Why we started writing these

In the eight years since I started Orvel, we have written a great deal and published almost none of it. There is the decision log every project keeps from its first week, one line per decision. There are the long emails we send after a difficult review, explaining why we think the second route is stronger than the one the client liked. There are the notes new designers get in their first month, rewritten so many times that nobody remembers who began them. Last spring, working from kitchen tables in two cities, we realised how much of the studio lived in those documents, and how little of it lived anywhere a client could see before deciding to work with us.

So this is the first issue of Orvel Notes. It will arrive four times a year, in March, June, September and December, with a few short notes on how we work: process, craft and, now and then, the mistakes. Each note is written by the person who led the work, not by a marketing team, because we do not have one.

Writing is how we check our thinking

The real reason is a selfish one. We have found, again and again, that a design argument which sounds convincing in a meeting falls apart on paper. Last year we tried to write down why a website we had just finished needed nine page templates. The explanation ran to three paragraphs before it became obvious that it needed five, and we went back and cut four. That kind of thing happens often enough that writing has become part of the work rather than something that comes after it.

If we cannot explain a decision in a paragraph, we probably have not made it yet.

What we will and will not write about

• How we run projects: briefs, audits, reviews and timelines, with real durations and real team sizes.
• Craft notes from the people doing the work: type, colour, motion, writing and code.
• Case notes, only with the client’s permission and only with figures they have agreed we can share.
• No trend forecasts, no lists of the year’s best logos and nothing about prizes.

Why email, and why so rarely

We considered a blog that updates every week, and decided against it because we know what happens to studio blogs: three keen months, then a post apologising for the silence. Four times a year is a pace twenty-six of us can keep alongside client work without anyone writing at the weekend, which matters, because home by six is the one rule we have never bent. It also means each issue has to earn its place in your inbox. If a note would not be useful to someone who runs a brand, a product or a studio of their own, it does not go out.

The next issue, in June, is about accessibility, and why it belongs in the brief rather than in the final week of a project. Write back if you disagree with anything here. Every reply comes to me, and the best ones have a habit of changing how we work.