A name that answered the one before it.

SomeOne is a London branding studio whose name is a reply. Design Week, in a profile by Lynda Relph-Knight published on 24 March 2011, said the consultancy had been set up five years earlier by the designers David Law, Simon Manchipp and Gary Holt. It traced the two halves of the business back to separate careers that converged in London in the mid-2000s.

Law and Manchipp had known each other since college. The magazine said they met at Central Saint Martins and then went their own ways, Law working with Thomas Manss and Coley Porter Bell, and Manchipp with Identica and the advertising agency HHCL. The two later came together as No-one, a design team inside HHCL, which ran until the parent agency wound down.

Holt came from broadcast and corporate identity. Design Week said he had worked with Martin Lambie-Nairn on clients such as the mobile network O2. It said Holt and Manchipp met in 2005 as judges for the Design Week Awards, and that when Holt went solo he shared space with No-one. Holt described the merger that formed SomeOne as “a natural development”. A second Design Week piece, published on 31 January 2011, made the same link between the founders and advertising, saying Manchipp and Law were designers who had worked in advertising, and that Holt had joined after a solo stint following years with Lambie-Nairn.

Three partners, two per project, and a lot of collaborators.

Design Week described how the three partners split the work in 2011. It said there were always two partners on each project, with one taking the lead, and that ideas could come from anywhere in the consultancy. It said the trio brought together pure design, branding and advertising, and that the networks they had built in those fields helped to cross-fertilise the work. Law summed up the studio’s attitude to a project as “the more you give a brand the better”.

The partners talked about process rather than style. Holt told the magazine that SomeOne was in the business of “managing change”, starting with engaging stakeholders and setting a tone of voice before anyone picked up a pencil. Design Week said every proposal included a “migration process” to embed the branding, along with a presentation for stakeholders. Manchipp described the change in the field as a move from broadcast to conversation, and said the studio expected the brands it worked on to be chatty by the end.

The studio also described its own business in plain terms. Manchipp told Design Week that the aim was to do good work, have some fun and make enough money to keep doing both, and that its new-business method was picking up the phone when a call came in; he said that was how the Eurostar and National Maritime Museum projects had begun. The magazine said clients often credited SomeOne’s strategic approach while the partners maintained that the studio did not have one and responded to each project as it came. The January 2011 Design Week piece repeated that point.

Collaboration with other studios was part of the model. Both Design Week articles named the digital consultancy All of Us and Fray, the co-operative run by Simon Waterfall, as regular partners, and the January piece said Fray led the work for the telecoms brand Yota. The March profile opened with a joking credit line it had seen on a project, “Someone did the branding and All of Us handled the website”, as an example of how studio names can read in a credit.

Manchipp was also known for a public argument about logos. Design Week said in January 2011 that he had declared “the logo is dead”, a statement that set off debate, and noted that the studio’s own portfolio did not always follow that line.

A name built as an answer.

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.

Client work, dated by the trade press.

The early client list was broad. Design Week said in March 2011 that SomeOne’s portfolio already included the pictograms for the London 2012 Olympic Games, together with work for Procter & Gamble, for Mick Jagger, for Philippe Starck’s Yoo interiors and residential brand, for the diamond company Dimexon and for country hotels such as Heckfield Place in Hampshire. The January 2011 article listed the London 2012 pictograms, Eurostar, Yota and Amnesty International among the projects in hand, and said many of them had not yet been made public.

The Eurostar commission was dated precisely. The March 2011 profile said a comprehensive rebranding of Eurostar by SomeOne would launch the following week, and that branding for the online betting company Betfair and for the National Maritime Museum would follow. Each of these was a large public-facing identity for a studio that described itself as relatively young: Design Week said that while SomeOne was new, its partners were old hands in design.

The studio also said it watched its own reputation closely. Manchipp told Design Week in 2011 that, as a business managing other people’s reputations, the studio was acutely aware of its own, and the magazine said quality ran through the way projects were handled as well as through the work.

For a design guide, SomeOne shows how a studio name can tell its own origin story: a design team called No-one inside an advertising agency, followed by a partnership that answered it with SomeOne. Compare Lewis Moberly, another London studio built by a small group of partners, and Conran Design Group, a London consultancy with a longer history. For this guide we use signal yellow, deep teal and ink black with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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