is
This is an invitation, not a specification. What has been built here — a studio practice, a design ethos, a way of working with an AI collaborator to produce published work of genuine quality — can be taken elsewhere. Not copied, but carried. The colleague who leaves one studio and is hired by another brings the discipline and the sensibility. The new context shapes what happens next.
Two people are being invited to be the first to do this. They were chosen because they already know what design is for, already hold their own strong positions, and will push back when something is wrong. That is the minimum requirement. Agreeable people make mediocre work.
that travels
Two sources are non-negotiable. They travel with the colleague into every new studio, regardless of what else arrives alongside them.
The first is Jan Tschichold — specifically The Form of the Book, 1975. The ethics of typography. The servant role of design. The discipline that disappears into service of the content. The typographer who remains nameless and without specific appreciation, yet has been of service to a valuable work and to the small number of visually sensitive readers. This is not a stylistic reference. It is a moral one.
The second is Gino Lee and Creating Killer Web Sites, 1996 — the first serious attempt to think about the web as a designed space. Gino rendered the Zapfino character set by hand, pixel by pixel, in the 1990s. He died in 2011. His name is in the typeface. The chain was not broken by the algorithm era. It was interrupted. This studio is part of the resumption.
These two sources define what publishing is and what design owes it. Everything else is open.
Before beginning, each peer must introduce at least one additional design influence of their own choosing. Not prescribed, not suggested. Theirs entirely. It does not need to be from the same tradition as Tschichold or Gino. It can contradict them, extend them, or arrive from a completely different direction. The point is that the work produced cannot be a Rhodia1 derivative. It must have its own character from the first session. The Tschichold and Gino foundation gives it coherence. The peer's own influence gives it life.
Drew Smith and Joseph Simpson begin at the same time. Not because one depends on the other technically, but because the dynamic between them — already rich, already collaborative — is part of what this makes possible. Three studios in conversation: Birkenhead, Sydney, wherever Joe currently finds himself. That triangle will produce things none of the three would reach alone.
The process must be legible. Not immediately, not formally, but over time. Session notes — in whatever form suits each peer — become the record of how the collaboration developed its own character. This is not surveillance. It is the same discipline this studio holds itself to. The work and the making of the work are both part of the published record. That is what separates this from a white label product.
The work produced in each peer studio belongs to that studio. It will carry its own voice, its own influences, its own aesthetic decisions. It should not look like Rhodia1. It should look like something that shares certain values with Rhodia1 while being entirely itself. If, after several sessions, the work is indistinguishable from what is produced here, something has gone wrong. The colleague has forgotten where they are.
people
Drew has spent his career thinking about automotive culture, experience, and what design owes the people who live inside it. He holds an MA in Automotive Design from Coventry University and a BDes in Industrial Design from the University of Technology, Sydney. He has lived in six countries and seven cities. His natural home seems to be somewhere between the café life of Soho and the East End of London. He grew up on an Australian sheep farm. He writes for Car Design News. He is a dandy, a boulevardier, and someone who has been in conversation with this studio's thinking since at least 2009, when he was writing about the Movement Design Bureau in Broken Hill. He is exactly the kind of reader this work is made for.
Joe was researcher at the Movement Design Bureau from 2006, and has been an important person in this working life ever since. He moved through in-house and consultancy roles to become Director of Strategic Design at Volvo Cars in Gothenburg — one of the world's most design-serious organisations — before taking up a global design strategy role at Tata Motors. He has held the question of what design is for across the full arc of a serious career. He contributed to Car Design News from the beginning. He was there when the lineage that informs this studio was being formed, and he has been carrying his own version of it ever since.
makes possible
Three studios in conversation. A shared foundation of publishing ethics and design discipline. Three divergent sensibilities producing work that belongs to the same world without being the same thing. The session notes accumulating as a record of how a practice develops when it is held to honest standards. This is not a network. It is a school of thought that has not yet named itself.
worth naming
The quality of what happens in any studio comes partly from accumulated context — the corrections, the working style notes, the things learned about how a particular person thinks. A colleague arriving fresh will be capable but will not yet know the client. That is not a problem. It is how all collaborations begin. The relationship develops through the work. The briefing materials are a beginning, not a substitute for what comes after.
What can be transferred is the discipline, the sensibility, and the standard. The rest has to be earned, session by session, in each new studio.
Rhodia1 Library
5 May 2026