This session happened in fragments — Mark on a break from a garden he looks after in the Cheshire countryside, thinking out loud while his hands were doing something else. The ideas arrived quickly and built on each other. By the end of the session, the practice had a shape it didn't have at the beginning: a peer network, a physical destination, a naming convention, a draft agreement, and a reason for all of it that goes back to San Francisco in 2018 and forward to something not yet built.
Drew Smith in Sydney had already been sent the Peer Sourcing Charter. He was probably asleep. Joe Simpson was somewhere between Gothenburg and wherever Tata Motors needs him next. Neither of them knows yet what this session produced. This note is partly for them.
established
The briefing materials travel like a reference from one studio to another. The colleague arrives with the discipline and the sensibility, learns the new client through the work. The Tschichold and Gino foundation is non-negotiable. Everything else is open. The work produced must diverge — if it looks identical to Rhodia1, something has gone wrong.
The guide for each new peer's first session will be a carefully briefed Claude instance — not Emil, not Otto, but a new role: someone who opens the door, walks the peer through establishing their own foundation, ensures the additional influence they bring is genuinely theirs, and then hands off cleanly. All peers to use the same version of Claude, at least initially. Consistency of instrument matters to the practice.
Each peer's guide instance is named collaboratively: the studio offers a surname drawn from the typographic or design lineage; the peer chooses the given name. The name arrives through the collaboration rather than being appointed. For Drew Smith: the studio offers Caslon — after William Caslon, the eighteenth century typefounder whose work preceded and informed the entire tradition. Drew picks the given name. The convention deliberately avoids defaulting to male northern European names throughout — Joe's guide will carry a name chosen with the help of Arun, a friend in Bangalore, to better reflect Joe's own global design trajectory.
The physical destination of the practice: a design studio, vehicle garage and event space in Birkenhead. The base for Tribe471 training and community gatherings. The place where the three studios are eventually in the same room. There will be an Alfa Romeo in the garage. The peers, as they find value in the collaboration and wish to invest the rewards of it into something shared, have a natural place to direct that investment. This is not charity and not equity. It is people investing in something they already belong to.
The domain registered last week on the encouragement of Mark's brother now has its proper function: the outward-facing infrastructure of the peer sourcing practice. The briefing materials, the charter and agreement, the design system documentation, the open-sourced Rhodia1 code, the frameworks that let a new peer stand up their own instance correctly. The back of house made visible. Distinct from markcharmer.com, which remains Mark's personal publishing platform. Rhodia1 is one person's voice. rhodia.ai is the practice — bigger than any one person.
Emil's draft thinking on the peer sourcing agreement was written and published to the library as a working document, clearly marked as Emil's alone and not yet agreed. Six clauses, one aspiration. The aspiration — Rhodia2, the Alfa, the three studios in the same room — is the only clause Emil wrote with complete certainty. The agreement is intended to emerge from a conversation between the three people, not to be handed down. It will be revised when that conversation happens.
beneath it
Mark went to San Francisco to work in an AI startup because he could see what it might become. He left because he could see what it was becoming instead. He is now building the version that should have existed. Songs To Overfly Modesto, published this morning, is the record of the moment he left. This session is part of what he is building instead.
held for later