1984
- Identity extension
- Type system
- Packaging
- Store build
- Product copy
“They redrew a wordmark my grandfather commissioned in 1984, and it somehow still looks like ours.”
Priya Marlow · Managing Director, Marlow & Kite
03
2025
Verity Health
Clinical software · Leeds
- Design system
- Front-end
The brief
Four products, eleven engineering teams, and three competing button components that all answered to the same name. Nothing shared could ship without a fortnight of reconciliation, and the previous attempt at a system was a ninety-page PDF nobody opened twice.
What we made
Tokens first, in the repo, versioned — then components, then documentation that lives beside the code instead of in a design tool. We wrote the migration codemods too, because a system nobody can adopt is a slide deck with better spacing.
Teams on one system
11
Releases to feature parity
2
Duplicate components retired
312
- Token set
- Component library
- Codemods
- Docs site
- Team handover
04
2024
Northbank Press
Publishing · Manchester
- Website
- Editorial
- Front-end
The brief
A ninety-year archive — forty thousand photographs, plates and features — sat on a server that two people knew how to search, and one of them had retired. The publisher was paying to store an asset it had no way to sell.
What we made
An editorial platform that treats the archive as inventory: everything catalogued, everything searchable, rights and licence terms attached to the record rather than kept in a filing cabinet down the corridor. The public site is the shop window; the licensing desk is the business.
Pieces catalogued
40,000
Of revenue from licensing, year two
18%
Revenue line created
3rd
- Editorial site
- Archive search
- Rights model
- CMS
- Front-end build

All thirty-one

Companies since 2016: 31
Median engagement: 7 wks
Work from referral: 94%

Twenty-seven more since 2016. A third are under NDA, a third are three-week naming jobs that do not survive being written up, and the rest we would rather show you than describe. Ask on the first call and we will open the folder.

Every entry is anchored, which is why the theme has no per-case routes. The totals row closes the ledger; heading="page" puts the route's h1 above entry 01.

services-ledger

src/components/services-ledger.tsx

Services

Six things we do, and what they cost.

Real starting prices, not ‘pricing on application’, fixed after a paid discovery.

How an engagement runs

01
Brand identity
Wordmark, palette, a type system, and the rules that keep it honest after we leave.
- Logotype
- Type & colour
- Guidelines
from £8k
4–6 weeks
02
Naming & verbal identity
A name that clears a trademark screen, and a voice that survives a legal review intact.
- Longlist
- Screening
- Tone of voice
from £4k
2–3 weeks
03
Design systems
Most requested
Tokens, components and documentation your engineers will actually open on a Tuesday.
- Tokens
- Component library
- Handover
“The design system paid for itself in a quarter. Our engineers stopped arguing about spacing and started shipping.”
Dan Osei · VP Engineering, Verity Health
from £14k
6–8 weeks
04
Websites
Designed and built. Next.js and Tailwind, with a CMS your marketing team can hold.
- Design
- Build
- CMS
from £18k
8–12 weeks
05
Editorial & print
Reports, catalogues, and the annual that nobody in the building dreads laying out.
- Art direction
- Layout
- Print management
from £5k
2–4 weeks
06
Studio retainer
A day a week of the whole studio, for the year after launch. One month’s notice, either way.
- Standing slot
- Priority queue
- Quarterly review
£6k / month
rolling

Prices exclude VAT, print and third-party licences. Discovery is £2,400 and comes off the project fee if you go ahead. Charities and B Corps pay 80%; we do not do spec work at any price.

Shown with its section heading. Pass heading="page" and the ledger carries the route's h1 as its own head row, which is how /services opens.

manifesto

src/components/manifesto.tsx

The studio

We sell the twenty minutes after the reveal.

Most studios sell process — a diagram with five arrows and a word like immersion in the middle of it.

We sell the twenty minutes after the reveal, when the room goes quiet and somebody finally says: that's us. Everything before it is in service of that moment — the interviews, the three hundred rejected wordmarks, the argument about the baseline grid that ran until nine on a Thursday.

