Why we present one route and not three
Three routes looks generous and is not. It moves the decision to the person least equipped to make it, and it guarantees that two thirds of the work was never meant to be built.
Almost every studio presents three routes. Clients expect it, procurement often asks for it in writing, and it reads as generosity: look how much thinking you are getting. We stopped doing it in 2023 and the work got better immediately.
Two of the three were never real
If a studio has genuinely developed three directions to the same standard, it has done three projects and charged for one. That is not what happens. What happens is that one route is the one the studio believes in, and the other two are built around it — one safer, one wilder — to make the first look correct.
Everyone in the room knows this. The client knows it well enough to ask which one we would choose, which is the question the three-route format exists to avoid being asked.
It moves the decision to the wrong person
A design decision is made well by the person who understands the constraints: the print method, the smallest size the mark has to survive, the fact that half the application will be on a delivery van. That is us. Presenting three routes hands the decision to whoever is most senior in the room on the day, and seniority is not the same as knowing whether a counter will fill in at 9pt.
The polite version of this argument is that one route is braver. It is not bravery. It is taking responsibility for the thing we were hired to be responsible for.
What we do instead
How a Brantholm project actually runs
- A conversation before anything is drawn, to establish what has to be true
- One route, developed to a finished state — not a mood board with a mark on it
- The reasoning written down, so it can be argued with rather than reacted to
- Two rounds of revision, both included
- If it is wrong twice, we stop and you pay only for the work done
The last line is the one that makes the rest safe. A single route is only fair if there is a stated way out of it, and there is: it has been used once, on a job we should not have taken.
What it costs when it works
Six weeks, one fixed fee, and a set of files you own outright at the end. No retained artwork, no licence to renew, no per-use charge. The Ashcombe Press identity ran exactly to that shape, and the shop now prints its own letterhead on its own presses without asking us for anything.
Tell us what you are making
A sentence is enough to start. We reply within two working days, and we will say straight away if it is not a job for us.