Walk into either studio on a Thursday afternoon and you will find a wall covered in paper. Website pages printed in long strips, packaging nets taped into shape, wine labels at actual size. Thursday is wall day. Everything in progress goes up, and everyone in the room walks past it with a pencil.

screens flatter everything

A screen is a generous place for a design to live. It is bright, it is backlit and it forgives almost any colour. It also lets you zoom, which quietly destroys your sense of scale. We have lost count of the headlines that looked right at 50 per cent on a 27-inch monitor and wrong at arm’s length on a phone. Paper does not zoom. A 9 point caption printed at 9 point tells you the truth immediately.

Then there is distance. On a wall you can stand three metres back and see a whole website as a sequence, the way a visitor scrolls through it, rather than one screen at a time. Problems of rhythm that stay hidden in a design tool, two heavy sections in a row or a page that never pauses, become obvious from across the room.

the pencil rule

Wall day has one rule: comments are made in pencil, on the print, by hand. No sticky notes and no messages sent later. A pencil mark has to be specific because it has to sit next to the thing it is about. ‘Tighten this’, with an arrow pointing at a line of type, is more useful than a paragraph in a feedback document, and it takes four seconds to write.

A pencil mark has to sit next to the thing it is about. That alone makes the feedback better.

The prints stay up until the following Thursday, so a second round of marks can answer the first. By the end of a project the wall is a record of every decision, crossed out and redrawn. We photograph it before it comes down, and those photographs are more useful to us than any version history.

the cost, and the printer

It costs the Lisbon studio about €40 a week in toner and paper, and Copenhagen slightly more, because Mads prints in colour when he should not. We use recycled 80 gram stock for everything except final proofs. The printer in Lisbon is the one we borrowed from a neighbour in 2014, when the studio was a desk in a stairwell. It has been repaired four times. We have offered to return it twice, and both times the neighbour told us to keep it.