Five founders and a name about working together.

The Partners was a London design consultancy whose name described how it began. A feature published by Creative Bloq on 31 August 2011 says the business started life in Shoreditch, in east London, in 1984, as a collaboration between a group of young designers. In the same feature, creative partner Greg Quinton names the original partners as Aziz Cami, Keren House, David Stuart, Malcolm Swatridge and Nick Wurr.

The name was a statement of method. Quinton told Creative Bloq that the founders chose “The Partners” to celebrate creative collaboration, and he described that idea as the philosophical cornerstone of the firm almost three decades later.

The partnership changed shape over time while keeping the name. Design Week reported on 17 January 1997 that Gillian Thomas had been appointed a full partner after nine years at the consultancy, having been made an associate partner two years earlier. The magazine said her clients included Asda and Unilever, and that she would lead a team with fellow partner David Stuart after the group had been reorganised over the previous two months into three teams. It added that the restructure had already been under way when partner Steve Gibbons left the year before.

The same short report gives a sense of the everyday work: Design Week said The Partners had been appointed by Halfords to design packaging for a range of replacement wheel trims.

A new generation of partners, then a new name.

A second generation took over in the 2000s. Creative Bloq says Greg Quinton joined The Partners straight from college as a junior designer, after Val Gibbons, then creative director at The Fine White Line, encouraged him to meet Nick Wurr. The feature says Quinton became creative partner in 2005 and joined Jim Prior as chief executive, Claire Robinson as client relationships partner and Natalie Clark as finance partner, a group it describes as the new generation of partners. It says the Manhattan office opened in 2009 to serve the firm’s American clients and that the US branch was organised to mirror the UK arm.

The firm also made work about its own tools. Creative Bloq reproduces “Manetone”, a version of Édouard Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère that The Partners made in 2008 out of Pantone colour chips.

The name ended with a merger inside WPP. Design Week, in its issue of 22–28 January 2018, reported that five WPP design consultancies — Brand Union, Lambie-Nairn, The Partners, Addison and the Amsterdam-based Vbat — had come together under one brand called Superunion. It said the merger had been announced in September 2017, and that four of the five names, The Partners among them, would be dropped and replaced with Superunion, while Vbat kept its own name.

People from The Partners led the new company. Design Week said Jim Prior, by then chief executive of Lambie-Nairn, became global chief executive of Superunion; Greg Quinton, formerly chief creative officer at The Partners, became global chief creative officer; and Claire Robinson, formerly chief client officer at The Partners, became chief marketing officer. The magazine said Quinton had run the creative side of The Partners for 25 years. Prior told it that The Partners, Lambie-Nairn, Vbat and Addison had already been working closely together under his leadership for three years, and pointed to a joint rebrand of the broadcaster ARTE by Lambie-Nairn and The Partners the previous year.

The studio also changed address. Design Week said The Partners had moved in December 2017 into the space at Brewhouse Yard in Clerkenwell, London, where Lambie-Nairn and Brand Union already worked, and that the four UK consultancies would share that office.

A plural name that became part of a larger one.

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.

How the name was retired, and where it resurfaced.

The identity that replaced the name came from The Partners’ own creative lead. Design Week said in January 2018 that Quinton led the branding of Superunion. It described a logo set in a lowercase, bespoke serif, with the “u” and “n” cut in half so that they appeared to belong to the same character, an idea Quinton linked to unity and to the merger itself. The magazine said the identity used colours in pairs, with names such as “honey and bee yellow” and “ocean and wave blue”, paired imagery such as a puffer fish beside a bubblegum bubble, and two typefaces: Cormorant, a serif, for headings and National Two, a sans-serif, for body copy.

Quinton told Design Week the merger was “not an exercise in cost-cutting” but a process of building, and said clients wanted creativity together with the ability to scale. The roll-out of the new identity across print, merchandise, online and office interiors was due to continue through that month.

Superunion itself did not last as a name. Mediaweek reported on 8 July 2022 that WPP had announced a new company, Design Bridge and Partners, formed by merging Design Bridge and Superunion, with a planned launch in January 2023. It said John Morris, then chief executive of Design Bridge, would lead the new business and that Jim Prior, then chief executive of Superunion, would become chair. The English Wikipedia article on Superunion says the merger created Design Bridge and Partners in 2023. The word “Partners” returned in the new company’s name five years after The Partners itself had been dropped; the 1984 consultancy has not traded under its own name since 2018.

For a design guide, The Partners shows how a studio name can carry a working method: a plural chosen in 1984 to celebrate collaboration, kept through changes of partners, and then folded into a holding company’s larger brand. Compare Superunion, the 2018 merger it joined, and SomeOne, another London studio in this collection. For this guide we use red, claret and studio black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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