Camberwell, Foote, Cone & Belding and London, to 1984.

Lewis Moberly is named after its two founders, Mary Lewis and Robert Moberly. A dated account of how the consultancy began is a profile of Lewis by Lynda Relph-Knight in Design Week, published on 7 June 2001. It says Lewis studied fine art and printmaking at Camberwell and, on leaving, had no wish to work in design. She taught in art schools so that she could use the printmaking equipment for her own work in the holidays, and found herself teaching graphic design without ever having practised it. She decided she should.

At that time, Design Week wrote, design was still closely linked to advertising, and Lewis chose advertising, where she could work freelance and do design within it. She told the magazine that advertising taught her how powerful an idea is, and drew a line between the two disciplines: advertising was “transient”, while design was “what you take home”. She also set out why she chose design over art. Communication mattered to her, she said, and she needed a brief to communicate to someone else, whereas in art there is no brief.

It was in advertising, at the agency Foote, Cone & Belding, that Lewis met Robert Moberly, her partner in business and in life. Design Week said he held a strategic and managerial role at the agency and wanted to do something different. Lewis described him to the magazine as highly creative, more rational and wise, and her greatest critic. In 1984 the two set up Lewis Moberly in London.

Lewis told Design Week that the founders set out to “make the product everything”, aware that they had to produce a body of work they were proud of. She said the quality of that early work brought an approach from Martin Sorrell early in his acquisitive career, and that she and Moberly resisted. In 2001 she said there were no plans to sell, and that much of the consultancy’s work was by then for clients overseas.

Own-brand wine, whisky packs and identity work, 1984 to 2001.

The consultancy’s early reputation was built on supermarket and retailer own-brand packaging. According to the 2001 Design Week profile, Lewis had got to know Keith Clarke, then trading director at Asda, at a time when supermarkets were beginning to see the potential of their own labels. The brief that followed covered own-brand wine and spirit labels for Asda, to be completed within two years. Lewis said the work had to be a turning point and put Asda on the map. Her solution was to commission artists to create the labels; each artist signed their work, and the design itself was not up for debate. Design Week said several of the designs were still on Asda’s shelves in 2001.

Another own-brand job Lewis singled out was a range of hosiery packs for Boots, made with John McConnell of Pentagram, who was then external design manager at Boots. She told the magazine that his design ethos took a philosophical and cultural approach. Later the consultancy took on packs for the Charnos BioForm bra, a product designed by Seymour Powell, and a sanitary protection range called Diva for Waitrose. By 2001, Design Week reported, Lewis had a role overseeing food and lingerie packaging for Marks & Spencer.

Branded drinks and food work followed. Design Week said the move into branding began with the Classic Malts range for United Distillers, which produced the consultancy’s packs for Oban. For that project, Lewis and Moberly spent a couple of weeks in the area absorbing the place and its stories. Lewis explained that projects often start with a story she has made up, and that stories get her into what she is going to express. The magazine listed further packaging for Bell’s Scotch whisky, Heinz, Milk Tray, Bahlsen biscuits and the Duchy packaging range.

Corporate identity work followed in 1988. Design Week named the insurer Eagle Star that year as the consultancy’s break into identity work, and said the portfolio by 2001 included the London wine attraction Vinopolis, Stuart Crystal and the fashion label Jaeger. Lewis told the magazine that her curiosity about people took her towards branding, and that the approach was the same whether a brand was corporate or consumer.

Two founders, one studio, an independent record.

A UK branding consultancy’s own identity is an unusual design problem, because the studio’s product is other people’s identities. The name on the door often begins as the founders’ surnames, set side by side, and that choice ties the brand to particular people. When a partner leaves or retires, the studio has to decide whether the name stays, shortens or changes, and each answer says something about how the business sees itself.

Mergers add a second pressure. When two studios combine, one name is usually retired, or both are folded into a new one, and the visual system has to absorb two histories without looking like a compromise. Some studios keep a former name alive as a sub-brand for a period; others make a clean break and let the archive carry the older work.

Studio publications are a third brand surface. Self-published books, journals, posters and seasonal greetings give a consultancy room to show craft without a client brief, and they often travel further than any logo. Case studies do similar work online: the way a studio photographs, captions and sequences past projects becomes its most visible typography, and readers judge the studio by how clearly it explains a brief, a constraint and a result.

An approach from life, and a Mexican store brand.

Lewis summed up her approach for Design Week in 2001 as looking “to life, not to design”. The magazine reported that a show of the consultancy’s work in Paris had been titled “Making the ordinary extraordinary”, and Lewis said she enjoyed the challenge of limited budgets. The same profile described the studio as one design team working under Lewis as creative director, with Robert Moberly as her business partner.

The consultancy’s work later reached Latin America. Design Week reported on 8 December 2010 that Lewis Moberly and the retail design consultancy JHP had been appointed design partners for the El Puerto de Liverpool department store chain in Mexico. Lewis Moberly had won a strategy pitch in September that year and then chose JHP as its partner for the retail design. Lewis Moberly took on the branding of the store and JHP the retail interiors, with both teams working from their London offices and visiting Mexico City regularly.

In that report Mary Lewis, named as creative director, said the two consultancies shared clients such as Waitrose and both understood working with premium clients. She called the project a very exciting branding opportunity in Mexico. JHP managing director Steve Collis said the work was expected to be complete by the third quarter of 2011.

Across the dated record, the consultancy’s identity is bound up with its founders. The name joins the surnames of the two partners who met at Foote, Cone & Belding; the work runs from own-brand labels to whisky packs, corporate identities and a store brand; and the 2001 profile records the founders turning down an early approach from Martin Sorrell.

For a design guide, Lewis Moberly shows how a two-founder consultancy can build its name on packaging that starts with a story, from supermarket labels to single malt packs. Compare The Partners and SomeOne, two other London design consultancies in this collection. For this guide we use gold, claret and plum with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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