The Studio, Oklahoma CityA small crew · Everyone here builds
Left to sharpen it. Came home to build it.
We're a small build studio in Oklahoma City. We went out to learn the craft at places with better logos than ours, looked around at what the wider world was charging for, and came back to build it for the owners who kept getting overcharged for it.
Morgy & Bristol, the founders
01. The Run
The territory opened at high noon.
On April 22nd, 1889, fifty thousand people lined up on the Oklahoma border and waited for a gunshot. At noon they ran. Whoever got to a piece of ground first and drove a stake into it owned it.
The internet runs the same way, and everyone knows it. What nobody says out loud is that most of the ground worth having is being claimed by businesses that are worse than yours. They just showed up first and looked credible when they did.
That's the whole job. Get you there first, and make sure that what people find when they arrive is worth the trip. We stayed to learn the craft in California and the wider world. We came home for the onion burgers and the ground we know.
And the line? On the east side of the run it was the Indian Meridian, the surveyor's line every claim in the territory was measured from. The runners stood on the same line their ground would be measured by. Starting line and survey line, one line. The foot of every page here says Built on the line. Show up first, and measure true.
02. The CreedFour rules we don't move on
01. The price
An honest amount.
Software should earn its keep in the first quarter. If we can't show you where the money comes from, we haven't finished thinking.
02. The reach
In the small shop's hands.
The tools that let a hundred-location group out-market you aren't magic. They're just expensive. We're making them not be.
03. The work
Done when it's right.
Heads down, hand to the plow. We'd rather tell you a date is moving than hand you something we'd be embarrassed by in a year.
04. The grit
Same build, either way.
The shop down the road gets the same team as the client across the map. There is no B-squad here; there's barely an A-squad.
03. How it goes
No discovery theater. We survey, we stake, we build.
Week 01
Survey
Three days in where your money goes and where your customers come from. You get the map at the end whether or not you hire us.
Week 02 to 03
Stake
One direction, priced and dated. Not three mockups where two exist to make the third look good.
Week 04+
Build
Shipping every Friday to a private preview link, with the numbers moving where you can watch them.
04. The CrewThe studio is the byline
Build & strategyBrand, web, custom software, and Meridian, and the conversation where we tell you what we'd change first.OKC
Operations & rootsThe ledger, the schedule, and the family-and-community side that keeps the studio pointed home.OKC
LabsIn-house experiments that keep the tools sharp, built between client work.In the shop
From the workbenchFree download
We cut a font from the archive.
Land Run Caption: 45 letters and marks traced from one archivist's pen on 13 Library of Congress glass plate negatives, two of them captioned Land Rush, Okl. and Land Office, Okl. Free under the SIL Open Font License, story and sources included.
