Notes from the studio

• Signage design in Saudi Arabia: the checklist before the fabricator cuts

  A sign is the most expensive logo you will ever print, and the hardest to reprint. Six tests and a checklist to run before anything gets cut, bent or wired.

• Branding agency vs freelancer: an honest guide from a studio

  Both routes can produce a good identity. Both can go badly wrong. What each does well, where each slips, and seven questions to ask before you pay anyone.

• Company profile design: what to keep, what to cut

  Most company profiles are written for the people who made them. The pages a buyer actually reads, the ones to cut, and how to brief it properly.

• Brand refresh vs rebrand: five myths, and how to choose

  Your brand feels tired. That rarely means you need a new one. What a refresh and a rebrand each change, and how to tell them apart.

• The Gulf's autumn design season, and what brands can borrow from it

  A ten-week season in Riyadh, a design forum at Kingdom Centre and a week of design in Dubai. What's on, and what a small brand can steal from the big ones.

• What a brand identity includes, beyond the logo

  The logo gets the attention. The system around it does the work. A tour of everything a complete brand identity includes.

• Designing a bilingual logo in Arabic and English

  Two scripts, two directions, one brand. How to design an Arabic and English logo that looks like it was always meant to be together.

• Saudi Arabia's design moment, in six dates

  A decade of new institutions, festivals and a script recognised by UNESCO. The timeline every brand launching in the Kingdom should know.

• The F&B packaging checklist we run before every launch

  Boxes that leak and labels that break the rules are expensive to reprint. The list we work through with F&B clients before files go to the printer.

• Colour psychology in branding: four myths worth retiring

  That '90%' statistic has a history, and it isn't what the infographics say. Four colour myths we hear in briefs, and what the research shows.

• Why our prices are on the website

  Ask most agencies for a price and you'll get a call, a proposal and a week of waiting. We put ours on the website instead. Here's why.

• What goes into brand guidelines, and who actually reads them

  The instruction manual for your identity, taken apart section by section. Plus the four kinds of people who will actually open it.

• AI, SVG, PDF, PNG, JPG: which logo file goes where

  Six months after your branding project, a printer asks for 'the vector'. This is the page to bookmark before that day comes.

• Ramadan 2027 starts around 8 February. Your design calendar starts now.

  The month moves about 11 days earlier every year, and print suppliers don't. A working-backwards timeline for Ramadan and Eid 2027.

• Five tests for a business name, before you print anything

  A name gets said thousands of times, typed into search bars and registered with the government. Five tests to run before a logo makes it feel permanent.