Case Study
01
The Folio Press Identity System
The Folio Press approached us with a legacy imprint that had outlived its identity. Their backlist of literary essays and fine letterpress editions deserved a mark that lived in the same tradition. We rebuilt the visual language from a single letterform — a Caslon lowercase 'f' — and worked outward from there.
Client
The Folio Press
Year
2024
Services
Brand Identity, Type Direction, Print Collateral
Scope
Wordmark, series templates, editorial grid, stationery
The Brief
Literary publishers occupy a peculiar corner of the brand landscape. Their identity must signal authority without pomposity, tradition without staleness, and care for the physical object without becoming precious. The Folio Press had operated for 22 years on a wordmark drawn in-house in 2002. It was not bad — it was invisible.
The brief was to establish an identity that the press could grow into over the next twenty years. Not a rebrand — a foundation.
"We wanted something that felt like it had always been there — like it was uncovered, not designed."
The Approach
We started in the archive. Three weeks with their backlist, reading the physical objects they had produced. The paper stocks, the binding methods, the margins. The press's real identity was already there — in the craft of the books themselves. The visual identity needed to make that explicit.