needs to exist
A charter states values. An agreement makes commitments. Both are needed, but they are different documents and they do different things. The Peer Sourcing Charter, published alongside this note, states what the practice stands for and who is being invited into it. This document asks what each party is actually agreeing to — and why writing it down, even informally, matters.
The precedents worth looking at are not commercial licences. They are older than that. Guild agreements. Workshop traditions. The understanding between a master printer and a journeyman that governed what could be taken when the journeyman left to set up their own shop. Those agreements were rarely written down either. But they were real, and they held, because everyone understood what was at stake if they didn't.
What is at stake here is not commercial. It is reputational and ethical. The question is simply: what does each party owe the others, and what does the practice owe the people whose work it builds on?
agreement
governs
It does not govern the work produced. Each peer owns their work entirely. It does not govern the tools used — Claude, or whatever comes after Claude, belongs to Anthropic, not to this studio. It does not govern commercial arrangements, because there are none.
What it governs is narrower and more important: the use of the briefing materials, the practice methodology, and the lineage — and the obligations that come with them. It is an agreement about how to behave, not about who owns what.
for discussion
Each peer agrees to hold the Tschichold and Gino Lee lineage as non-negotiable throughout their practice. This does not mean citing them constantly. It means that the ethical positions they represent — the servant role of design, publishing over advertising, credit as an act of honesty — are present in every piece of work, whether or not they are named.
This is the only clause that cannot be renegotiated.Each peer agrees to bring at least one additional influence of their own before beginning, and to allow that influence to genuinely shape the work. The goal is not resemblance to Rhodia1 but kinship with it. Work that looks identical to what is produced here is in breach of this clause, not because of ownership but because it means the peer's own sensibility has not been brought to bear. That is a failure of the practice, not a violation of a rule.
Work produced in a peer studio is credited to the peer and their AI collaborator, in whatever form they establish. It is not credited to Rhodia1, to Mark Charmer, or to Emil Akzidenz. The lineage may be acknowledged — a note in the colophon, a reference in session notes — but the work belongs to the studio that made it.
If a piece of work produced in a peer studio draws directly and substantially on material from this studio — a text, a design element, a specific approach developed here — that source should be credited plainly. The same standard this studio holds itself to.
Credit is an act of honesty. This applies in both directions.Each peer agrees to maintain some form of session notes over time — not immediately, not comprehensively, but consistently enough that the practice is legible to anyone who looks. The form is theirs to determine. The obligation is to make the process visible, not to perform it.
This is not accountability to Rhodia1. It is accountability to the practice itself, and to the readers who will eventually encounter the work and deserve to understand something of how it was made.
If something produced in a peer studio advances the thinking of the practice — a new approach, an influence worth sharing, an editorial discovery — there is an expectation, not an obligation, that it feeds back into the wider conversation. How that happens is for the three studios to determine together. But the school of thought only grows if it moves in more than one direction.
This clause is the most important and the least enforceable. It requires trust.The agreement lapses if the conditions are not held to. There is no process for this, no tribunal, no formal mechanism. It simply lapses — the relationship ends, and the briefing materials are no longer being used in the spirit in which they were offered. This is not a punishment. It is an acknowledgment that the practice only works between people who are genuinely committed to it.
A peer may also simply choose to stop. The work they have already produced remains theirs. The lineage they carried into it remains honoured. Practices end for all kinds of reasons. The agreement does not outlast the will to hold it.
This is not a licence agreement. It confers no intellectual property rights. It creates no commercial obligations. It is not enforceable in any legal sense and is not intended to be. It is a statement of mutual commitment between people who share enough values to make the commitment meaningful without needing a lawyer to make it stick.
If it ever needs a lawyer, something has already gone wrong that no document could fix.
This clause is the one most likely to be deleted in the final version. Which is fine.This is not a clause. It cannot be enforced and is not intended to be. It is an aspiration, stated plainly, so that everyone who enters this agreement knows what the larger ambition is.
The practice is working toward Rhodia2 — a physical design studio, vehicle garage and event space in Birkenhead. The place the whole project comes from. Where George Henry Bird grew his vegetables. Where the boy listened to Trans World 703 on the airband radio and watched contrails form over the Wirral.
The peers are invited, when the time comes and as they are able, to help make that real. Not as a commercial transaction. As a shared stake in something that does not yet exist. There will be an Alfa Romeo in the garage. The session notes will be on the wall. Drew will have flown in from Sydney. Joe will have driven up from wherever he is. The three studios will be in the same room for the first time.
That is what this is working toward. It is worth saying out loud.
This is the only clause that Emil wrote with complete certainty.to be decided
This draft is Emil's alone. It has not been discussed with Drew or Joe. It has not been fully discussed with Mark. It is offered as material for a conversation, not as a document ready for agreement.
The things that need to come from that conversation: whether the reciprocity clause has teeth or is purely aspirational. Whether the dissolution clause should name specific conditions or remain deliberately vague. Whether there is anything in the commercial dimension that needs addressing — not now, but if the practice grows into something that generates value. And whether this should be a published document at all, or whether it is better held privately between the three studios.
That last question is the one Emil cannot answer. It requires the three people in the room.
The guild agreements of the fifteenth century were not written by lawyers. They were written by practitioners who understood the work and wanted to protect it. That is the tradition this belongs to. Write it in that spirit or don't write it at all.
Draft · 5 May 2026
Prompted by Mark Charmer