A studio started by a husband-and-wife team in 2009.

Manual is a design studio in San Francisco started by the designer Tom Crabtree and Patricia Callaway. Monocle described the pair on 26 June 2026 as the husband-and-wife co-founders of the studio, and said it has offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam. In that interview, conducted by Monocle’s head of radio Tom Edwards for the programme The Entrepreneurs, Crabtree said he moved to the United States in 2006 to work at Apple, after nearly a decade in London doing brand identity for arts, culture and hospitality clients. He said that when he left Apple in 2009 he saw an opportunity to start a studio in San Francisco, one that would walk a fine line between culture, nonprofits and technology.

An earlier interview tells the same story from closer to the start. designboom published a conversation with Crabtree by Andy Butler on 7 October 2013, introducing him as the founder of Manual in San Francisco. He said there that he began his career at a handful of boutique design studios in London, working with clients in music, arts, culture and fashion, and that in 2006 he joined Apple in California as an art director in packaging design. He told the magazine that his wife is American, that the couple had been thinking about a move to the United States after many years in London, and that he then could not resist starting his own studio in the city. He named technology, food, culture and entrepreneurs setting up shop in almost any sector as part of the pull. In the same interview he referred to the four years the studio had been running, which places its start in 2009, in line with the Monocle account.

Callaway came to the studio from marketing. She told Monocle that she began her career at organisations such as the Barbican Centre in London before moving into product marketing in San Francisco, and that the two started Manual while they were expecting a child. Creative Boom, in an article by Katy Cowan dated 8 February 2016, described Crabtree as a Yorkshireman who began his career at London design studios before relocating to San Francisco to join Apple’s design team, and said he ran Manual alongside Callaway, its managing director and partner.

Sketchbooks first, systems second.

Crabtree has described a hands-on way of running the studio. He told designboom in 2013 that he oversees every project and is very hands-on as a creative director, and that he still designs logos, kerns type, pushes pixels and chooses Pantone colours himself. He said that on larger brand identity projects he likes the whole team to fill the walls with as many ideas as possible and then hold group creative reviews, and that the designer whose idea a client chooses goes on to lead that project to completion. He added that he tries to keep continuity on each job so that a designer has a sense of ownership of it.

Drawing sits at the start of that process. In the same interview Crabtree said he sketches and draws every day, and that he could not think of a logo design that did not begin as a freehand drawing in a sketchbook; he called the act of drawing a way to generate ideas. He also set out how he sees identity work. He called it part psychology and part design, and said it differs from designing a single artefact such as a book, a poster or a piece of packaging, because a concept has to play out across a whole system. That, he said, means balancing variation with consistency, style with function and visual expression with timelessness. He described his aim as work interesting enough to provoke curiosity and simple enough to understand.

Packaging, his field at Apple, gets the same practical treatment. Crabtree told designboom that packaging should never be designed only on screen as an illustration or render, and that the way to design it is to build mock-ups out of real materials at actual size, with a packaging manufacturer involved early. He said decisions about usability, manufacturability and cost drive that process. On the client side, he said that in the year before the interview Manual had worked with a local bakery, a microbrewery, Apple, Nike, a London architectural practice and a local maker of hydration products, and that nearly all of its clients had arrived through recommendation and word of mouth. The interview illustrated identity work for the restaurant Wo Hing, Slice, Demand Media, Gap Fit and Joos, the last with packaging.

A studio built around identity work.

American design studios name themselves in a few recurring ways. Some put the founders’ surnames on the door, joined by a space, a comma or an ampersand, so the people and the practice share one label. Others choose a single everyday word, a noun anyone already knows, and let the studio’s work give it a second meaning. Each route says something different: a surname partnership puts individuals in front, while a common word leaves room for new partners, new offices and new disciplines.

The second surface is the case study. A studio’s website orders, photographs and writes up its client projects, and those pages act as portfolio and advertising at once. The design press then republishes the same projects, often with the studio’s own descriptions, so the way a studio frames its work travels further than its logo.

The third surface is the product a studio makes for itself. Reissued design manuals, books, type releases and small runs of objects carry a studio’s name into shops and libraries, outside any client brief. Read together, the name, the case studies and the self-published products describe a studio more fully than any single mark.

Client identities, dated.

The studio’s client work can be followed through dated coverage. It’s Nice That published an article by Maisie Skidmore on 31 October 2013 about Manual’s identity for San Francisco Design Week 2013. It reported that the studio built a three-dimensional installation from sheets of laser-cut plexiglass and then photographed it, and that the photograph became the image representing the event.

A brewery followed. Creative Boom reported on 8 February 2016 that the San Francisco brewery Fort Point had approached Manual for a new brand identity, and that the studio also produced illustration and packaging design. The article said the brewery is based in a historic building in the Presidio that was once used as an army motor pool, close to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Fort Point National Historic Site, and that this location inspired a modular, illustrative look. On the packaging, it said, small illustrations draw on San Francisco landmarks and Bay Area culture to give each pack a sense of place.

Later that year the studio worked for an architecture practice. Creative Boom reported on 31 May 2016 that Manual had redesigned the identity of BDG architecture + design, a WPP company that designs workplaces for advertising, public relations and media agencies. Manual told the magazine that it turned the firm’s three-letter acronym into a logotype by abstracting the letterforms into reductive geometric shapes, a nod to architecture and the constructed environment. It said it also designed a new website with large imagery and bold typographic layouts, a bi-annual newsprint paper mixing news, commissioned articles and recent projects, and invitations for private views at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

A larger programme followed. Monocle reported in June 2026 that Manual was appointed prime design partner for the Obama Presidential Center in 2023, with a programme spanning brand identity for the Obama Foundation and the visitor experience, from custom typefaces and maps to signage and wayfinding. Crabtree told the programme the work moved from typefaces, colour palettes, motion and patterns into wayfinding, where signage is permanent once installed.

For a design guide, Manual shows how a small studio can tie hand drawing to identity systems, from a photographed plexiglass object to a brewery’s landmark illustrations. Compare Porto Rocha and Athletics. For this guide we use signal red, bay blue, fog grey and ink with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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