The Journal

Six months after the first workshop at the long table on Fennell Quay, the Register's volunteers keep their own website, and nobody needs to post a card to anyone. What they have done without us since launch, what we would change if we started again, and what comes next for the Register and for us.

The Register launched on Saturday night of Open House weekend, under the Accordion's roof, with a hundred and twenty guests and a brass quartet. At 7:52 a board member scanned the bus station's own plaque and got a page that didn't exist. What broke, how we fixed it in twenty minutes, and what we changed so it can't happen again.

I took 1,400 photographs of the Register's buildings, so I wrote their alt text too. What a building's photograph should say to someone who can't see it, why "brutalist building" is not a description, and the four questions I asked of every picture.

I joined Small Caps in Copenhagen in July and spent most of my first month in Dublin, building the page you see when you scan a plaque. What the two studios are like, what a quay is, and the afternoon a retired architect fixed a page in the rain.

The studio dog has been asked to contribute to the journal. She has some observations about the print shop, Friday biscuits, the workshops, the pile in the middle of the table, and the people who keep standing on her blanket. Typed up by Elias, uncorrected.

The Register's building notes will be written by forty volunteers, a registrar and a retired architect, mostly on phones on the pavement. Their style guide had to fit on one page pinned to the office wall. Here is all of it, what we left out, and the first note that arrived.

The Register's plaques had a name and a year, in letters too small to read from the pavement opposite. The new ones are black enamel, set in small caps, and carry a code that opens the building's page. Prototyped on the press in the print shop, one line of metal type at a time.

The Register's old logo was a clip-art skyscraper in a city without skyscrapers. The new one was cut into stone in 1962, at the foot of the building everyone already associates with the Register. How we found it, redrew it, and kept it to one colour.

Concrete looks best on the days everyone else stays indoors. Three weeks of grey mornings, 1,400 photographs of the Register's buildings, why every one of them was taken from the pavement, and why we handed over the originals uncropped.

The Modern Register asked us for a new identity, a website, walking routes and plaques for Dublin's twentieth-century buildings. All 1,912 of them lived on index cards in six oak drawers, kept with care since 1989. We said yes, and this is why.

Our Copenhagen studio now lives in a print shop that closed after sixty years. The type cabinets became shelves, three drawers of metal type stayed as they were, and the press we meant to sell is still here, because its former owner offered to teach us to use it.

One question, asked of every field before it exists, does most of the work in our content modelling: who reads this value, and when? Here is why it matters more than it sounds, the index-card exercise we built around it, and what ends up in the pile.

Small capitals are letters that sit quietly in a line and carry a lot of meaning. Seven years after naming a design and development studio after them, that is still the best description of how we work. Here is where the name came from, and why we started writing this journal.