Established practice, small room
Four people. One project at a time, occasionally two. The person who writes your strategy is the person who answers your email on a Thursday afternoon.
We take on brand systems, product interfaces and the writing that holds both together.
Thyme & Quill is a brand and product studio for organisations that have outgrown their first identity and need the next one to survive contact with a real roadmap.
Method
Every stage closes with an artefact, not a status update. If a stage cannot produce its artefact, we stop and say so rather than rolling the problem forward into production.
Interviews with the people who sell, support and build. We read your existing material the way a sceptical buyer would, and note every place the story changes between departments.
You receiveA positioning memo and a list of the contradictions we found.
Type, colour, grid, motion and voice decided together rather than in sequence, then tested against the three hardest screens or documents you actually produce.
You receiveA working system file, two applied routes and the reasoning for each.
We produce the real pages, the real templates and the real copy — not a mood deck. Anything that only works in a presentation gets cut here.
You receiveProduction-ready layouts, editorial guidance and component specifications.
A working session with whoever inherits the system, plus a written record of the decisions so your team can defend them long after we have gone.
You receiveSource files, a usage guide and a recorded walkthrough of the build.
Engagements
We price by engagement, not by hour, so the scope below is the scope you get. If your situation sits between two of these, say so in the enquiry and we will tell you which one it really is.
Retainers are only offered to organisations we have already completed an engagement with — we would rather know your system before we are asked to maintain it.
Selected work
Each entry names the brief we were actually given and the material we left behind. Client names are withheld while the systems are still rolling out.
Specialist lender
The existing identity had been written for a consumer launch and no longer matched a business selling through brokers. We rebuilt the language first, then the system around it, and tested every claim against what the legal team would actually approve.
Independent publisher
Six imprints had drifted into six visual languages. We drew a single typographic frame flexible enough to hold all of them, then rebuilt the catalogue and the online store on the same grid so a title looks the same wherever a reader meets it.
Clinical software
Clinicians were losing time to dense record screens. We reorganised the information model with the people using it, set a stricter type scale for scanning, and handed the component library to an in-house team that now extends it without us.
How we work
Good design is mostly an argument that survived being questioned.
Before you write
Answered here so you can decide whether to contact us at all. If your question is not below, put it in the enquiry and we will answer it directly rather than sending a brochure.
A fixed fee per engagement, agreed before we start, based on the scope in the engagement table. Diagnostics are quoted from the enquiry alone; full engagements are quoted after a short call, because the number depends on how many surfaces you need applied.
A named decision-maker, access to the people who sell and support the product, and whatever material already exists — including the things you are not proud of. Those are usually the most useful documents in the room.
Yes, and it is our preferred arrangement. We set the system and the reasoning; your team extends it. We will review their output during a retainer, but we do not sit inside your sprint board or attend daily stand-ups.
We run one engagement at a time, so the honest answer is the date in the studio diary at the top of this page. If that is too far out, we will say so in our reply rather than holding your project in a queue.
You do — full rights to the identity, the copy and the source files transfer on final payment. We ask only for permission to describe the work in general terms, as we have done above, and we will withhold your name for as long as you need.
The four of us. Nothing is subcontracted without telling you first, and if we bring in a specialist — an illustrator, a front-end engineer — they are named in the proposal before the engagement is signed.
Enquiry
A paragraph is enough. We reply to every enquiry ourselves, usually within two working days, and we will tell you plainly if we are the wrong studio for it.