A DJ, a rapper and a record that waited three years, 1996.

Stones Throw was started to finish something. In an interview published on 22 December 2011, ahead of the label’s fifteenth-anniversary party, the Los Angeles Times described the founder, the DJ and producer Peanut Butter Wolf, as having been born Chris Manak, and said the label began as a means of releasing Wolf’s debut album with the late MC Charles Hicks, known as Charizma. The paper called it a tiny hip-hop label born in the Bay Area a decade and a half earlier.

Wolf told the paper where and how it started. “I started the label in the San Francisco Bay area and was really involved in the hip-hop and turntablism scene,” he said. “We only did vinyl. I didn’t even have a distributor for CDs; the label was really just for DJs.” He named Gang Starr, Diggin’ in the Crates, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest as the early influences on the sound he wanted to put out.

The label’s own history, an essay signed by Peanut Butter Wolf, fills in the years before. Wolf says he released his debut record in 1990, with a small San Jose label, and met Hicks the same year, when Hicks was 16. The pair became a duo, signed with Hollywood Basic, a hip-hop label owned by Walt Disney, and, Wolf writes, got out of that deal before the company ended its hip-hop division. The essay says Charizma died in December 1993, and that for a while Wolf quit music.

In the years that followed, Wolf writes, he made compilations, an instrumental record called Peanut Butter Breaks and production work for other labels, while still wanting to release the songs he had made with Charizma. He found that he enjoyed promoting records as much as recording them, and he persuaded a distributor, Nu Gruv Alliance, that he could run a label. In 1996, the essay says, “My World Premiere” by Charizma and Peanut Butter Wolf came out on Stones Throw Records. Wolf adds that people still thought it was a new song, although it had been recorded years before.

The name has a domestic origin. Wolf writes that “Stones Throw” came from a saying his mother used, one that he and Charizma used to tease her about. The Wikipedia entry for the label gives the same founding year, 1996, and the same founder, Chris Manak, and describes Stones Throw today as an American independent label based in Los Angeles.

From the start, the essay makes the label personal. “I put out what I like,” Wolf writes, describing himself as executive producer, and he told the Los Angeles Times in 2011: “I really rely on my instincts more than thinking too long about the next move I make.”

Madlib, J Dilla and MF Doom, then soul, funk and pop.

The roster grew through a few working relationships. In the 2011 Los Angeles Times interview, Wolf said Madlib had put out an early record with the group Lootpack on an imprint his father funded, and that Wolf began with a meeting with Madlib’s father, because Wolf was working for a record distributor at the time while still running his own label. The members of Lootpack, he said, already knew the music on Stones Throw by 1997, when the label had put out only a few records.

The paper also asked about J Dilla and MF Doom. Wolf said he already knew J Dilla because he had released Peanut Butter Breaks in 1994, before Stones Throw existed, and that DJ House Shoes had introduced them. With Doom it was different: Wolf said Doom did not really know Stones Throw or Madlib when the label reached out, which made him nervous, but that Doom agreed to the project.

The results are dated in the label’s Wikipedia entry. It lists Madvillainy, by Madvillain, the pairing of Madlib and MF Doom, in 2004, and J Dilla’s Donuts in 2006, and names Madlib, Jaylib and Quasimoto among the hip-hop acts on the label. It says the label issues the majority of its artists’ albums on vinyl as well as in digital formats.

Stones Throw did not stay a hip-hop label. Wikipedia lists the singer Aloe Blacc’s Shine Through in 2006 and Good Things in 2010; the soul singer Mayer Hawthorne, whose 2008 debut single came out on a red, heart-shaped seven-inch record, and his album A Strange Arrangement in 2009; and 7 Days of Funk, the 2013 album by Snoop Dogg, recording as Snoopzilla, and the musician Dâm-Funk. Later entries include the psychedelic pop project Mild High Club, the producer Knxwledge, the duo NxWorries with Anderson .Paak, whose Yes Lawd! came out in 2016, and the violinist and singer Sudan Archives, signed in 2016.

Wolf presented the range as a matter of taste rather than strategy. Asked in 2011 about signings as different as Jonti, Jonwayne, M.E.D., Vex Ruffin and the Stepkids, he said he was “really into artist development”. He also admitted that some listeners had a fixed idea of what the label meant, and that departures from it upset them. He named the producer Flying Lotus as an artist he had wanted to sign but was talked out of.

The Los Angeles Times noted the party itself: Stones Throw Celebrates 15 Years, on 22 December 2011 in downtown Los Angeles, with DJ sets from Madlib, Mayer Hawthorne, Dâm-Funk and Wolf.

A saying, a format and a founder’s taste.

A record label’s identity rarely lives in one place. It is spread across a series of small, repeated surfaces that a listener meets again and again: the logo printed on the centre label of a vinyl disc, the mark that sits at the top or bottom of a sleeve spine, the run of letters and numbers that make up a catalogue number, and the rule set that decides how a front cover is laid out. Seen one at a time these details are modest. Seen across a shelf of releases they become the brand.

Spines matter because records are usually stored edge-on. A consistent spine treatment — the same typeface, the same position for the logo, the same order for artist, title and catalogue number — lets a run of releases read as a set. Catalogue numbers do similar work: a prefix and a sequence turn a list of records into an archive that collectors can follow.

Some labels go further and give their sleeves a house style, built by a single designer or studio over many years. Others let each artist lead and keep the label’s presence to a small mark. Imprints, sub-labels, shops and mail-order operations extend the same identity into new places, from a carrier bag to a shop sign. In each guide below, the question is which of these surfaces a label has used, and how consistently.

Vinyl, instrumentals and seven-inch singles.

The clearest part of the Stones Throw identity is a format. Wolf told the Los Angeles Times in December 2011 that in the beginning the label “only did vinyl” and had no CD distributor, because it was made for DJs. The label’s own history explains how that shaped the catalogue: as a DJ himself, Wolf writes, he committed to releasing vinyl LPs along with breakbeat records, and to issuing instrumental versions of albums, so that artists could perform a show from vinyl and because DJs asked for them.

The essay also describes a return to the 45. Wolf says his record buying began as a child with seven-inch singles, which he could afford on an allowance, and that the label was releasing 45s with artists who were willing to keep the format going even in small runs. Wikipedia’s note that Mayer Hawthorne’s 2008 debut single was pressed as a red heart-shaped seven-inch shows how far the object itself could carry an idea.

The founder’s tastes run through the rest. Wolf writes that, as a boy, he noticed records on labels such as Sugarhill, Tommy Boy and Def Jam were consistent, and that he came to trust a label as much as an artist. That, he says, is the model he wanted: a label whose records sound like the person choosing them. In the same essay he says artists share in deciding how much to spend on promotion, from videos and radio to stickers, flats and posters, and that the costs and profits are split.

The label has also been the subject of its own film. Wikipedia lists the 2014 documentary Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton: This Is Stones Throw Records, directed by Jeff Broadway, which follows the label from the collaboration between Hicks and Manak onward, and notes that LA Weekly described Stones Throw at its twentieth anniversary as an “eternally evolving experiment”. No official logo specification, typeface or colour code is published in the sources we read, so the identity here is described through its records rather than a style sheet.

For a design guide, Stones Throw shows how a small label can make its identity out of a format, a founder’s taste and a name taken from a family joke rather than from a style manual. Compare Blue Note, a jazz label with its own long history of sleeve design, or XL Recordings, another independent label built around a few founders’ choices. For this guide we use label red, groove black and sleeve cream with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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