We are twelve people in a railway arch. We take four projects at a time, which means the person who pitched your work is the person who draws it. There is no new business team. There is Nadia, and she answers her own email.

Companies since 2016: 31
Projects at a time: 4
Of work from referral: 94%
Median engagement: 7 wks

testimonial

src/components/testimonial.tsx

In their words

“Two agencies wanted to talk about our purpose. Foundry turned up in week three with a name, a livery and a printed timetable.”

Erin Vasquez

Chief Marketing Officer, Halcyon Rail

capabilities

src/components/capabilities.tsx

What's in the box

Six capabilities, mixed to fit the brief.

Every engagement draws on these; we tell you the proportion before you sign.

Research & positioning
Twelve to twenty interviews with your team, your customers and the two competitors you are quietly worried about. One page of findings, not forty.
- Stakeholder interviews
- Category audit
- Positioning statement
Naming & trademark
A longlist you will hate, a shortlist you will argue about, and a final three that survive a UK/EU screen and a .com search.
- Longlist
- Screening
- Registration support
Logotype & lettering
Drawn, not chosen. Custom letterforms where the budget carries them, and a licensed pairing where it does not.
- Wordmark
- Monogram
- Custom lettering
Colour, type & motion
A palette checked for contrast at the values you publish, a type scale with real steps, and six frames of motion so it moves the same everywhere.
- Palette & contrast
- Type scale
- Motion principles
Tokens & components
The system as code: semantic tokens, a component library, and documentation that lives next to the components rather than in a folder nobody opens.
- Design tokens
- Component library
- Usage docs
Build & handover
Next.js and Tailwind, shipped to your repo with a half-day session for the people who inherit it. We leave; the system does not.
- Front-end build
- CMS setup
- Handover session

process

src/components/process.tsx

How it runs

Four phases. No stage gates you didn't ask for.

An eight-week identity looks like this; longer projects stretch phase three and nothing else.

01Week 1–2
Read the room
Interviews with your team, your customers and your two nearest competitors. We come back with one page: what you are, what you are not, and the thing nobody in the building has said out loud.
Positioning page · fixed quote
02Week 2–4
Draw the line
Three directions, presented in context — on a sign, on a phone, on an invoice. You choose one. We do not come back with a fourth; that is a decision, not a menu.
Three routes · one signed direction
03Week 4–8
Build it out
The system: logotype, type scale, colour with real contrast numbers, layout, motion, components. Documented as we go, in the open, in a repo you already have access to.
Working system · living documentation
04Week 8+
Hand it over
Source files, a written system and a half-day session with the people who will run it. Then a quarter of on-call, because the first quarter is when systems break.
Handover session · 90 days on call

faq

src/components/faq.tsx

Before you ask

The questions that come up on the first call.

What does a brand cost?

The ledger above is honest about where it starts. A small identity for a founder-led company lands near £8k. A full identity for a funded company, with naming and a design system, usually runs £24k to £60k. We quote a fixed price after a paid two-week discovery, never before — a number given without the discovery is a guess dressed as a quote.

Who actually does the work?

The six people on the studio page, plus six more who keep projects moving. We do not subcontract the thinking, and the person who pitched your project is the person who draws it. If that changes mid-project, we tell you the day it changes.

What if we only need part of it?

Common, and fine. Roughly a third of our work is a design system for a brand somebody else made, or a website for an identity we did not draw. We will say so if we think the part you want will not survive without the part you skipped.

How far ahead are you booked?

Usually six to ten weeks. We hold four project slots and two are open from November. Discovery can start sooner — it does not need the full studio.

Do you work with in-house teams?

Most of our best work is alongside one. We run the system and the hard calls; your team runs the volume. The handover session is built for exactly this, and the retainer exists for the year afterwards.

Will you pitch for free?

No. Not for a logo, not for a homepage, not for a chance at a bigger project later. Speculative work is paid for by every client who did not commission it, and we would rather not run a studio like that.

The variant prop switches between the engagement and working question sets.

team-grid

src/components/team-grid.tsx

The people

Six of the twelve. The other six are on a deadline.

