Before the project began, Kody and I were invited to learn blacksmithing at the forge. We made S hooks: hammering metal to a point, twisting it in a vice, managing our own coke fires. We watched as the metal in the fire went from black to red, orange and white. When stoked, the fire threw embers up from the coals.

The wordmark uses TT Trailers: a bold condensed display face that reads like metal cut into letterforms. The W is the wordmark initial, manipulated to swell as if expanded under heat. I refined the weight distribution in Illustrator to make the asymmetric expansion read as balanced.

To convey the grit of soot and char within a blacksmithing forge, a series of textures were created. These appear at the edges of backgrounds and decay into typography. Made by hand: black spray paint on paper, outdoors. The paper was lit on fire, hit with a hammer, scrunched and torn. Each sheet dried and scanned at high resolution.

Eight icons were crafted to support the identity system. Each references the tools of the blacksmithing trade.

The palette was inspired by a colour temperature chart on the forge wall, specifically how the colour of metal transforms as it heats toward forging temperature.

The website conveys the experience of being inside the forge. Audio recorded inside the studio plays in the background: hammers on anvils, laughter, distant music. A clip of embers rising from the coals loops on the hero section of the home page.

Ben Beagley and Kody Deretic built the site.

The system is built from the forge out: colours from a heat chart, textures made by setting paper on fire, typography expanding under stress.