The Originality Charter.

We keep a research record from the first day of a project: what we looked at, who made it, and what we took from it. Not as bureaucracy, but because a decision whose origin nobody can recall is a decision nobody can defend when it is challenged.

When we deliver, references are cited in the documentation by name and by link. Where an element came from a stock library, a commissioned collaborator or a generative tool, that is recorded too. If you ask where something came from, you get an answer rather than a shrug.

Design has always been built on prior work, and we are not interested in pretending otherwise. The line we hold is between understanding why something works and reproducing what it looks like. The first is craft. The second is delivering someone else's work under our invoice.

In practice this means we deconstruct rather than trace: identify the underlying problem a reference solved, then solve ours with our own constraints. If the result would be described as a version of the reference, we go again.

We use generative tools. They widen the search space, they speed up iteration, and refusing them on principle would be a position rather than a practice. What we will not do is present their output as something else.

Every generated element that ships is recorded with the tool used, what it was used for, and the named person who reviewed, edited and stands behind it. We do not generate in the style of a living, identifiable artist. We check the commercial licensing of every tool before it touches client work. The studio remains the author; the model is not a collaborator with rights, and it is not an excuse.

WCAG 2.2 AA is our floor, not our ceiling, and it is inside the base quote. Treating it as a line item invites it to be cut, and the thing that gets cut is a group of people's ability to use what we built.

We test with keyboards and screen readers, not only with automated tooling, because automation finds roughly a third of what is actually wrong. If a client instructs us to remove accessibility from scope, we will complete the work to standard anyway or decline the project.

Confirmshaming, disguised advertising, fake scarcity, roach-motel cancellation flows, pre-checked consent, hidden costs revealed at the final step — these are not growth tactics, they are small deceptions, and they work by exploiting attention rather than earning it.

We will decline the request, explain why, and propose the honest version — which in our experience converts within a few points of the manipulative one and does not erode trust or attract regulators.

Studio work is collective, and the convention of publishing it under a single studio name erases the people who did it. Our case studies name everyone involved and what they did, including freelancers and the client-side people who shaped the outcome.

Junior people get named for the work they did. Contractors get named. We ask permission first, and anyone who prefers not to be listed is not listed.

Design knowledge locked inside studios is how the industry keeps reinventing solved problems and gatekeeping entry to people without the right internship. Ours is public, permanently, at no cost and behind no email gate.

Attribution is all we ask, and it is a licence condition rather than a favour. If you disagree with a principle, the reasoning is written out precisely so it can be argued with — send the argument and we will publish the correction with your name on it.

We do not work on gambling, predatory lending, surveillance products sold to states with poor human-rights records, or fossil-fuel reputation campaigns. We do not take work whose objective requires deceiving the end user.

We would rather lose the enquiry at the first email than three weeks into a project. If you are unsure whether something falls inside these lines, ask — the answer is usually quick and always straight.