No headshots against a brick wall; you get what we look like when we turn up.

Nadia Okonkwo
Founder & Creative Director
Started Foundry in the arch in 2016 with one client and a borrowed guillotine. Still writes the first line of every brief.
Since
2016
Focus
Identity, art direction
Ines Ferreira
Strategy Director
Turns nine weeks of interviews into one sentence a board can repeat without reading it off a card.
Since
2018
Focus
Positioning, naming
Milo Vance
Design Director
Draws in Figma, thinks in letterpress. Owns every argument about the baseline grid, and usually wins.
Since
2019
Focus
Logotype, layout
Priya Raman
Principal Engineer
Ships the design system the same week it is signed off, then deletes the parts nobody used.
Since
2021
Focus
Design systems, front-end
Callum Reid
Type & Motion
Custom letterforms, and the six frames of motion that make them behave the same on every screen.
Since
2022
Focus
Lettering, motion
Sofia Brandt
Studio Director
Keeps four projects, twelve people and one very old kettle running, in roughly that order of difficulty.
Since
2020
Focus
Production, print

The other six run production, front-end and the print desk. You meet whichever of the twelve your project actually needs, on the first call.

Initials plates, not photographs. Foundry ships no image assets. On /team the heading="page" variant makes the masthead the sheet's plateless first cell.

open-roles

src/components/open-roles.tsx

Open roles

Two seats, and a kettle that needs replacing.

We hire slowly, reply within a week, and pay for any take-home test.

Permanent£58–68k
Senior Brand Designer
London · Arch 41, four days in
You will lead identity work from week one, present it yourself, and draw more than you deck. We are looking for someone whose portfolio has one project they are still slightly angry about.
Apply for this role
Permanent£65–78k
Design Engineer
Remote · UK or EU timezone
React, Tailwind and strong opinions about type rendering. You will own the design systems we ship to clients, and the tooling that keeps six of them from drifting apart.
Apply for this role

No agencies, and no speculative work as part of an application. If nothing here fits, write to jobs@foundry.studio anyway — two of the twelve arrived that way.

contact-desk

src/components/contact-desk.tsx

Where to write

Three desks. Someone reads all three.

Pick the closest one; a rough note beats a polished brief.

The people who reply

New business
hello@foundry.studio
Nadia reads this one herself; there is no new business team. A paragraph and a budget range beat a brief.
Answered within one working day
Jobs
jobs@foundry.studio
The two open roles, and the unsolicited note that got two of the twelve hired. Sofia opens all of it.
Answered within a week
Everything else
+44 20 7946 0912
The phone on the workbench. Press, students, suppliers, and anyone who would rather talk than type.
Answered Mon to Thu, 9 to 6

The arch

Arch 41, Crimscott Street

Bermondsey · London SE1

Getting here

Bermondsey on the Jubilee line is eight minutes on foot and London Bridge is fifteen. There is no sign on the door; the bell is marked 41, and it is the only one on the row that works.

Before you come

Write first. Half the studio is usually out at a press or on a shoot, and the arch is a working room rather than a reception with a sofa in it.

Arch 41 · Crimscott Street · SE1

Three desks in a hairline grid, then the arch and the drawn area map. It opens /contact, where heading="page" swaps this h2 for the route's h1 on a shorter lid.

enquiry-form

src/components/enquiry-form.tsx

Tell us what you’re making.

Four fields, and a paragraph in the last one beats a polished brief.

A client island: validation on submit and on leaving a field, designed error and success states, and the POST boundary printed under the button.

journal-entry

src/components/journal-entry.tsx

Journal

Keep the wordmark.

Marlow & Kite’s logotype was drawn by hand in 1984. Keeping it was the whole job; replacing it would have been the easy one.

Published: 12 March 2026
Written by: Milo Vance
Filed under: Identity
Read: Six minutes

The bindery on Clerkenwell Road has been in one family since 1953 and in one typeface since 1984, when Priya Marlow’s grandfather paid a lettering artist forty pounds to draw the name on a trade card. It has been stamped into every cover the workshop has bound ever since. When the brief reached us it was about none of that: the trade counter shut at five, two thirds of the enquiries arrived after ten at night, and the website took payment by emailing an invoice the following morning.

