Tessea McCrary
An interior design studio taken from business plan to brand to a site that turns referrals into work.
Summary
Overview
Tessea McCrary is a custom interior design studio in Baltimore. The work started before there was a brand to draw. I consulted on the business first. The identity, the site, and the advertising were built on top of it. Tessea grew up in Egypt, Senegal, and Liberia, and the studio takes its range from that.
Challenge
Interior design sells on taste, before anyone reads a proposal. The brand had to show it at a glance. It had to hold on a phone and on a magazine page. It had to leave room for a portfolio still being built.
Process
The studio itself, before a single mark was drawn.
Sketches that became the TM, and the identity that grew out of it.
Type and color chosen to sit quietly beside a photograph of a room.
A Squarespace build a new visitor can read in one pass.
Magazine advertising, at the size a page allows.
The Rename and the Squarespace Account
Most identity projects begin with a logo brief. This one began with the business. The studio traded under an earlier name. The first job was ownership rather than brand. The site, the domain, and the accounts around them moved under her own name in February 2024. One person could then reach every part of the thing her name was about to go on.
The offer, the pricing, and the path from first inquiry to proposal were settled in the same stretch. Only then was there a brand to design.
The TM Monogram
The monogram went through several rounds before the interlocking TM settled. A T and an M share one stem inside a rounded capsule. It had to hold at the size a site header gives it, and at the size a magazine footer gives it. The wordmark is a wide serif, letterspaced enough to read as a nameplate. It sits beside photographs of finished rooms without competing with them.
One ink, and that is the whole of it. A single color survives a knockout on dark, a knockout over a photograph, and one color on the gray the site runs its copy over. That is every ground the studio prints and publishes on.
The Homepage, Portfolio First
Most first visits to an interior designer's site come from a referral text. The Squarespace build puts the portfolio first, keeps copy short, and makes the path to an inquiry obvious from every page.
The Projects Index
The projects index sits further down the home page, and it is the portfolio itself, not a route to it. Thirteen cards, two across, each carrying a room, a name, and a link that says View. No dates, no client names, no sentence explaining the project. A referral arrives already knowing what they came to look at. The grid is built to be scanned.
The names do the sorting. Woodberry, Sunset Wharf, and Heritage House are places. That is how the work gets talked about on a phone call. Three of the thirteen say Coming Soon and carry a finished room anyway. The grid stays whole. It reads as a studio with work in hand.
Inside One Project Page
Each project opens on the room and then explains it. The client brief, a gallery of the finished space, and the design objective, in that order. A referral arrives already interested and wants the reasoning.
A Quarter Page and a QR Code
A quarter page in Baltimore Magazine has about the area of a postcard. This one had seven things to fit. A finished room, the readers' poll finalist badge, both categories the studio was named in, the mark, what it does, the number, and a route to the rest of the work.
The QR code is what made it fit. One square does the work of a sentence about where to find the portfolio. What it buys is space. The room stays the largest thing on the page, and the badge sits over the window, where the photograph is quietest.
One Room and a Contact Line
The other ad in the set drops nearly everything the quarter page had to fight for. No badge, no categories, no QR code, no line listing what the studio does. A dressing room runs to all four edges. A white band at the foot carries the rest.
The two are the range the identity had to cover. On the quarter page every piece of type is paying rent and the room is what is left over. Here the room is the whole argument and the type has one job, which is to say whose it is. The mark reads at both. That is the thing a monogram is drawn small to do.
