Case study · Brand & identity · Editorial · Print Studio concept
Whaup Press
An identity for a small west coast imprint, built around one bird that moves between every kind of ground its books are about.
Self-initiated. Not commissioned work, no client involved, brief set by me.
The brief
Most brands need a logo. A press needs a system.
The mark has to survive at eight millimetres on a spine, hold a list together across subjects with little in common, and still say something about where the books come from.
Whaup Press publishes field guides, essays and short fiction rooted in close observation of one small part of the world. I set the brief on ground the studio knows, so the work could be judged against something real.
- Brief set by
- Andrew A. Stewart
- Year
- 2026
- Setting
- Argyll, west coast
- Studio
- Northmarker, Lochgilphead
- Scope
- Brand identity · Type · Colour system · Editorial standards
- Status
- A concept. Whaup Press does not exist. The bird, and everything said about it, does.
The idea
The bird names itself.
Whaup is the Scots name for the curlew, and it is onomatopoeic. You hear the bird before you see it, a bubbling cur-lee carried across a bog on a still morning.
It earns the mark twice over. It moves between exactly the places this press publishes about, moor and bog in spring, estuary and shore in winter, so one bird spans the list. And it is a bird in trouble: the Scottish breeding population fell by around 59% between 1995 and 2018, and the curlew now sits on the UK Red List and is Near Threatened worldwide.
Every book carries a species that has more than halved within living memory. The press never says so on a cover. The bird says it.
The mark
A book cover, used as a logo.
A framed panel with a nameplate below it, which is the shape of a book cover in miniature. A new series colour is a single fill swap, and nothing else moves.
One bird, drawn once, redrawn twice.
The silhouette is identical across all three weights, so the imprint reads the same on a poster and on a favicon. Only the detail changes: the feather scoring closes up below about 120px, so small sizes get a lighter cut and a 16px icon gets a thickened one.
The bill's crescent is the identity, so it is never cropped, tilted or flipped, and the nameplate carries WHAUP alone because that is the form that survives on a spine.
Colour
Three habitats, and a shelf you can read.
Ink and cream are constant. The other three are habitats, and a book takes the colour of the ground it is about.
Sage
#818468
Pasture, glen and strath. The house colour.
Heather
#95707D
Moor and blanket bog. The uplands.
Terracotta
#AD5139
Coast and estuary, and a turning tide.
Ink
#191913
Not black. A warm near-black that sits down beside cream.
The colour that did not make it
A marine blue was carried through early drafts and cut. The ink bird went murky on it, and every fix meant special-casing one series. A palette in which one colour needs its own rulebook has a fault in it, so marine was withdrawn rather than patched.
The shelf
Three feet away, in a bookshop.
The colour system exists for one moment: a reader working out which Whaup Press book is the one about the shore. Heights vary. The cream nameplate band at the foot does not, and that is what lines up.
Moor
Upland, bog and hill ground.
Pasture
Glen, strath and farmland. The default when a title spans grounds.
Shore
Coast, estuary, sea loch and island edges.
The system is only worth having if it is never fudged.
The book
The logo, at full size.
Because the lockup is already the shape of a cover, a cover is the lockup scaled up with the title set inside the panel. Series label at the head, title at the foot, author beneath, nameplate across the bottom. The open field is never filled with type.
Off the page
The lockup as a woven label.
A woven patch is the hardest test the mark faces, because there is no fine detail to be had in a thread. This is the small-size cut on terracotta, and the one place the lockup appears without a page around it.
Type & voice
Three faces, and a house style.
One for the outside of the book, one for the inside, one for anything a reader checks against the ground. Bitter won the nameplate because it needed the most letterspacing, which sounds like a mark against it and is the opposite: it is what keeps WHAUP readable at 8 mm on a spine.
Bitter
Covers, spines and the wordmark
Source Serif 4
Running text, essays and fiction
IBM Plex Mono
Grid references, distances, tide times
A publisher's brand is mostly sentences, so the voice was written down as rules.
Close observation. Write down what was there, in order, with the numbers, and trust the reader to feel the rest.
House
Three hours on rough ground. The last mile is pathless and the burn is not bridged; after heavy rain, turn back at the fank.
Not house
An unforgettable journey into the wild heart of Argyll, where the landscape will take your breath away at every turn.
Weather over wonder. No book of ours calls anything breathtaking.
Outcome
What it set out to prove.
No books were printed and no reader ever stood in front of that shelf. What this tested is whether a colour system can do a job rather than decorate one, and whether one mark can hold from a poster down to a favicon.
The system held
Three habitats and one format is a short enough code to read at a glance, and the constant nameplate band makes a mixed shelf look like a list.
Decisions, not preferences
The wordmark came out of a test rather than a taste, and a colour was cut on measured contrast rather than defended.
Still untested
The blind emboss and the foil exist on paper only, and that is where a cream-on-cream nameplate either works or does not.
Self-initiated. Not commissioned work, no client involved, brief set by me. Whaup Press is invented. The bird is not.
Sources
- Curlew declined 59% in Scotland, 1995 to 2018, Scotland's Farm Advisory Service, farmland waders note
- UK Red List, and a quarter of the world's breeding curlew, British Trust for Ornithology
- Globally Near Threatened, IUCN Red List, Numenius arquata
- Numenius, from the Greek for new moon, and the cur-lee call, Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust
Got something that needs a system, not just a logo?
That is the kind of problem I like best.