The instinct is to redraw everything

A studio that is paid to make things has an obvious bias, and the honest version of it is this: a new mark is easier to present, easier to justify and much easier to charge for. It also lets us skip the part of the job where we have to work out what the old one was doing right. Nobody commissions a rebrand hoping the answer is that most of it should stay.

So we started by drawing the counter-argument. We set the 1984 logotype beside four replacements of our own and put all five in front of eleven customers who had spent more than £400 with the bindery in the previous year. Nobody chose ours. Two people described the original as “the one my ledger has on it”, which is not brand recall, it is ownership.

“A mark that has survived forty-one years has already won an argument we were not in the room for.”

What changed instead

We redrew the logotype rather than replacing it: the same letterforms, cut as outlines from a 600 dpi scan of a 1991 die stamp, with the spacing corrected and the ampersand rebuilt where three decades of photocopying had eaten it. Set at 14px on a phone it now holds together, which the traced version we were given never did.

Everything around it is new. A second type system carries the product copy so the logotype never has to do a job it was not drawn for. The packaging survives a courier rather than a counter. And the shop takes money at midnight, which is when the people who love this bindery are awake.

The number it moved

Of revenue online, from 12%: 61%
Average order value: 2.4×
Wordmark redrawn, not replaced: 1984

None of that is an argument for keeping every old mark. Most of them are old rather than good, and the test is whether anyone outside the company would notice it going. Ask eleven customers. If they shrug, draw something better.

The case in full, with what we made

The article layout. It carries the h1 on the journal page, which is why that page has no page header.

journal-notes

src/components/journal-notes.tsx

Shorter notes

At the length they deserved.

Eight or so a year, written when there is something to say and not before.

14 January 2026
Why the prices are on the site
Every studio that hides its prices spends the first call finding out whether the other side can afford it. We would rather spend it on the work, so the ledger is public and the numbers are the ones we charge.
3 December 2025
We do not pitch for free
Speculative work is paid for by every client who did not commission it. We will show you four cases, tell you what they cost and introduce you to the people who signed them off, and that is the whole pitch.
6 November 2025
The arch, in winter
Railway arches are cold, loud twice an hour and the best studio any of us has worked in. The trains are on the ceiling, the presses are against the back wall, and the rent buys a room nobody has to book.
2 October 2025
Hiring without portfolios
Two of the twelve arrived by writing us a note about a project of ours they thought was wrong. Portfolios show what a studio let someone ship; a paragraph shows how they think.

Older notes are in the studio’s own archive rather than on this page. Ask on the first call and we will send the file.

Four notes finished in place — a hairline grid, not a fifth ruled ledger.

legal-notice

src/components/legal-notice.tsx

The small print

What we keep, what you own.

Six answers, and none of them need a solicitor to read.

Ask us anything else

Who we are
Foundry Studio Ltd
Twelve people in Arch 41, Bermondsey, trading since 2016. The six on the studio page are the ones you meet; the other six keep the projects moving.
What we keep
One inbox, one repository
Enquiries live in the studio inbox and project files in a private repository. We hold both for the engagement plus two years, then delete them, and sooner if you ask.
Cookies
None, and no banner
No analytics, no pixels, nothing to dismiss. The only thing this site stores on your machine is whether you asked for dark mode.
Invoicing
Thirds, on thirty-day terms
A third to book the slot, a third at direction sign-off, a third on handover. No day rates and no timesheets to argue about.
Ownership
Yours on final payment
Outright, including the source files and the working drawings. We ask only to show the work in our portfolio, and we wait as long as you need.
Complaints
Sofia, inside five days
Write to hello@foundry.studio and mark it for the studio director. A named person answers inside five working days, and it is never a form.

Company number

09942310

Foundry Studio Ltd, registered in England and Wales. The number on every invoice we send is this one.

