The Ashgrove identity went live in April last year — four hundred acres of dairy and arable outside Wells, with three converted barns and the yard open two days a week. We signed it off indoors, on a screen and on two A1 proofs pinned above a radiator, on a bright Tuesday in March. The site is a slope, a gravel yard, and a beech hedge that turns the colour of wet cardboard by November. None of that exists in a warm room.

The roadside sign was wrong

We set the wordmark at 140mm cap height on a 2.4-metre board and approved it from six feet away. Traffic coming down off the A37 gets about four seconds. The colour was the second mistake: an olive we had spent a fortnight defending in the studio, sitting at nearly the same value as the hedge behind it, gone entirely in grey light from October to March. The board came down in January.

The cheap end of the system held up best. Stencilled crate marks, the uncoated labels on the milk, the numbers chalked on the trestle by the gate — all still working, all replaceable for under twenty pounds. Replacing the road sign cost £2,600, which we absorbed, and which we should not have caused. We would proof the next one filthy, in November, at fifty miles an hour.