About the desk

The desk

Stag & Doe Designs is a studio journal on branding, print and the web. It is written and edited at a design desk in Suffolk, in eastern England, and published in British English. Four desks hold the entries: branding, web design, print and packaging, and studio practice.

What an entry is

Each entry answers one question a small business actually asks: what a print run costs at 250 and at 1,000 copies, how much a mark can lose before it stops working on a van, what a first screen has to say, how long a guideline document needs to be. The answer comes first. The working follows.

The reader

The journal is written for the people who commission design and often carry it themselves: a shop, a workshop, a trade, a clinic, a practice, a maker who sells by post. It assumes no design training and no patience for filler.

How the desk works

Entries are dated and revised when the trade moves. Figures come from published specifications, suppliers' sample books and named sources, and every entry lists the sources its desk read. Photographs are made for the journal and captioned as plates. The desk writes in the third person about every company, studio, printer and supplier it names.