Ardent Materials

Ardent tests things until they fail. The lab's actual product is a report — a hundred-odd pages of load curves, photographs of fractures and a summary that a client's lawyer will read very carefully. When they came to us they had a logo they liked, a Word template they hated, and no idea that those two facts were the same problem.

We spent the first month reading finished reports rather than looking at brand assets. Two things fell out of that. The first was that nearly every page of an Ardent report is a table, a plot or a photograph with a caption, so any identity that expressed itself through page furniture was going to be visible on roughly four pages in a hundred. The second was that the lab's photography — raw, fluorescent-lit, unflattering shots of broken samples — was already the most distinctive thing they made, and nobody had noticed.

So the system is mostly a typographic one. A single grotesque, four sizes, used with enough discipline that a table and a body paragraph and a caption all sit on the same baseline grid. A caption style that is quiet enough to be used two hundred times. And a decision to leave the fracture photography completely untreated: no duotone, no crop convention, no colour cast. It runs as shot, at full bleed, and it is the only place in the system where anything is allowed to be beautiful.

The deliverable was a working template, not a manual — the lab's report authors were never going to consult a PDF about their own brand. We rebuilt the document from styles up, wrote the plot and table specifications as things the software could enforce, and sat with two authors for three days while they wrote real reports in it. The changes they asked for in those three days improved the system more than the preceding six weeks had.