Chapter Two — Established 2017
The 5-Phase Method.
A documented system for building brands people actually remember — not a moodboard, not a style guide, not a vibe. Sour, Slice, Sketch, System, Ship is the working method behind every identity, packaging system, and digital flagship we've shipped since 2017. It is the reason 92% of our clients come back, and the reason we still turn down 80% of the briefs that hit our inbox.
The thesis
Branding done from instinct alone is why most identities blur. A method — written down, taught, and tested across 220 brands — is what lets fourteen people ship work that holds up under scrutiny.
The portfolio pages of the design internet are full of beautiful artefacts with nothing underneath them. A handsome logo. A considered palette. A website that hums. Six months later the company rebrands again, because nobody — not the founders, not the team, not the customers — could explain what the first one meant. The problem was never the work. The problem was the absence of a method that asked the brand to be specific before it was asked to be pretty.
Sour, Slice, Sketch, System, Ship is the answer we arrived at after our first forty projects, when we noticed the briefs we kept winning shared a common shape and the briefs we kept losing shared a different one. The method is not a process document we hand to clients. It is a discipline we hold ourselves to, in the order its phases demand, on every engagement that comes through the studio door.
The five movements
Sour. Slice. Sketch. System. Ship.
Five phases, in order, every time. Each one has a single intent, a concrete deliverable, and a gate the work must pass before the next phase begins.
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01
Sour
Gather the raw material the brand will be made from.
Six weeks of interviews with founders, customers, and detractors. Competitive teardowns, category history, and a stack of artefacts the founders didn't know they had.
Deliverable — A 40–60 page strategy document only the studio and the founder will read.
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02
Slice
Cut the strategy down to a single sentence that can survive a meeting.
A workshop week where the 40-page strategy gets compressed into a positioning sentence, a voice register, and a set of three non-negotiable brand promises.
Deliverable — A one-page brand charter, signed by both founders, that lives in every kickoff deck afterward.
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03
Sketch
Make the strategy look like a brand, in three completely different directions.
Three identity directions, each rooted in the charter, each developed far enough to be argued with. We present, you react, and we narrow to one with the receipts for why.
Deliverable — A direction-pick presentation with a recorded rationale session the leadership team can rewatch.
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04
System
Build the identity into a working system the team can actually operate.
Logo, type, colour, motion, photography, packaging, web, voice — every expression developed as a system with rules, not a stack of one-off files. Two rounds of structured revision, in writing.
Deliverable — A Figma library, a 90-page guidelines PDF, and a 60-minute internal launch recording for the team that has to use it.
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05
Ship
Launch the brand in public, then measure whether it landed.
Site, packaging, and launch campaign shipped in coordinated waves. A 12-month check-in to measure brand recall, unaided awareness, and the one internal metric each founder cared about most.
Deliverable — A post-launch report with year-one benchmarks, and an open door for the second thing you want to build.
Taught at the schools that taught us
The method, under student pressure.
Sour, Slice, Sketch, System, Ship has been taught as a framework in graduate studios at three design schools, including RISD. The two notes below are from faculty who have run it as a semester exercise — and watched it hold up when the brief is impossible and the deadline is six weeks.
“I have run Lemoon & Hood's five-phase method as the spine of my graduate identity studio for three cohorts now. What I keep noticing is how well it survives bad briefs. The phases force students to answer the strategy question before they reach for the type tool — and the ones who obey the order ship work that actually has a thesis in it.”
Prof. Ada Wexler
Faculty, Graduate Graphic Design, Rhode Island School of Design
Course — GD 502: Identity Systems
“What I borrow from the method in my packaging studio is the discipline of the phases — particularly Slice, which is the one students always want to skip. By the time they defend a final project built on the framework, the work reads as if a senior team had made it, not a second-year studio of fifteen. That is not a small thing.”
Prof. Marcus Oduya
Visiting Critic, Packaging Design, Rhode Island School of Design
Course — PKG 314: Brand & Package
Origin
The pattern that survived 220 brands.
Between 2017 and 2020, the studio ran thirty-eight engagements using what we now charitably call an instinct-based process. Mara and Theo met weekly to compare notes. The projects that worked all shared a similar shape: a long, slightly uncomfortable intake; a ruthless compression step; a presentation of three directions rather than one; an obsessive systems phase; and a launch that included measurement, not just a press release.
The projects that didn't work skipped at least one of those steps. Most often, they skipped Slice. We let the strategy stay a document. The identity then drifted toward whatever the founders most recently saw on a competitor's site, and the launch felt hollow because the system had nothing to be a system of.
By project forty-one, the five phases had a name and a notebook. By project eighty, they had a deck we showed every new prospect. By the time we crossed two hundred brands, the method had survived enough rebrand cycles, founder turnovers, and category pivots to feel earned rather than designed. What you see on this page is that system — unchanged in shape since 2021, refined in language every year since.
Before you book a call
Questions the studio gets every week from founders evaluating the method.
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How long does an engagement actually take?
The average engagement is eleven weeks end-to-end, from the Sour kickoff through the Ship launch. Engagements can run as short as eight weeks for a focused identity sprint and as long as twenty weeks when packaging and a digital flagship are built in parallel. We do not promise fixed timelines until we have read the brief; every project is scoped against the work it actually contains.
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Who on the studio team will we work with day-to-day?
One of the two founders leads every engagement. You will also have a senior strategist and a senior designer assigned for the full run, plus a writer during the System phase. There is no account manager. There is no hand-off to a junior team after the sale. The people on the kickoff call are the people doing the work.
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What happens after Ship?
We run a twelve-month check-in to measure brand recall, unaided awareness, and one internal metric each founder cares about most. After that, about 92% of our clients retain us for a second engagement — usually a product launch, a sub-brand, or a packaging extension. The method is built so the system keeps paying for itself long after the studio has left the building.
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What kind of brief will the studio turn down?
Roughly four out of five. We decline briefs that want a logo by next Friday, briefs that arrive without a written strategy document already in hand, briefs where the only decision-maker is an agency of record, and briefs whose budget sits below the minimum needed to run Sour properly. None of these are bad projects; they are simply not the work this method is built for. The introduction call is the right place to find out which side of that line you sit on.
If your brief has a sharp point of view, a real budget, and the patience to let a brand be developed rather than decorated — the method is ready.
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