Free is Emma Keyte.

Developing the tone for Chris Romer-Lee’s website went hand in hand with developing his business proposition. We wanted to show how his new venture – connecting people to water – is driven by a very personal passion for the water, and to let his love of swimming shine through. Chris memorably told us that “sometimes it’s as simple as putting a ladder in the water” so, working with designer Linda Byrne, we shaped the site around this principle, allowing visitors to either dip in their toe or fully immerse.

With an audience made up of community groups, swimming enthusiasts and government bodies, we shifted the focus away from the language of architecture and onto the impacts of his work. The projects are sorted by action – design, research and advocacy – and are pitched to be accessible to all.

The brand hierarchy surrounding 10 Design is complex: the studio sits under the Egis umbrella, and within that the 10N Collective. 10 Design is also intentionally international, operating from locations worldwide. With the acquisition of US-based SB Architects, this rebrand – developed with designers TM – needed to work in 360 degrees, making sense of a ‘Russian doll’ of nesting brand identities and cultures.

Much of the work was about finding global kinship, demonstrating that there’s a lot more that connects 10 Design’s studios than separates them. It was also about celebrating the fact that while design expertise is global currency, clients must always receive attention that’s immediate and local.

This website for architects Orms came with a unique brief in the shape of an internal manual by Beispiel, setting out five principles for making architecture in an accelerated age.

Working with BOB Design, we let the principles of the manual – Ultrapractical – inform structure and content. Building Stories connects to the project portfolio, while Deep Assignments links to insights and research pieces. The idea of A Custodian’s Work is reflected in the social-media-generated project map we called Pins.

The language and tone are siblings to the original book, the words built in layers to serve up varying depths of information. Woven against the vertical flow of each project page, horizontal wefts of ‘tartan’ allow process and background narratives to be told.

Whittaker Parsons is a studio supported by two architectural pillars: building less and designing better. With a new website emerging around the concept of a concertina-ing logo, we decided to apply a similar principle to the words.

The result is an interactive opening sentence that pushes and pulls with the logo, expanding and contracting according to the movement of the user. This develops the pillars and adds ideas about making well, finding worth and seeing further, enabling us to summarise an ambitious intent in a very small space indeed.

The project was shortlisted for an Archiboo Award for Best Written Content in 2024.

A few years back, we celebrated Haptic’s tenth birthday by ‘opening the kitchen drawer’ and making a book together – The Haptic Way. Unusually, the book focused on practice rather than projects, so when we came to create a new website (designed, like the book, by BOB Design) we turned our attention back onto the work.

We evolved ideas about process from the book and used these to shape each project entry, meaning the story of a scheme can be told even while it’s still on the drawing board. Bringing the process alive also helps to communicate the haptic-ness of the work – a real challenge in a digital space. The bold and active tone of voice, always approachable, reflects Haptic’s purpose to design places that make people happy, as well as the practice’s optimistic Scandinavian flavour.

The site won the Archiboo Award for Best Written Content in 2022, for its “punchy writing with bags of personality”.

FifthMan is an in-house publishing house for architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Since creating the project in 2015, Free has commissioned and edited about 30 publications of varying shapes and sizes.

Every book we add to the shelf is a new opportunity to consider how the practice talks about how it designs, offering possibilities for experimentation away from the consensus of more established architectural publishing. Free to play, we’ve designed pamphlets and directories, invented minigraphs and made monographs.

To appeal to completists (and followers of Factory Records), every FifthMan work is given its own catalogue number, reinforcing each separate piece as part of a coherent whole.

Sheppard Robson is a mini-city of architects with a design heritage traceable back more than 80 years. Defining a new brand for this ever-evolving collective was a challenge: how do you develop a consistent set of corporate ideas that speak not just of one designer, but of many?

With BOB Design, we developed the central idea from which the practice’s new identity has grown: the fertile ground in which people and places are cultivated. This is brought to life in the website, a ‘terrace of houses’ that celebrates each discipline to its best while reinforcing the strength of the whole: the making of places that are co-created, people-centred and precision-made.

The website was chosen as Best Overall in the Archiboo Awards 2022.

A first visit to Oslo with BOB Design to talk to architects Nordic about their new monograph resulted in the best of briefs: they simply wanted to show, without spin, how architecture can solve real-life problems. They also wanted to surprise people, demonstrating that despite becoming a large practice, the fundamentals of their motivation and method remain the same as when they started out.

This brief became The Force of the Simple, a book written and designed to show the power and the poetry of a clear idea. It presents the projects ‘without fuss or fog’, focusing on plans and pictures to explain why they look the way they do – an ego-free approach that also demonstrates how, with confidence and trust, you can end up with an object of real beauty and coherence.

This rebrand project, in collaboration with BOB Design, explains the evolution of Duggan Morris Architects into Morris+Company. It shifts the emphasis from the individual to the collective, spotlighting a wider company of voices, all committed to the shared adventure of making architecture.

The central idea of the new identity – ‘a change of state’ – echoes this transformation. We wanted to distil the creative spirit of the reassembled office and communicate the ongoing human experience of the buildings that they make. On the website this is achieved by separating factual ‘beat’ content from more dynamic ‘jazz’, aggregated from many sources to de-objectify the architecture and place the focus firmly on the user.

The site won Best Newcomer at the Archiboo Awards in 2019.

Poised on the completion of several reputation-defining projects, Gibson Thornley wanted to develop a practice narrative that was as strong as their architectural stories. Recognising an urgent need for content for their new website, designed by Julia, we started our conversation with the projects rather than the people, and it soon became clear that the practice culture and approach was fingerprinted across the whole portfolio.

The new words aim to reflect Gibson Thornley’s unique brand of good-ness, an architecture that’s clear to read and meets its purpose happily. They also shed more light on the work behind the scenes, an engagement with process that’s about designing with no walls up and being able to drop your creative guard when necessary.