Auber & Lind is a two-person studio working with founders and curators on identity, publications, and slow digital — one engagement at a time.
I — Manifesto
There is a kind of work that only reveals itself slowly. We spend the first weeks of an engagement reading what you have read, sitting through the meetings you sit through, and watching how the language you use about your work shifts when the door is closed. The identity that comes out of that listening tends to be quieter than a competitive audit would suggest, and more lasting.
Our collaborators are architects, publishers, small wineries, and institutions whose work is measured in decades. They do not need urgency. They need care — applied consistently, across every surface a reader or visitor might meet.
Restraint, when it is genuine, is the most persuasive tone a studio can speak in.
We are based in a two-room office in a converted warehouse near the canal. We work in print, web, signage and occasional film. Most of our projects begin with a letter and end, many months later, with a finished book, a site, or a set of guidelines left on a shelf for the team to inherit.
II — Practice
Each engagement lives in one of four disciplines. We try not to blur them.
I. Identity
Marks, wordmarks, and the full set of editorial rules that follow them — typography, voice, grid, paper stock, photographic direction.
II. Publications
Museum catalogues, architectural monographs, annual reports. We work with binderies we trust and stay with a project through press.
III. Digital
Small, legible, durable. We build single-page sites and archives that open in under a second and will still open in a decade.
IV. Environment
Exhibition graphics, wayfinding, printed ephemera for galleries and public spaces. The piece is finished when it is hanging on the wall.
Plate I — The reading room at Halden House, 2023. Identity and signage programme for Halden & Sons Architects.
III — In Figures
Finished engagements since 2009
Permanent team members, today
Average months per engagement
Plate II — Press sheets, Hess Weingut annual, autumn 2024. Typeset in Centaur with Galliard specimens.
IV — How we work
An engagement moves through the same four phases regardless of medium. The names are old-fashioned. We keep them for clarity.
I
A week of reading, meetings and questions. No deliverables. We produce one short memo at the end summarising what we heard.
II
Three or four routes explored in parallel — marks, typographic systems, sample spreads. We never present fewer than two we believe in.
III
Weeks of revisions across every surface the identity will meet. We prefer to be told what is wrong more than what is right.
IV
A bound book of guidelines, the working files, and a day in the studio with whoever will carry the work forward. We answer letters for a year.
V — Letters received
A finished Auber & Lind book is the closest I have come in twenty years of publishing to an object I would want to keep in its own drawer.
We came in expecting a logo and left with a way of describing our work that our board still quotes three years on.
They made the annual report feel like something the team wanted to read. The following year, we asked them back for everything else.