Every good brief has a wall in it somewhere: a budget, a deadline, a printing method, a planning rule, a founder’s favourite color. The work gets interesting when you stop trying to climb the wall and start building against it.
On the Halden Botanics identity, the wall was letterpress. The client wanted their labels printed by a family workshop that only runs two colors at a time and cannot hold fine detail below a certain size. That ruled out half the ideas on our wall in the first week.
Constraints are decisions someone already made
It helps to treat a constraint as a decision made in advance, usually for good reasons. Two colors means every color has to earn its place. A coarse press means the mark has to be strong enough to survive it. Those are design decisions we no longer have to agonise over.
What remains is the interesting part: within those limits, what is the most precise, most characterful thing we can make?
Give me the freedom of a tight brief.
David Ogilvy
Three constraints we now add ourselves
- One typeface per project, until it proves it cannot do the job.
- No color without a role: every color names something.
- Design the smallest application first — the favicon, the label, the stamp.
None of these are rules. They are walls we build on purpose, so the work has something to push against.