Process notes: what we keep when a project closes

There's a part of a studio's work that never appears in the case study: everything that was discarded to get there. The directions that died in week two, the symbol that worked on screen and failed embroidered on a cap, the entire palette we pulled because it failed contrast. That material isn't waste. It's half the learning.

For a while now we've closed every project with a short, unglamorous ritual: one afternoon, one document, three lists. These notes cover what we keep and in what shape, in case the skeleton is useful to anyone.

List one: decisions with a date

Every structural decision — typography, symbol construction, colour logic — gets written down with its date and its why, in one line. No more than one line: if the why doesn't fit, we don't understand it yet. Six months later, when the client asks “why can't it be blue?”, the answer is written and dated, not reconstructed from memory.

List two: dead ends

Discarded routes are filed with one screenshot and one sentence: what was tried, where it broke. It's the list we consult most when starting new projects. Not to reuse the pieces — they almost never transfer — but to recognise the pattern before spending another week on it.

List three: what the client said in other words

The most valuable list and the hardest to explain. Over the course of a project, clients define their brand by accident: in emails, in meetings, in how they describe their competitors. “I don't want to look like a bank” says more than three positioning workshops. We collect those sentences verbatim, uninterpreted. When direction wavers, re-reading them re-centres the project better than any moodboard.

The case study tells the tidy version. The process notes keep the true one.

— Sors, notas internas

The full document rarely runs past two pages and is never shown to the client. It isn't a deliverable: it's working memory. But it is probably the single asset that has most improved our projects in the past year — and it didn't cost a single new tool.