Process
One route, developed
Four steps, six weeks, one fixed price. And the reason every photograph on this site looks the way it does.
Start a project £6,400 — a complete identity in six weeks
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One
A conversation, not a questionnaire
Forty minutes on the phone. We work out whether this is a job for two people or for an agency, and say which.
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Two
One route, developed
Not three options in a deck. One direction, argued for, and revised twice. Three routes is a way of making the client choose so nobody has to be responsible.
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Three
Artwork and specification
Files you own outright, with the specification a printer or a fabricator needs. No retained files, no licence, no per-use fee.
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Four
On press
We check the first sheets. Colour signed off wet, not from a PDF.
The grade, drawn
Photographic printing paper is sold in numbered contrast grades. A grade is not a filter and it is not a mood: it is a slope on the paper's characteristic curve. Grade 0 is soft and grade 5 is hard, and the same negative printed on two grades differs by that slope and by nothing else.
Everything on this site is printed at one grade — chroma to zero, then lightness through a slope of 1.85 about L* 46, clipped at both ends the way paper clips. Below L* 21.1 everything goes to black and above L* 75.2 everything goes to paper. That is why the shadows here have no detail in them: on a hard grade they are not supposed to.
The slope is baked into the file, not applied in the browser. A CSS filter is the thing that
silently stops being applied to one image in twenty; bytes do not drift.
scripts/plates.mjs reads the shipped WebPs back and recovers the slope by least
squares — it does not read the grade script's arithmetic.
And the one that is not
A rule you cannot see broken is not a rule, it is a description. So one project ships without the grade, in the same index as the rest: Ninebark is a colour system, and a hard-grade black-and-white plate of a colour system is a picture of nothing.
It is the same crop, the same box and the same encoder, with the grade removed and nothing else changed. Measured off the shipped file it recovers a slope of 1.00 and a mean chroma of 46.5, against 1.85 and under 0.02 for the other seventeen. The harness requires it to differ.
