To Life
The studio
A small studio with one obsession: colour that means something.
We are not a logo shop with a swatch book. We are colourists who happen to build brands. Everything here, the people, the principles, the way we work, bends toward a single question: what wavelength has this brand been missing, and how do we turn it all the way up?
Colour is not decoration. It is the fastest sentence a brand can speak, understood before a single word is read.
What we do
Four ways we put a brand in colour.
-
Identity
Names, marks and the logic that holds them together. A signature that still reads at the size of a thumbnail and the height of a building.
-
Palette systems
Not a swatch, a system. Primaries, supports, tints and the rules that keep every screen and surface in tune across a hundred touchpoints.
-
Brand worlds
The whole climate a brand lives in: motion, texture, sound-of-voice, the feeling someone keeps two days after they have left.
-
Art direction
The hand on the campaign once the system exists. We make sure the tenth asset is as deliberate as the first.
How we hold the line
Six principles, kept even when the brief gets loud.
-
Earn every colour
No colour ships until it has survived contrast, context and a year of imagined use.
-
Accessible by default
4.5:1 is the floor, not the goal. Colour is never the only signal we lean on.
-
Systems over swatches
A palette is a set of rules. We hand over the logic, not just the hex.
-
One brave choice
Most brands are grey from indecision. We make the one decision they have been avoiding.
-
Built to outlast a trend
We design for the wavelength, not the season. A good colour ages into a signature.
-
In the room, in person
No account-layer telephone game. The people who tune the colour are the people you meet.
The people
A studio is itself a palette.
- Mara Vance Founder · colour direction
- Idris Okafor Identity & type
- Lena Brandt Systems & tokens
- Theo Marsh Motion & brand worlds
- 16.7M
- colours considered, roughly twelve chosen
- 4.5:1
- the contrast floor we never drop below
- 120+
- brands brought from grey to full strength
Want to see how we’d colour you?
Tell us where the brand has gone grey. We will show you the wavelength it has been missing.
Start a project