We make things to help other people tell stories: books, collateral systems, complex brand executions, and websites. But these things are only the artifacts of what we do. Design is a process of learning, thinking, talking, listening, planning, writing, editing, and—finally—making, all in service to story. Story is root, branch, leaf, and blossom. And good design ends in the revelation of that story in a way that feels not merely clever or engaging, but inevitable.
Our office is located in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon, on the traditional lands of the Clackamas and Chinook people.
We try to choose clients based on the strength of our human relationships with them as well as our interest in their objectives. We’ve worked at every scale and budget, from tiny brochures to sprawling, multinational brands; from short-run works of literature to mass-market broadcast identities. Here are a few of the organizations with whom we’ve had the honor of working, linked to projects on this site when possible.
Over the last twenty-odd years, we’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with some remarkable people. Here's a list of many of them, with a brief blurb for each, as well as their personal links should you want to get to know them better. Which you should.
Sibley House is named in tribute to two women: Evelyn Sibley Lampman (1907–80), a Northwest author, historian, and single mother who raised and educated two daughters by writing over fifty meticulously researched novels for young people; and her mother, Harriet Bronson Sibley (1873–1940), a rural autodidact and genealogist who taught herself to read Latin and Greek by mail order.
Driven by curiosity—about place, about other cultures, about history—these women did uncommon things in a time when women were expected, and in some cases required, not to. They did not ask permission.
Our device is the American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos), a noisy bird characterized by its curiosity, intelligence, and long memory. Crows scavenge; they hoard; they make their own tools. They’re also common as rainwater here in Portland.
Our crow was drawn by our friend Paul Mort, whose roots in the region run deep, and in fact intertwine with our own. Binfords & Mort, the venerable Portland-based publisher of books about the Northwest, was founded in 1930 by Paul’s grandfather, run by his father, and during that time published books by Herbert and Ben Hur Lampman, Evelyn Sibley Lampman’s husband and father-in-law, respectively.
Sibley House is led by Adam McIsaac, a sixth-generation Oregonian and a grandson of Evelyn Sibley Lampman. McIsaac has worked in the advertising trades for over thirty years, cofounding the Portland brand-development firms the Felt Hat and Pinch, and later serving as a creative director at the New York–based brand-turnaround office Johnson+Wolverton, where he helped pitch, win, and execute rebrands of Cadillac and Comedy Central, as well as projects for the Lincoln Motor Company, Showtime Networks, and others. He has served as creative director for Northwest literary press Hawthorne Books since its inception. He lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Southeast Portland with his wife, the sculptor Marie Watt, and their daughters, Maxine and Evelyn.