“We get clients and designers from agencies – quite a lot, I’d say maybe 10%, 15% of the time – where they actually have a sketch, or they’ve drawn something themselves, and we love that,” says Will Richardson, co-founder, along with Chris Nott, of type foundry Studio Drama in London.

There are a lot of designers who would grimace at a client having a pop, but not these two. “I’m sure traditionally people might have turned their nose up at it and been like, Oh, what have you drawn there? But I love it. I think it’s so cool when people have a go at it, because we want loads of people to draw on it and get excited about it. If they’re drawing it, it means they’re excited by it, which means they’re buying into the idea of it.” This non-hierarchical attitude runs throughout Studio Drama, which, despite its name, is more preoccupied with making type design as down to earth and frictionless as possible.

Richardson and Nott cut their teeth in the world of branding agencies: Richardson gained experience in a range of companies, while Nott spent the best part of a decade at Neville Brody Associates. When their careers crossed paths, they discovered they both had a passion for the typographic element of branding projects, and they set out on their own to launch Studio Drama. It was initially a broader design outfit but has since become almost entirely focused on type design, though always with that brand-focused underpinning, which they’ve brought to projects for the likes of RSPCA, Mozilla and Vogue Brasil.