How Launch Media Studios looks, and why

The idea

The brand has one job: look like a studio that makes things, not an agency that presents things. Everything below follows from that. The photography is warm and unstaged, the typography is calm, and then a single orange hand-drawn layer goes over the top, as if someone marked up the print on the way past.

That drawn layer is the whole identity. Strip it out and this is a competent minimal brand that looks like forty others. Keep it and the work is recognisable at a glance, at thumbnail size, in a feed. Protect it.

Imagery: photoreal base, drawn overlay

Mixed media. A real photograph underneath, and one orange hand-drawn layer on top carrying both the marks and the words: a circle, an arrow, and a hand-lettered note saying what is happening and why it matters. Never illustration alone, never a bare photograph, and never an image without its words.

The photographic base

• Warm natural daylight only. No hard flash, no cool blue cast, no heavy colour grade. Window light doing the work.
• Warm neutral palette in frame. Off-white, sand, oatmeal, pale wood, the occasional plant. The photograph must never fight the orange, because the orange has to win.
• Generous negative space. Deliberate empty area, usually upper right, because that is where the drawn marks live. Compose for the annotation, not around it afterwards.
• Real and Singaporean. Real rooms, real props, people who look like they live here. No glass-tower stock, no headset call-centre imagery, no handshake photography.
• Unposed. Mid-task, looking at the work rather than the camera.

The drawn layer

• One colour only: #f2681c. No second accent, no gradients, no shadows on the drawn marks.
• A limited vocabulary: rough circle, curved arrow, underline, bracket or frame, small four-point sparkle. That is the entire set. Adding new mark types dilutes it.
• Three to five marks per image. More than that and it stops reading as annotation and starts reading as decoration.
• Never over a face. Never over the primary subject either. The marks point at things, they do not obscure them.
• Flat and graphic. The drawn layer must never try to look photographic, three dimensional, or lit.

Producing a new image

Images are generated with gpt-image-2 and the prompt below, then resized and converted to WebP before they go in public/img/. Keep it verbatim and change only the scene sentence and the two phrases, or the set drifts. Then read the result before you ship it.

Every image carries a label

An arrow and a circle can point at something. They cannot say what it is or why it matters. So every image carries hand-lettered words in the same orange marker: a short phrase in capitals naming what is happening, and a lowercase line under it giving the principle. The picture stops being decoration and starts teaching something.

The lettering is part of the drawing, not a caption laid over it. That is the whole point: it should read as though someone marked up the print, wrote a note in the margin and drew an arrow to the thing they meant. The photograph is composed for it, with the subject on the right and a calm empty area on the left.

How to write one

• Headline: two to four words, hand-lettered capitals, naming the action or the principle. “SHOOT IN BATCHES”, not “OUR PROCESS”. Short phrases are also what the image model renders reliably, so brevity is craft and insurance at once.
• Concept: one sentence a buyer could repeat to a colleague. It should teach, and where possible it should cost us something to say.
• Never a caption of the obvious. If the line only describes what is visible in the photograph, it is wasted. Say the thing the photograph cannot.
• The alt text must carry both lines, or a screen-reader user loses the point of the image entirely. It is the only copy of those words a machine can read.

The full set in use

Colour

One accent, one near-black, three greys, two grounds. The restraint is the point: because there is only one colour, the orange means something wherever it appears.

Typography

Poppins throughout, at three weights: 700 for headlines, 600 for labels and buttons, 300 for everything you actually read. The 300 is deliberate. It is what keeps a page dense with information from feeling heavy.

• Headlines carry negative tracking. At display sizes Poppins opens up, and it needs pulling back in.
• Body copy never goes below 15px or above 17px. Long documents live or die on this.
• Sentence case everywhere. Never all caps except the small uppercase labels, which carry 0.06em tracking.
• No em dashes in any copy, anywhere. Commas, colons, semicolons, full stops or brackets.

The mark

A capital L inside a hand-drawn circle. The circle is the same loose marker stroke that annotates every image on this site, so the logo is not decoration bolted onto the identity, it is the identity at its smallest size. It does not quite close, and it is not meant to.

It survives being small, which is the only test a mark has to pass. At sixteen pixels it still reads as a circled L rather than an orange smudge, and that is why this one was chosen over the alternatives.

Orange on light, white on ink. There is no third colourway. Download the orange SVG or the white SVG.

The lockup

Mark plus wordmark, set in Poppins 600, sentence case. The gap between them is roughly a third of the mark height, and the two are optically centred rather than mathematically aligned.

Launch Media Studios

Clear space and minimum size

• Clear space: keep a margin of at least half the mark height on every side. Nothing enters that box, including the wordmark of another brand.
• Minimum size: 16px for the mark on screen, 8mm in print. Below that the counter inside the L fills in and it stops reading.
• On photography: place it in the negative space the image was composed to leave. Never over a busy area, and never inside a drawn annotation.

Icons and favicons

Two treatments, chosen by context. The bare mark is used wherever a transparent background is possible, because it stays legible smaller. The filled orange tile is used only where the platform demands a solid square, which is app icons and home-screen bookmarks.

favicon.svg

20px

16px

apple-touch

icon-192

maskable

Shape and depth

• Radii are generous and consistent: 999px for pills and buttons, 22 to 28px for cards and panels, 16 to 20px for small tiles.
• Depth comes from one-pixel borders and the alternate ground, never from drop shadows. There is not a single box-shadow on this site.
• Sections alternate Paper and Paper soft to create rhythm down a long page.
• No glassmorphism, no gradient fills, no coloured left borders on cards.

Voice

Plain, specific, and willing to say the unhelpful thing. The brand's whole competitive position is that it tells buyers what other agencies will not, so the writing has to earn that in every paragraph.

• Say the number. If a price band is known, print it. Vagueness reads as evasion here.
• Include what costs us money. Every service page names a case where we are the wrong choice. That is not modesty, it is the reason the rest is believable.
• No invented proof. No client names, case studies, testimonials or results percentages until they are real. This is not negotiable and it is not temporary.
• No hype vocabulary. Nothing is game-changing, cutting-edge, best-in-class or revolutionary. No exclamation marks.
• Date and source any third-party fact, and link it so a reader can check it in under a minute.

What breaks the brand