Monolith had eleven years of catalogue, four hundred thousand monthly listeners, and a website that looked like a plugin store. The brief was not a redesign. It was: make the label look like the records sound.

Week 1–3: strip it back

We archived every asset and started from the only three things nobody disputed — the logotype, the catalogue numbering, and the sleeve grid. Everything else was negotiable, which is a much faster place to start than everything is sacred.

Week 4–7: one system, not one page

Sleeve art changes every release, so the identity had to survive any image dropped into it. That meant a type scale loud enough to hold its own, hard black rules instead of soft containers, and exactly two accent colours per season.

Week 8–11: the pipeline

The part nobody puts in a case study: a release template the label fills in themselves. Artwork, tracklist, credits, pre-save link. Fifteen minutes per record, no designer in the loop.

What we would do again

No status meetings. A shared board, a Friday build, and the rule that anything undecided by Friday ships as the simpler option.

Result: 2.4× pre-saves on the first three releases and a team that stopped emailing us to change a headline.