Logos and identity systems
Marks that still work at nine millimeters.
I draw symbols, logotypes and the systems around them from a studio in Katendrecht, mostly for museums, small manufacturers and people who make food. Every identity leaves here with a one-page rule sheet, because nobody has ever finished reading the sixty-page one.
Drawing record
- Discipline
- Symbols, logotypes, identity systems
- Grid
- 12 units, four radii, one angle
- Delivered
- Four lockups and a one-page rule sheet
- Smallest use
- 9 mm engraved, 16 px in a browser tab
- Studio
- Katendrecht, Rotterdam - since 2017
Marks now out in the world
Thirty-four identities since 2017. These are the eight you are most likely to have walked past.
Shown the way they are delivered
Centered, alone, at the size the client will actually meet them. The sector and the year sit underneath; everything else is on the job's own sheet.
One mark, four ways to use it
A logo is not a picture, it is a set. This is what leaves the studio on every commission, all four drawn from the same file so nothing drifts once you start using them.
Primary lockup
Minimum width 34 mm
The default. Anywhere there is a full line to give it.
Horizontal
Minimum width 46 mm
Letterheads, email footers, a band shorter than it is wide.
Stacked
Minimum width 26 mm
Square spaces. Tote bags, stamps, the corner of a window.
Symbol only
Minimum 9 mm / 16 px
Once the name is already on the page. Tabs, embossing, brass.
The whole rule sheet, one page
- Clear space
- One cap height of the logotype on every side, measured from the outermost point of the symbol
- Color
- Solid ink or solid reverse. No gradient, no outline, no second color inside the mark
- Backgrounds
- Any flat field passing 4.5:1 against the ink. Photographs only behind the reversed lockup
- Below 26 mm
- Drop to the symbol. The logotype loses its counters before it loses its weight
- File set
- SVG, EPS and PNG at three sizes, plus a favicon drawn separately at 16 px
Three ways this usually starts
Prices are where the last few projects landed, not a menu. Tell me which of the three questions is yours and I will send a real number within two days.
A mark from nothing
What is this thing actually called, and what should it look like?
You have a name, a lease and a date. I draw until one of them is right, then build the set around it. Most of my work starts here, and most of it starts on grid paper before it goes anywhere near a screen.
Redrawing what you have
Can we keep what people already recognize and lose the wobble?
Somebody drew it in 2004 and it has been redrawn badly nine times since. I go back to the original intention, rebuild it on a grid, and hand back something your printer can set without phoning you.
The system around it
Who is going to keep all of this consistent once I have gone?
Color, type, pictograms, signing, packaging rules - only as much as your team will actually use. I would rather write one page they read than sixty they file. Available on its own if the mark is already good.
How a commission runs
Nine weeks, four moments where you see something, one invoice at the end. Nothing is presented on a mood board and nothing arrives as a surprise.
The sixty-one that did not make it
A mark is chosen, not invented. Everything on this sheet was drawn for the same brief in the same fortnight, and exactly one of them survived contact with a brass plate.
Why the other sixty-one went
Died at nine millimeters
Handsome on the screen, a smudge on the brass door plate the client had already ordered.
Belonged to someone else
Two hours of searching found it registered in the same class, in the next country, since 2011.
Only worked in two colors
The overlap that made it clever fell apart the moment it had to be one flat ink on a paper bag.
Said the wrong thing
Read as a hotel group in Zurich. The client bakes bread six streets from here.
Could not be stitched
The aprons were already in the budget, and a 0.4 mm stroke does not survive an embroidery machine.
What happens to a mark after you hand it over
The day always comes when somebody needs the logo bigger, faster, and in a color it has never been. That is why every identity leaves here with a page of don'ts.
Correct
The mark, as drawn
Solid ink, original proportions, one cap height clear on every side. This is the only version that ships, and it is the one in the file you were sent.
Never stretch it
The counters go oval and the weight stops matching the logotype beside it.
Never tilt it
It is drawn to a baseline. Angled, it stops being a mark and becomes a sticker.
Never recolor it
One ink and one reverse. Nothing else has been drawn, tested or approved.
Never sit it on a pattern
It needs a flat field. Anything busy behind it eats the counters first.
Never crowd it
One cap height stays clear on every side, including in the corner of a busy poster.
Never fade it
Below full strength it stops passing contrast, and a mark you have to look for is not one.
Nadia Roos, one desk in Katendrecht
A one-person studio for marks and the systems around them.
I have been drawing marks in Katendrecht since 2017, and before that I spent four years in a wayfinding studio cutting vinyl for hospitals - which is where I learned that a logo is a manufacturing problem long before it is a taste problem.
I work alone, on one identity at a time, which is why the waiting list is real and why I answer my own email. Most commissions arrive from museums, small manufacturers and people who make food - clients whose mark will end up embroidered, engraved, screened onto a van and set at sixteen pixels in a browser tab, sometimes all in the same month.
Everything starts on grid paper. I keep the roughs: there are about four hundred rejected marks in the flat file behind me, and I still go back through them when a new brief looks like an old one.
- 2017 Working since
- 34 Identities delivered
- 400+ Marks in the flat file
- 01 The small size decides everything I draw at nine millimeters first and enlarge afterwards. A mark that only works on a screen is a picture, not a mark.
- 02 One page, not sixty The rules a team follows are the ones they can read standing up. Everything else gets written down and quietly ignored.
- 03 Hand before software Sixty on paper before anything is drawn on a grid. The pencil finds things the cursor never suggests.
- 04 You own the drawing Full rights, working files, the grid it was built on. If you outgrow me, the next designer should be able to pick it up cleanly.
From the people who have to live with them
All four have agreed to be asked, and two of them already have been. Ask for the phone numbers and I will send them.
We asked for a logo and got a rule sheet, a favicon drawn separately, and an answer to a question our sign maker only thought to ask eight months later. Nobody here has needed to phone a designer since.
Wieke Aalbers
Director
Havenmuseum
Commissioned the identity and the signing, 2025
The first thing Nadia did was ask for a bread bag and the width of our shop window. The second was to show us nine marks printed at postage-stamp size. That order of operations is the whole difference.
Joris Kastanje
Owner
Kastanje Bakkerij
Commissioned the identity, 2026
Our old mark had been redrawn by six suppliers and none of them matched. What came back was one file, on a grid, with the tolerances written down. Our tile press is literal and has not complained since.
Bram Steenwerk
Production manager
Steenwerk Beheer
Commissioned the redraw, 2024
I have commissioned identities that arrived as a hundred-slide deck. This one arrived as four lockups and a single page, and every person in the company can still describe the rules from memory.
Marit de Vos
Publisher
Polderpers
Commissioned the logotype, 2024
Awards, press and a few talks
Kept short on purpose. The bakery is a better reference than any of them.
Send me the brief, or the beginnings of one
Five fields and a paragraph. The most useful thing you can tell me is where the mark will be reproduced, not what you want it to look like.
Received. You will hear from Priya within two working days.
- 1 A real reply in two working days. From me, with questions, not an auto-responder.
- 2 Ninety minutes on a call. What you make, and every surface the mark has to reach.
- 3 One page, one number. Scope, the weeks, what you get, and the fee. Nothing hidden underneath.