Studio Missive 26: The new website for Bruce Mayhew
Hi friend,
Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening this week in the studio.
What’s inspiring you?
I’ve been waiting for this for years. Typography master Kris Sowersby and his team at Klim Type Foundry designed their own interpretation of Helvetica: “Die Grotesk.” Kris also wrote a great essay about how he approached the work, and why he did it now. Surprisingly philosophical and relatable, and a great little treatise on the angst of youth and the fear of selling out.
Seriously, imagine an essay about designing a typeface that largely reads like this: “Perhaps this is what annoys many of my contemporaries about Helvetica — that it’s nakedly commercial, really good, and bloody successful? Nobody making fonts these days will openly admit, ‘I made this font for purely commercial reasons.’ It’s just not cricket… The craft world in general struggles with the idea of selling and selling out — surely the quality of the work should be enough? Surely, but no. That’s not how it works.”
I cannot wait for an excuse to buy this typeface and use it. (I would use it on my own branding, but at this point, Graphik feels like a part of my DNA.)
- While we’re talking about typography, Grilli Type has released Canon, a serif typeface that lives up to its legacy-imbibed name. Their website for the typeface demos by the font by reproducing selections from “the canon” of great text, including Frankenstein. Pound for pound, I think Grilli Type and Klim are two of the best type houses in the world right now.
- This is the last typeface thing this week, I swear, but in other typography news, Swiss Typefaces’ new Only Extended is really nice.
- New music: I love jazz in the studio, and Julian Lage is one of the greatest jazz musicians alive. (His main guitar is a Telecaster, and if you don’t realize how weird/cool that is for a jazz player, let me assure you it’s very weird/cool.) He’s teamed up with a new quartet for his follow-up to the fantastic Speak to Me. Their first album together, Scenes from Above, really cooks. Listen to it on Apple Music, Spotify, or, you know, wherever.
What are you working on this week?
This week, I am excited to unveil version one of the new website for Bruce Mayhew.
Bruce is corporate trainer, keynote speaker, executive coach, and now an author. He approached me in 2025 with some exciting news of his own: a publisher had picked up his first book. Should he have a new website too?
That question opened up a large can of worms: what sort of websites do authors have? How could Bruce integrate the book into the broader messaging of his website? Should his brand get updated? Where does his brand exist in the broader marketplace? Should his brand identity and the book have some sense of synergy?
We dialled in on a few things:
- The most important thing here was Bruce’s work. The book was a supporting actor.
- His brand identity needed a refresh as well as the website. While Bruce has competitors, none of them do what he does. He works with existing teams in corporate structures to help them work better together, and to train new leaders from within. We felt his existing brand could make that clearer.
- We wanted his brand identity and his book to have some sort of synergy, and I personally wanted that synergy to be expansive to additional books, should he choose to write more in the future. While I wasn’t designing the cover, I wanted to contribute some elements from the brand identity and design system that could communicate something in a shared language.
In my second missive, I shared the three stylescapes (next-level moodboards) that we started with to agree on a direction. I wanted to share them again just as a brief reminder of where this project started.
I give each stylescape a name, so the theme can be spoken aloud and given direction. I called this one "Imperfect Humanity."
This stylescape is called "Evolving Leaders." It was designed to tap into the idea that we are always evolving and growing as humans, and like the world around us, we are not static. We grow.
This approach is meant to evoke somebody who brings modern class into a coaching realm, like if your business coach got a little electrocuted during a fitness routine. I call it "Inspiring Connection."
In that post, I didn’t reveal Bruce’s favourite. But it’s time: Bruce loved “Imperfect Humanity,” and we both thought elements of “Evolving Leaders” were really working. Both of us felt that Bruce helped people evolve individually, but also move in a rhythm together.
Something about that reminded me of forests and the way that trees grow individually, but work cooperatively. We settled on this idea of a topographic motif that resembled the annual growth rings of a tree, but also resembled the ebbs and flows of rivers. Some lines are thicker and lead. Some lines are smaller and follow. But they all ebb and flow together, growing, changing, and working together as part of a bigger whole.
Once we landed on that direction, the entire design came together very quickly, and I think where we landed is a great blend of both directions. There are so many little details that I love: the background colour of the table of contents changes as you scroll through different sections, there are different “elevation levels” in the colour scheme that naturally reflect the environment around them, and the topographic maps seamlessly adjust as you change the size of the window (a real challenge to implement well).
The book cover ended up taking inspiration from our design as well, integrating the topographic line art into its cover with a complementary green that pops.
This is only the first phase of this project. There are a few minor enhancements that didn’t make the deadline, and a couple more pages to launch in time for the book’s official launch in mid-February, so keep an eye out for that. Until then, both Bruce and I would be honoured if you checked out the new website.
Until next week,
Nathan
P.S. There’s going to be another launch next week! It’s a busy time at the studio.