The brief I wrote myself
Everything I make sits on one thing: riding a bike a very long way, and what happens to people out there. It comes out as essays, as film, as pen drawings, as photographs, as races. For a while that looked like five different people who happened to share a bike.
So I wrote myself a brief. One identity strong enough to carry every format, and specific enough that someone could tell it was mine with the words covered up.
Positioning
The line I use, and will not trade:
Creative storytelling about cycling and everything around it.
It names the subject, not the craft. That is what lets one identity hold an essay, a film and a drawing without any of them looking like a side project.
Two things I turned down to get there:
Not “writer”.
True of one format and wrong for all the others. It also puts the weight on the output instead of the subject, which is the wrong way round — the subject is the only thing every piece has in common.
Not a list of formats.
“Writer, filmmaker, illustrator, photographer” reads as someone who has not decided. A list is what you write when you have no position.
The rules
Five decisions. Each one is a rule I can defend, which is the only kind worth having — a preference bends under deadline, a reasoned rule does not.
Cormorant Garamond on warm paper, never on screen white.
The register is literary, not performance-sport. The bike industry defaults to a bold sans-serif on black, so an editorial serif on paper does two things at once: it says this is something to read rather than scroll, and it does not look like a brand deck.
Hyphenation off. Words wrap whole.
Reading is the product. A word split across a line is a typesetting convenience that costs the reader a beat, and on a page whose only job is to be read, that is not a trade worth making.
One accent red, taken from a photograph.
The mark red is sampled from the table in the collages, so the interface and the photography carry the same red instead of two that nearly match. Brownish reds are out — the red has to read as velvet or rose, never as dried blood.
The drawings are the ownable asset, not the photographs.
Photographs of gravel racing all look like each other. The pen drawings could not have come from anyone else, which is why they lead the grid and carry the share cards.
The text measure is capped, everywhere, forever.
Line length is a reading decision, not a layout one. The column stays at 46rem whether the screen is a phone or a 32-inch monitor; only pictures and film are allowed to break past it, and only because they are the subject when they do.
- Paper#EDEBE3
- Ink#16130F
- Mark#943F24
- Accent#5C6034
- Out#841818
TK — one line on why the fifth swatch is banned — the word for what is wrong with it
What the rules had to survive
A system is only worth the formats it does not break in. This one runs across a website, a long-form essay, a short film made with a brand, nine animated drawings, an Instagram grid, video frames, business cards and street stickers — and the hardest test is not any single piece, it is the grid, where nine things sit beside each other at thumbnail size and either look like one hand or do not.
TK — the grid, three site pages and the print set as images — the section needs to be shown, not described
What I rejected
The part of an identity that is hardest to show is the part that got thrown away. Everything below was built, looked at, and killed.
Frames around the video posts.
TK — why the frames lost — the specific reason, in one sentence Built as transparent-window overlays in the site’s own paper and Cormorant, tested on the grid, and dropped.
Burgundy, in any application.
TK — the reason, in your words
TK — one more rejection if you have it — a rejected third is what turns this from a list into a standard
Activation
Where the identity actually met people, and what each channel was for.
The essay was published as its own site rather than a post on someone else’s platform, because a piece about handmade letters could not arrive looking like everyone else’s feed.
The film was made with GripGrab for their EXPLR series — embedded here, credited with their lockup, and linked out to them. A collaboration should send traffic both ways.
The grid runs to a rule rather than a mood: one drawing in every three, one warm photo grade, and a square opener on video posts so a moving piece still reads as a picture at thumbnail size.
The street carries stickers and cards that point at one domain and nothing else, because the whole reason for a single positioning is that every channel can end in the same place.
Attribution is built in. The bio link is a short link that applies its own campaign tag, a second rotating link points at whatever is current, and the page waits three seconds before tidying the tag out of the address bar — because stripping it on load would wipe it before the analytics beacon ever read it, and every visit from Instagram would have looked like someone typing the address in.
Evidence
Honest numbers, gathered rather than estimated. TK — fill all four — real and modest beats round and impressive, and an empty figure is better than a guessed one
- —Essay readers
- —Film views
- —Instagram, start to now
- —Inbound enquiries
The outcome that is not a number: a brand came to me for a film, and the work that convinced them was made under this system before there was a brief.
What I would change
TK — two or three things, honestly — what the system still does not solve, what you got wrong first time, and what you would do differently with a client’s budget instead of your own evenings. This is the section that separates someone who makes things from someone who runs a brand, so it is worth more than section three.