London, 1992.

Spin is a London graphic design studio founded in 1992 by Tony Brook and Patricia Finegan, who are married. A detailed independent account of its early years is a long interview with Brook by John L. Walters in the “Reputations” series of Eye magazine, published in Eye 86, autumn 2013. The conversation took place in Spin’s studio and at the Eye offices that summer.

Eye says Brook grew up in Halifax, in the north of England, and left home in 1980 to study illustration at Somerset College of Arts and Technology in Taunton, switching to graphic design in his third year. After a year without work he joined the design agency Shoot That Tiger! in 1984, then moved to Icon (later Sonicon) in 1989 and to Crimson in 1991. Much of that work was for record sleeves, and Brook told Walters that a Gert Dumbar book cover, seen as a student, had turned him towards typography.

Brook left Crimson in 1992, in the middle of a recession. He told Eye that his boss called the decision insane, and that he set up in a two-bedroom flat, using one bedroom as the studio and the other as his bedroom, so that overheads could hardly be lower. He had a couple of clients, including the record label Telstar. Finegan, who had studied fashion management and worked in public relations, joined him a month later. The pair hired an employee after six months.

The studio then moved several times as it grew. Eye records a start in a flat in Streatham, a move to a larger space, then to a bigger studio in Clapham, and later to a large studio in Kennington in a building once used for horse-drawn taxis, where, Brook recalled, the floors sloped so much that chairs rolled away. It was in Kennington, he said, that Spin resigned the accounts he no longer wanted, a step that still scared him to think about two decades later.

Brook described the 1990s to Walters as a period of searching for a voice. Spin was dependent on the music industry, working with labels such as Talking Loud on a more organic, painterly style. Brook said that in 1996 he decided to head in a different direction, towards conceptual and reductive work, and that the change meant letting some people go. Eye describes the studio moving on to large-client branding in the mid-2000s with a spare, neo-Modernist approach to identity design.

Self-initiated work, newsprint and a publishing imprint.

Spin’s own projects shaped how the studio presented itself. Brook told Eye in 2013 that one early self-initiated piece was a CD-Rom on the word “spin”, made to experiment with interactivity. It was seen by Diesel, which then gave the studio a large commission. A short film made on a small PC was seen by the advertising agency Mother, which recommended Spin to Channel 4; Eye captions frames from a moving-image identity for Channel 4 dated 2001, designed by Brook. A later film about table-football players, shot on 16mm, was in Brook’s words to Walters an expensive piece made for the studio’s own entertainment.

Print followed. Eye says that in 2006 the studio decided to stop entering design competitions and to publish a newspaper instead, designed by Brook and David McFarline. The first issue showed selected Spin work and, Brook said, was ordered by readers in Argentina, Sweden and Belfast. A second newsprint collected design reading lists: Brook asked Wim Crouwel for a list and then wrote to other designers with Crouwel’s list as a prompt. The connection with Crouwel continued. Eye says Brook was the guiding figure behind the Design Museum exhibition Wim Crouwel: A graphic odyssey in 2011, curated with Margaret Cubbage, which travelled to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam later that year.

A longer-running venture is Unit Editions. Brook told Eye that he met the writer and art director Adrian Shaughnessy through Shaughnessy’s Resonance FM programme Graphic Design on the Radio, at a time when Spin was frustrated by work with two large publishers, and that they decided over a drink after a broadcast to publish together. Wikipedia says Unit Editions was founded in 2009 by Shaughnessy with Brook and Finegan of Spin, is based in London, and that a majority of its early titles were designed by Spin. The Unit Editions website says the company was formed by Brook, Finegan and Shaughnessy.

The imprint changed hands in 2023. The Bookseller reported on 15 May 2023 that Thames & Hudson had acquired the back catalogue and the rights to future titles of Unit Editions, together with the video-game publisher Read-Only Memory. Spin’s website says Thames & Hudson continues to publish books under the Unit imprint, and Wikipedia lists later titles on MuirMcNeil, Chris Ashworth, North and Fred Troller. Brook has also designed books by others for the imprint: the motion-design site Stash reported on 16 June 2022 that the two-volume Pentagram at 50: Living by Design was designed by Brook and published by Unit Editions.

Brook’s work outside the studio is part of the same picture. Eye says he joined the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 2006, served as president of its UK chapter from 2008 to 2013, and organised AGI Open at London’s Barbican in September 2013, with websites for the event designed by Spin.

Founders, studios and an imprint.

A smaller design studio rarely has a product on a shelf, so its identity has to live on the surfaces it controls directly. The name comes first. Many studios choose a single short word or a founder’s surname, and that choice sets the tone for everything that follows: a one-word name has to work in a sentence, on a door plate, in an email signature and as a domain, often in that order of difficulty.

Partnerships shape the story as well. Studios are often founded by two or three people, and the way founders arrive, leave or hand over the business becomes part of how the studio is described in the trade press. A name that combines surnames records that history; an abstract name lets the studio outlive any single partner.

The studio’s own website is usually its main brand surface, carrying the typeface, the grid and the way projects are presented. Some studios also publish books, monographs or small runs of printed matter about their own work, which act as an extended identity. For a design guide, the useful habit is to read these surfaces as a system: the name, the type choice, the website and any self-published material are all expressions of one point of view.

Clients and a monograph, by date.

Eye lists the clients behind Spin’s identity work from the mid-2000s: the auction house Christie’s; the galleries Whitechapel, Haunch of Venison and The Photographers’ Gallery; Proa in Argentina; and the television channels Channel 4, Five and More4. Brook told Walters that between 2003 and 2006 the studio also worked for large companies such as Nike, Diesel and Levi’s, which required heavy project management, and that the growth that came with them was not what he had pictured when Spin began.

One dated example appears in the Eye feature: full-page magazine advertisements for Haunch of Venison in London, designed by Joseph Burrin and Patrick Eley in 2005. Brook explained that the type for an advertisement for a Dan Flavin exhibition abstracted Flavin’s use of neon, and that repeating the gallery’s fixed, functional elements gave the studio room to play with each exhibition identity. Eye also shows a 2009 Unit Editions book edited by Brook and Shaughnessy and designed by Ian Macfarlane, and pages from the catalogue for the 2011 Crouwel exhibition.

The studio has also documented itself. In an interview with It’s Nice That, Brook described Spin: 360°, a 520-page monograph published by Unit Editions to cover the studio’s twenty years of work. It includes texts by Paula Scher, Rick Poynor, Stefan Sagmeister, Wim Crouwel and Steven Heller, and interviews with Brook and Finegan. Brook said the book arranges its projects alphabetically by client name, is set throughout in Dada Grotesk, and reproduces on its covers sheets from the studio flipchart on which the book was first mentioned. He told It’s Nice That that he wanted work shown large enough to be read, and that the team redesigned the book after a first pass because the editorial pages were too small.

Brook summed up the studio’s aim to Eye as an intention rather than a philosophy: to make a genuine connection with the audience, with work that goes out without an explanation. He also named the Dutch firm Total Design as a studio whose way of running itself he had admired.

For a design guide, Spin shows how a small studio can build its own identity through self-initiated work and publishing as much as through client logos. Compare Thames & Hudson, which took on the Unit Editions list, and Build, another studio in this collection. For this guide we use signal red, charcoal and black with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Spin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.