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 get the grit of soot and char, I made a series of textures. They sit at the edges of backgrounds and decay into the typography. Made by hand: black spray paint on paper, outdoors. I lit the paper on fire, hit it with a hammer, scrunched and tore it. Each sheet dried, then scanned at high resolution.

I drew eight icons for the identity, each from the tools and trade of the forge.

The palette comes from a colour temperature chart on the forge wall: how steel shifts colour as it heats toward forging temperature.

The website puts you inside the forge. Audio recorded in the studio plays under it: hammers on anvils, laughter, distant music. A clip of embers rising off the coals loops on the home hero.

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.