The Studio Series

A visual system and template shop for a creator who was tired of designing every thumbnail from scratch.

Year: 2025
Location: Cape Town
Duration: 6 weeks

Client: Robert McCombe
Role: Visual system, Templates, Storefront
Discipline: Brand & Graphic
Delivered: 2025 · 6 weeks

The problem

What we were actually solving

Robert was producing well-made content at an unsustainable pace, inventing the visual approach fresh each time. Output was good, consistency was poor, and the workload was heading somewhere unpleasant.

The approach

Warm office with a tree and pendant lighting

How the work was made

We designed a system instead of a series: a fixed title treatment, a three-shot opening, a consistent caption block bottom-left, and one editorial rule that every episode is about a single object rather than the whole space.

Typography does the branding. A single high-contrast display face at a consistent scale, always bottom-left, always over a lower-third gradient. Nothing else was needed, and nothing else was allowed.

The templates were then packaged as a small storefront, so the system Robert uses weekly also sells to his audience. It runs on a static site with a payment link and no monthly platform fee.

The outcome

Production time per episode dropped by roughly two-thirds, and the template shop now covers his annual software costs.

Production time per episode: −67%Production time per episode
Episodes banked per shoot day: 4×Episodes banked per shoot day
Editorial rule that shapes every episode: 1Editorial rule that shapes every episode
Weeks to design, build and hand over: 6Weeks to design, build and hand over