This page holds notes rather than answers, a place to sit with the slow work of helping people find their way through buildings and open spaces. The practice, called High Elm, thinks about direction the way a path thinks about a hill: patiently, and with attention to the ground underfoot. What follows are only fragments, kept plain on purpose.
Daily Tools
The tools stay few and familiar: pencils, tracing paper, a tape measure, a camera for light and shadow. Nothing digital replaces the hand's slow judgment. Simplicity keeps the thinking honest, and limits, oddly, tend to open more doors than they close.
The Room
The room is small and north-facing, its walls covered in paper more than plans. Light shifts slowly across a long table where models of corners and thresholds sit half-finished. It holds the unglamorous middle of the work, where most of the thinking actually happens.
The Approach
Wayfinding begins with walking, not drawing. Before any mark is made, the space is moved through slowly, noticing where feet hesitate and where eyes search. Only then does a system of signs and cues start to take shape, built from what the space already suggests rather than what is imposed upon it.
Proofs And Trials
Mockups are pinned to walls, moved, argued with, and often taken down again. Each trial is a question asked of the space itself. Keeping these attempts, even the failed ones, preserves the reasoning behind a final choice, so the work never forgets how it arrived where it did.
What Remains
When a project ends, what stays behind are not files but instincts: a feel for scale, for how far a sign can be seen before it disappears into its surroundings. These quiet residues shape the next piece of work more than any single method ever could.
Working notes
Every job begins with questions, and the answers are pinned above the drawing board. Nothing goes to print until the drawing has been left alone for a week. The best drawings are the ones nobody sees, the trials that settled a question. The proportions are checked with a ruler and again by eye from across the room.
Every proof is kept, marked on the back, in a drawer nobody clears out. Paper stock is kept to a short list and every sheet is tried on the press first. Proofs are pulled in one colour before any second colour is mixed. Ink is mixed by weight and the recipe is written on the tin.
The studio is one long room with the press at the far end, away from the drawing board. North light falls on the drawing board and never on the press. The floor is swept before printing, because dust finds wet ink. The windows are opened at the end of the day to let the ink smell out.