Five years ago, I designed a simple framework for celebrating places through colour. Six swatches, one story each, laid out the same way every time. I could not have told you then that this same, unchanged format would end up on a railway underpass in Leamington Spa, a shopping centre wall in Redditch, and a print hanging in someone's hallway in a city I'd never even visited yet.
What I did know, even at the start, was that the format itself had to stay still. Everything else was allowed to change. The colours, the stories, the places. The design underneath it never could.
Why rigid beats flexible
There's a temptation in design work to keep tweaking. A new town comes along, and it would be easy to think this one needs a slightly different layout, a bolder font, something to mark it out as special. I've resisted that every single time, and it's been one of the harder disciplines to hold onto.
The reason is simple. If the format changes from town to town, nobody ever learns to recognise it. A Colour Palette Company design needs to be identifiable at a glance, whether someone's looking at a mug on a kitchen shelf, a print in a gallery, or a panel on a station wall three hundred miles from where they first saw one. That recognition only works if the underlying structure never moves. Consistency is what turns a nice idea into an actual, trusted design language, and that only happens with real repetition, applied without exception, over years rather than months.
It's also, frankly, harder than it sounds. Every new town brings its own temptation to do something different, because every town feels special when you're in the middle of researching it. Holding the line on the format, again and again, while still making sure each town's own personality comes through in its colours and its stories, has genuinely been one of the more demanding parts of running this properly.
The header, top left
If you've ever looked closely at one of our designs, you'll have noticed the header always sits in the same place, top left, every single time. That's not an accident, and it's not just decoration either. I think of it as the page headline, the single most important piece of the whole format.
A reader's eye goes there first, before the colours, before anything else. It tells you immediately what you're looking at, which town, which story. Everything else in the design exists to support that one fixed point. If I ever let that header move, or resize it, or treat it as flexible depending on the layout, the whole format would start to lose the thing that makes it recognisable in the first place. It's a small detail, but it's doing more work than almost anything else on the page.
Four UK IP registrations, and why that matters to me
I'm genuinely proud that the Colour Palette concept now holds four UK IP design registrations, each one built around the same underlying principles I set out five years ago. It's not something I talk about often, but it matters to me for a reason beyond the legal protection itself.
Registering a design properly means committing to it. It means saying, this is the format, this is how it works, and I'm prepared to stand behind that consistently rather than reinventing it every time a new opportunity comes along. That discipline is exactly what's allowed the format to survive five years of new towns, new products, and new public art projects without ever losing what made the first palette recognisable in the first place.
Interpretation panels, and the public art difference
Large format public art projects have added one more piece to the format that doesn't always appear on a mug or a print. Wherever we can, we build in an interpretation panel alongside the finished artwork, a short piece of text explaining what each local reference actually means.
This has become one of the most important parts of the public art concept, and it came directly out of watching how people actually interact with the finished pieces. A colour on a wall is striking on its own, but a passerby who doesn't already know the story behind it can walk past without ever understanding why that particular shade is there. The interpretation panel closes that gap. It turns a nice piece of colour into something a resident can point to and properly explain to a visitor, a genuine piece of local knowledge rather than decoration.
It's a good example of the wider principle running through all of this. The format stays fixed. But the way I apply it keeps growing, learning from every town, every installation, every conversation with the people who actually live with the finished piece.
Five years in
Looking back, the discipline of keeping this format so rigid has been harder than designing something new every time would have been. It would genuinely be easier, in a lot of ways, to let each project bend the rules slightly. But five years on, I think that discipline is exactly why the format means something now. People recognise it. Councils ask for it by name. And every new town that joins the collection adds to something that already has real weight behind it, rather than starting again from nothing.
The design never changes. That's rather the point.