Ravensbourne, North and London, 1996 to 2000.

Made Thought began as a partnership between two graphic designers who had studied together. It’s Nice That wrote on 3 August 2016 that the studio was founded by Ben Parker and Paul Austin, who met while studying at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. In the same piece Parker recalled that in their final year he and Austin designed the publicity for their degree show together.

Before setting up on their own, both worked at the design group North. Design Week profiled the new studio on 11 October 2001 and said Austin and Parker had been with North since the beginning, when Sean Perkins and Simon Browning set it up in 1996. Austin told the magazine he met Perkins when Perkins came to give a lecture at Ravensbourne. He applied for two weeks of work experience with Perkins, then working at Imagination, and the placement turned into six months. When Perkins left to set up North, Austin went with him.

Parker took a different route. Design Week said he had been on the masters course at Central St Martins, where he struggled to fit what he called a “Swiss school typographic approach” into a more theory-led programme, and that within three months he had joined Austin at North. In his 2016 bookshelf for It’s Nice That, Parker said it was Perkins, as creative director of North, who lent him a copy of Leonard Koren’s book on wabi-sabi at his first job after college.

The two left North in 2000. Design Week dated their departure to a year and a month before its October 2001 profile and quoted them saying North had such a strong reputation that they could have stayed under it, but that leaving felt like a natural evolution. A profile by Creative Lives in Progress, published on 14 February 2019, says the founders did a short stint at another agency and then started working out of Parker’s bedroom in 2000, and that Made Thought grew from there. Design Week and City AM, reporting in December 2021, both give 2000 as the founding year and name Austin and Parker as the founders.

Print first, then screens, then a creative office.

The first Design Week profile, on 11 October 2001, set out the studio’s early range. For the fashion label Sonneti it produced brochures, posters, books, a website and a branded series of clothing, and for the Sonneti showroom it created in-store graphics and short films for video towers, working with the interiors and furniture group Barber Osgerby. The publisher Edward Booth-Clibborn commissioned Made Thought to design the book for the Jam exhibition at the Barbican, and the magazine described its diagonal text set in the Preset-f typeface, with the stepping done by hand using the space bar.

The same profile described a series of on-screen idents for the music channel MTV Base, made with Mill/Lab, the interactive division of the Mill, and set in Avantgarde type. Parker told the magazine the job opened up a new set of parameters for a studio that knew it could do print. Design Week added that a print approach still informed much of the studio’s work, and cited a website for the furniture and interior designer Simon Dance as an example of its restrained, clean approach.

By 2016, It’s Nice That described Made Thought as a London-based studio creating identities, packaging, print and interactive design for clients since 2000. In the Creative Lives in Progress profile of 14 February 2019, managing director Nick Marshall said the studio no longer saw itself as a graphic design studio but as a “creative office” that uses design to drive behaviour. He said the creative team was headed by Austin and Parker, with a separate project team of producers, a small art direction department and an art producer for imagery and film.

Marshall described the way projects start. He said the studio does not follow a rigid, replicable process, but opens with a phase it calls “define”, built around a point of view and provocations, before a second phase called “imagine”, where visual sketching begins. He said the studio tells clients that it never starts by talking about design.

Founders, offices and a group owner.

A design studio’s own identity starts with its name, and many studios are named after the people who founded them. Founders’ surnames joined by an ampersand or a comma, sets of initials, and short coined words all appear across the field, and each choice says something different about how a studio sees itself. A surname partnership puts the founders in front; a set of initials can outlast the people behind it; a coined word leaves room for new partners and new offices.

The second surface is the work itself. Case studies, published on a studio’s website and in the design press, act as its portfolio and its advertising at the same time. The way a studio photographs, writes up and orders its client projects becomes part of its identity, often more visible than its logo.

The third surface is structure. Office locations, partnership arrangements and changes of ownership shape how a studio presents itself: a one-city studio and a network of offices tell different stories, and a studio that joins a larger marketing group usually keeps its own name on the door. Read together, the name, the case studies and the structure describe a studio more fully than any single mark.

Clients, a New York office and a WPP stake.

Several client relationships run through the record. Creative Lives in Progress said in February 2019 that early projects for the furniture brand Established & Sons and the design fair Design Miami got the studio noticed, and that these led to a collaboration with Stella McCartney that was still running. Marshall described the Design Miami identity as a single line that serves as the logo and is reinvented every season. It’s Nice That cited a campaign for Adidas’ StellaSport in its 2016 piece.

The paper company G . F Smith appears in both profiles. Marshall said in 2019 that Made Thought worked almost as G . F Smith’s creative directors, and described a campaign to find a favourite colour, which grew out of a plan to add to the Colorplan range, and the campaign, collateral and exhibition design for Extract, a paper made from recycled coffee cups. He also named work with A Plastic Planet on a Plastic Free mark, and an identity for the travel company Prior that set aside photography.

Ownership changed in December 2021. City AM reported on 6 December 2021 that WPP had acquired a majority stake in Made Thought, which would be integrated into AKQA and join Universal Design Studio and Map Project Office in a collective called The New Standard. Design Week reported the next day that the studio worked from London and from a New York office opened in January 2021, that it had recently redesigned the visual identity of Pinterest and had rebranded BrewDog the year before, and that all three studios would keep their names. WPP has held a majority stake since 2021. City AM listed clients including Pinterest, Unilever, LVMH and Paul Smith.

For a design guide, Made Thought shows how a studio can keep its founders’ name for the practice of thinking first while its clients, offices and owner change around it. Compare Turner Duckworth and Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), two other London-founded studios in this collection. For this guide we use clay orange, graphite and black with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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