Daniel Martin joined Pentagram New York in 2009, two years out of the Royal College of Art. He spent the next six years as a senior designer under the partners who wrote the modern rules of identity work — Paula Scher, Michael Bierut, Abbott Miller — shipping the type systems and editorial identities that would come to define a generation of American cultural institutions. Sofia James arrived at the same studio in 2012, after four years at Wieden+Kennedy Portland, where she had led the on-screen identity for Nike's digital platform group and a quiet, fastidious rebrand of a national broadcaster. The two were assigned to opposite corners of the same floor, shared a print queue, and argued about Garamond for a year before they spoke about anything else.
By 2015, both had begun to feel the friction that almost every senior practitioner eventually names: the distance between the client and the work had grown to include an account director, a project manager, a strategist, a junior designer, a production artist, and sometimes two interns. The judgment that had once been the product had been replaced, somewhere in the stack, by process. Daniel left Pentagram in 2016 for an eighteen-month engagement at Collins in New York, where he led the identity for a now-public fintech — a body of work that would later be taught in the fourth edition of Alina Wheeler's Designing Brand Identity. Sofia stayed on at Pentagram for another year, finishing the Whitney Museum signage system, and then joined him in Brooklyn in the autumn of 2017 to start the studio under both their names.
The premise was unfashionable then and remains unfashionable now: that the work gets better, not worse, when the ratio of partners to accounts is held at one to nine. That a forty-page verbal identity and messaging playbook is a more durable deliverable than a Figma file. That a nine-week average timeline from kickoff to public launch is achievable — and worth the friction — when the two people in the room are the two people who will be quoted in the press release. The studio has held that line for seven years, through a pandemic, a brand-new-economy contraction, and an awards cycle that has, on two occasions, named us Studio of the Year.
— D.M. & S.J., written for the Quarterly, Autumn 2024
