Forma
An identity that behaves like the objects it represents: warm, slightly irregular, and made to be handled every day.
The brief
Forma is an imagined two-person studio throwing tableware by hand. They needed a name in use, a mark that could be stamped into clay, and packaging that felt as considered as the pieces inside.
The challenge
Most craft identities either go rustic and generic or polished and cold. The work had to feel handmade without looking amateur, and survive being pressed into wet clay at 12 millimetres wide.
Creative approach
- I started at the wheel, not the screen — photographing bowls drying upside down and tracing their profiles. Stacked, those silhouettes became the F.
- The wordmark is set in a soft optical serif with slightly swollen terminals, echoing a glaze pooling at the rim. Supporting type is quiet and mono, like a kiln log.
- Colour comes from the process itself: raw terracotta, bone-dry clay, iron oxide and a celadon-like sage used only for small moments.
A letter you could stack in a cupboard.
The monogram is four bowl profiles, stacked and offset until they read as an F. It is drawn to be pressed into clay: no hairlines, no counters smaller than a fingertip.
Swollen terminals, like glaze at a rim.
- Optical size pushed small for warmth at display sizes.
- Mono supporting text references kiln logs and firing notes.
- Line length capped at 48 characters on all printed matter.
Nothing in the system needs a printer — a stamp, one ink and some patience will do.
Outcome
A compact system of mark, stamp, wordmark and pattern that works at the scale of a maker's stamp and a shop window. Every element can be produced with a rubber stamp and one ink colour.
Something like this, for you?
I take on a few projects at a time. Tell me what you’re making and when.