Atrium is four people and one room in Gowanus.
You come to the room. We put the whole problem on the table at once — the business of it, the constraints, the things you have already tried and thrown away. By six we have agreed what we are actually solving, in one sentence, written down.
Three days of making. Work goes on the wall as it happens, not into a deck for Friday. You are welcome in the room the whole time and most clients come back at least once. Nothing is presented; things are simply visible.
We square everything up and hand it over: the files, the running front end where there is one, and the decision log — every choice we made and the option we turned down to make it. You leave owning the reasoning, not just the artwork.
Marks, type systems, colour, and the rules that keep them alive after we leave. Built as a working kit, not a PDF of guidelines nobody opens.
Books, catalogues, packaging, signage. Set on real stock, proofed on the press we will actually run it on, folded before it is approved.
Sites and product surfaces, designed in the browser from the second week. We hand over a running front end, not a file full of artboards.
Naming, voice, and the actual sentences on the actual page. Written alongside the design rather than poured into it at the end.
One floor of a 1920s warehouse on Third Street.
We ran a monthly retainer for three years.
A retainer sells you the right to ask. A week sells you the work. If we finish on Thursday you have your Friday back, and we have not invoiced you for it.
There is no reveal, no big Friday deck, no theatre. Work is on the wall from Monday afternoon and you can walk in and look at it whenever you want.
The decision log is the deliverable that outlasts the artwork. When someone asks in two years why the mark is set that way, the answer is written down.
The same number whether the week goes well or badly.
A retainer sells the right to ask. We were being paid most in the months we did least, which is a strange thing to optimise.
Read the note
Every edition ships with what we chose and what we chose it over. It is the part of the work that survives longest.
Read the note
We used to run three projects at once. The overlap was not free, and it was never on any invoice.
Read the noteWe take one project at a time, so the calendar is the honest version of how busy we are.