Wilfred Gweth Portfolio, Vol. 04

Design.

Preparing case studies 000

Independent designer & art director, Nairobi

Booking selectively for Q1 2027

Visual Design & Direction

Fourteen years building brand systems, editorial platforms and interfaces for people who care about the difference between fine and finished.

Brand Systems Editorial Art Direction Interface Type Design Motion

(01) Approach

I do not decorate. I build the underlying system first: the grid, the type scale, the motion grammar. Then the surface falls out of it. Good design should feel inevitable, like it could not have been any other way.

(02) Services

  • 01

    Brand Identity Systems

    Naming · Marks · Guidelines
  • 02

    Editorial & Publishing

    Grids · Type scales · Layout
  • 03

    Product & Interface

    Design systems · Tokens · Prototypes
  • 04

    Motion & Film

    Titles · Idents · Campaign
  • 05

    Art Direction

    Photography · Styling · Rollout

(03) Selected Work

01 / 05

Five
projects
that mattered

A cross-section of the last three years. Keep scrolling and the page moves sideways from here.

Horizontal
Solstice identity system
01

Solstice

Kahawa Collective · Brand Identity · 2025

Field Notes editorial system
02

Field Notes

Aperture Press · Editorial System · 2025

Longform product design
03

Longform

Ledger · Product Design · 2024

Tide motion and film work
04

Tide

Bahari Studio · Motion & Film · 2024

Monolith art direction
05

Monolith

Form Gallery · Art Direction · 2023

0

Years practising

0

Shipped projects

0

Countries served

0

Awards & mentions

Fourteen years, condensed

Everything is a system
waiting to be found.

(04) Craft

Every mark
is drawn,
never dropped in.

Logos are built as vectors from the first sketch. Scroll and the line draws itself; the form finds its final state.

DrawSVGPlugin draws the strokes on scrub · MorphSVGPlugin morphs triangle → square → circle

(05) Process

Four phases. No surprises,
no big reveal theatre.

01

Interrogate

Two weeks of stakeholder interviews, competitive teardown and an honest audit of what you already have. Most projects need less than they think.

Weeks 1–2

02

Build the system

Grid, type scale, colour logic and motion grammar are defined before a single layout is made. The system is the deliverable; the artefacts are evidence.

Weeks 3–6

03

Pressure-test

Applied to the ugliest real cases you have: the cramped banner, the dense table, the bad photograph. If it survives those, it survives launch.

Weeks 7–9

04

Hand over

Documented guidelines, production files, tokens and a working session with your team. You should not need me afterwards. That is the point.

Weeks 10–12

(06) Trajectory

The route so far,
drawn as you go.

  1. 2012

    First studio bench

    Junior designer at a three-person shop in Nairobi. Learned the grid the hard way, by setting 400 pages of it.

  2. 2016

    Art direction

    Moved from making artefacts to directing them. Campaign work across East Africa, first international client.

  3. 2019

    Systems, not logos

    Stopped selling identities and started selling systems. The deliverable became documentation, tokens and rules.

  4. 2022

    Independent

    Left the agency. Small roster, long engagements, no account layer between me and the people doing the work.

  5. 2026

    Now

    Four clients a year, from Nairobi. Brand systems, editorial platforms, and the interfaces that carry them.

(07) Archive

Everything else

HaloBrand · 2025
ColumnEditorial · 2025
SignalMotion · 2024
OrbitDigital · 2024
FoldBrand · 2024
MarginEditorial · 2023
CutawayDigital · 2023
Tide IIMotion · 2023
MonolithBrand · 2023
Solstice PressEditorial · 2022
RingDigital · 2022
PulseMotion · 2022

(08) Interlude

How good is your eye?

Five rounds. Stop the marker dead centre. Alignment is the whole job, so let us see how close you get.

Round 0 / 5 Score 0

Press start, then hit stop when the marker crosses the centre line.

Space or click to stop Best 0

“Wilfred handed us a system, not a logo. Two years on we are still designing inside it and it still holds.”

Ines Marchetti · Creative Director, Aperture Press
Drag me
Throw me
Inertia ✦

(09) Contact

Let us make something good

Studio

Riverside Drive
Westlands, Nairobi 00100
Kenya