About
Est. 2016
Frieze is a design studio working in identity, typeface design, editorial, packaging and wayfinding. We photograph most of it ourselves.
A studio of nine, working between London and Lisbon. Six projects a year, each seen through from the first reading to the last proof.
The sign you read twice because the arrow sits at exactly the right weight. The book whose margin gives the photograph room to breathe. The label you keep after the bottle is empty. None of that happens by accident, and none of it survives a process built for speed.
So we work slowly and we work close. A project usually starts with a week of reading and ends with a week of proofing. The part in between is mostly subtraction.
Six disciplines, one studio. Most projects touch three of them before they are finished.
- 01
Identity
Marks, systems, and the rules that keep them honest.
24 projects - 02
Typeface design
Retail and commissioned families, drawn in-house.
9 families - 03
Editorial
Books, monographs, catalogues, and the odd annual report.
31 titles - 04
Wayfinding
Signage systems for transit, civic and cultural clients.
6 systems - 05
Packaging
Structure and surface, produced with the printer in the room.
18 lines - 06
Interface
Reading, browsing, buying. Screens that hold still.
14 products
Three movements, in order, every time. The order is the method.
Read
Before anything is drawn we read everything: the brief, the archive, the complaints, the competition. Most of what a project needs is already written down somewhere by someone who was annoyed.
Draw
We draw far more than we show. The work you see is the third or fourth position, and it survives because it beat the others in the room, not because it arrived first.
Prove
Nothing leaves the studio untested. Type gets proofed on paper, signage gets printed at size and taped to a wall, interfaces get handed to someone who did not make them.
- Founded
- 2016, in a former print works
- Studio
- London SE16 · Lisbon
- People
- Nine, plus a dog
- Sectors
- Transport, publishing, coffee, cosmetics
- Recognition
- D&AD, TDC and ADC — twelve times
- Intake
- Roughly six projects a year