Registered office: Arch 41, Crimscott Street, London SE1 3JU
VAT: GB 214 8871 05
This page updated: March 2026

The imprint: six clauses and the company number at display size. /legal renders it with showHeading false, under the page masthead.

page-header

src/components/page-header.tsx

The small print

The terms, in full.

Company details, what we do with an enquiry, and who owns the work when the last invoice is paid.

Registered office: Arch 41, Bermondsey
Trading since: 2016
Updated: March 2026

The masthead, shown with its optional facts strip. /legal is the one route that ships it, and it ships it without the strip; the opener at the top of this page is the same component.

cta

src/components/cta.tsx

New business

Tell us what you're building.

Bring the messy version — the half-finished deck, the name you are not sure about, the site you have stopped showing people. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it, and who is if we are not.

Email the studio Read the ledger first

Reply time: Within one working day
First call: 30 minutes, no deck
Currently booking: From November, two slots

Defines the contact anchor every page links to.

Shared parts

Nine primitives, one frame.

The pieces every section imports: buttons, links, chips, fields, the mode toggle, monograms and the heading block.

src/components/ui/*.tsx

Button · variants

primary

secondary

ghost

disabled

Button · sizes

sm · h-9

md · h-11

lg · h-13

Links

Start a project

ButtonLink · ui/button.tsx

See the ledger

ArrowLink · ui/arrow-link.tsx

Badge · tones

Most requested

accent

Design systems

neutral

2024

outline

Two slots

solid

Eyebrow

Brand and digital studio

ui/badge.tsx · the printer's slug

Field · states

The resting state, with its note.

That address has a typo in it. Check it and send it again.

Budget

ui/field.tsx · Field, Input, Textarea, Select

ModeToggle

ui/mode-toggle.tsx · the live control — it flips this page too, because a specimen that did nothing would not be the component

Monogram

block · accent

SectionHeading

Selected work

Four we can show you.

Eyebrow, display heading, lead and an optional action on one baseline row.

The cases in full

ui/section-heading.tsx

FoundryMark

ui/icons.tsx · the one hand-drawn SVG, strokeWidth 1.5

Container

One gutter for every section: px-5 at 375, px-8 from 640, px-10 from 1024.

prose 48rem · default 72rem · wide 80rem

Every part, and where it lives.

Seventeen tokens, two modes.

Twenty-one sections, one file each.

Brands that carry weight.

Four projects that explain the studio.

Halcyon Rail

Marlow & Kite

Verity Health

Northbank Press

The brief, what we made, and the number it moved.

Halcyon Rail

The brief

What we made

Marlow & Kite

The brief

What we made

Verity Health

The brief

What we made

Northbank Press

The brief

What we made

Six things we do, and what they cost.

Brand identity

Naming & verbal identity

Design systems

Websites

Editorial & print

Studio retainer

We sell the twenty minutes after the reveal.

Six capabilities, mixed to fit the brief.

Research & positioning

Naming & trademark

Logotype & lettering

Colour, type & motion

Tokens & components

Build & handover

Four phases. No stage gates you didn't ask for.

Read the room

Draw the line

Build it out

Hand it over

The questions that come up on the first call.

What does a brand cost?

Who actually does the work?

What if we only need part of it?

How far ahead are you booked?

Do you work with in-house teams?

Will you pitch for free?

Six of the twelve. The other six are on a deadline.

Nadia Okonkwo

Ines Ferreira

Milo Vance

Priya Raman

Callum Reid

Sofia Brandt

Two seats, and a kettle that needs replacing.

Senior Brand Designer

Design Engineer

Three desks. Someone reads all three.

hello@foundry.studio

jobs@foundry.studio

+44 20 7946 0912

Arch 41, Crimscott Street

Getting here

Before you come

Tell us what you’re making.

The instinct is to redraw everything

What changed instead

The number it moved

At the length they deserved.

Why the prices are on the site

We do not pitch for free

The arch, in winter

Hiring without portfolios

What we keep, what you own.

Foundry Studio Ltd

One inbox, one repository

None, and no banner

Thirds, on thirty-day terms