Why we're called Small Caps
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.
People ask about the name more than anything else. Usually on a call, usually right after they have spelled it back to us as "Smallcaps" or "Small Cap Studio". So here is the answer, written down once, and with it the reason this journal exists.
The letters
Small capitals are capital letters drawn at about the height of a lowercase x. A good typeface draws them separately, not by shrinking the full capitals, so their strokes stay as heavy as the letters around them. You have seen them a thousand times without noticing: in abbreviations like BBC or NATO set inside a paragraph, in the first line of a book chapter, in the names of speakers in a play.
That last part is the point. Small caps do their job when you don't notice them. Set NATO in full capitals in the middle of a sentence and it shouts; set it in small caps and the sentence reads evenly, the abbreviation still clear. They carry structure without demanding attention.
I first learned about them as a junior sub-editor, from a production editor who kept a laminated card of the paper's typographic rules on his desk. Rule eleven was small caps. I was twenty-three and thought rule eleven was the most pedantic thing I had ever read. Ten years later I named a company after it.
The work
I spent those ten years on a newspaper's website, first editing, then running it, and in the end rebuilding it with a team of four. The thing I learned was that the quality of a website is mostly decided in places readers never see. Whether the type holds up on a cheap phone. Whether a page loads before the reader gives up. Whether a byline is a name typed into a box or a link to a person. Whether "updated" means the facts changed or someone fixed a comma.
When those details are right, nobody notices. The site feels calm, quick and obvious, and a redesign three years later is a change of clothes rather than a move of house. When they are wrong, everyone notices, constantly, and nobody can say why.
Small Caps started in 2019, in a back room in Dublin, to sweat those details for other people. We are a design and development studio: we design and build websites, digital products and the identities around them. Strategy, design, writing, photography and code, done by the same small team, so nothing gets lost between a slide and a server. Sometimes we run what we build. Often we hand it over to an in-house team with the code, a design system and the documentation, and leave.
There are seven of us now, across two studios:
Dublin, where it started: me, Callum (who writes and edits everything, twice) and Aoife (who will ask you what a field is for before you are allowed to add it). Marta, our photographer, is based here when she isn't somewhere else.
Copenhagen, since 2022: Elias, who leads design, and Leela, who leads development. They are about to move into a new space, which Elias will write about once the boxes are unpacked.
Why a journal
For seven years our work has lived in other people's websites, under other people's names. That is how it should be. But it means that when someone asks what we actually do, we end up describing it in the abstract, and "a design and development studio" is a phrase that could describe ten thousand companies.
So this journal is where we show the work instead. What we did on a project, what went wrong, what we would do again. How we draw a wordmark, why a plaque is designed the way it is, how a page loads without signal, what we learned from a launch. The craft, written down by the people who do it.
A few rules for ourselves, borrowed from the laminated card:
Say what happened. Not what we believe in, not what we promise. Things that happened, and what we made of them.
Name the people. Every post is written by someone, and the work it describes was done by someone. Usually several people.
Show the mistakes. A post about a project that went perfectly would be fiction, and a dull one.
We will write when there is something to say. This year, that is mostly going to be one project: a register of nearly two thousand buildings and, we are told, six drawers of index cards. More on that soon.
Small caps do their job when you don't notice them. So does a good website.
If you have read this far, you may now spell the name correctly. Two words, both capitalized, no "studio". Rule eleven.
