One thing, done excellently. Studio Drama co-founders Will and Chris on the Design Next podcast
14 July 2026
Series three of Design Next has taken us inside some of the most interesting creative minds working today, asking what creative excellence really means in an industry that never stops accelerating.
For Will Richardson and Chris Nott, co-founders of Studio Drama, they’ve formed their answer to that question around a single, disciplined conviction: do one thing, and do it excellently.
But they are about to change that up.
Starting out
Studio Drama’s proposition is admireably simple: they create custom typefaces for brands. Type, designed at the speed of branding, delivered with craft at the same level as everything else in the brand toolkit, with the rigour demanded by global megabrands.
Getting to that clarity took time. In the early days they did a lot of what design agencies do… Brand work, type work, all of the wonderful challenges in between.When they looked honestly at what they loved most, what was working commercially, and what they were genuinely best at, that they made the decision to commit fully to type.
“We realised type is the thing we’re most passionate about: how about we lean into that? Since that day, it’s just flown.”
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Craft at serious scale
The scale of what Studio Drama produces can’t be underestimated…
Last week, Heinz reported it sells over 650 million bottles of ketchup every year.
Globally, Snickers hits $1 billion in sales each year.
Mozilla Firefox has 155 million monthly users worldwide.
What do these mega brands have in common? They know the value of being recognised for their words alone. From a branding POV, the drama is justified.
We’ve all seen a bento box with a column for typography. Quite simply, that doesn’t do it justice. For a while, typography has been viewed as important (of course), but rarely the thing that got the most attention or budget. That’s changing.
Type, is now one of the most powerful tools in the toolkit. It’s seen more than a logo. It covers more applications than a colour palette. And unlike a typeface licensed from a retail foundry (where your competitor might be using the same font) a custom typeface belongs entirely to the brand that commissioned it.
“If the brand can be recognised by the words alone, we’ve done an amazing job.”
Will also corrected a myth that custom type is expensive and slow. It doesn’t have to be. Scope it correctly and it becomes not only achievable, but actually the most impactful investment a brand can make in its own distinctiveness.
Two non-negotiables
So what does creative excellence mean at Studio Drama? Quite simply, craft and passion.
Craft, because when you do one thing, the scrutiny on that one thing is absolute.
And passion, because, according to Chris and Will, most great type designers are self-taught. Many are brand designers by day and type designers by night. When Studio Drama hire, they’re looking for people who came to type through love.
The highs and lows
You know that feeling when a project you’ve worked on launches, and you see your work out in the world? It makes it all worthwhile. Imagine having that feeling when you walk into any grocery store. And the moment, that many in design never achieve? Chris’s mum actually knows what he actually does. Magic.
Will’s earliest memory of failure is something we can laugh about now: misspelling the word “fashion” on the cover of a fashion course publication, only discovering after 3,000 copies had been printed. Stickers were issued. Lessons were learned: the detail is everything when your medium is letterforms. “What we do is so detail driven – we need to be in the details every single day.”
Chris’s version of failure is not as riddled with print costs: working to a standard you can never quite reach, under a creative who holds the bar so high it always feels just out of your reach. That, he says, created a monster in him.
“Being pushed to be better. That's definitely something that I've grown into.”
— Chris Nott
Co-founder, Studio Drama
What's next?
Watch this space. Studio Drama is preparing to launch their first retail typeface offering! Most foundries launch retail first and add custom later, so this is another bold move for them, and for the typography landscape. The goal? To make custom type accessible to brands who couldn’t previously afford it or weren’t in the right place to commission it.
This interview is the finale of Design Next season three, where we focus on Creative Excellence. We’ll be back in September, again showcasing voices from the heart of the global creative community. We discover the topics, challenges, and innovations shaping the design landscape today, and what’s coming next.
