How do you make post-production visible without breaking the illusion? When London studio Microdot needed a brand identity, Standard Projects found cinema’s own language hiding in plain sight.
Post-production occupies a peculiar position in the creative economy. When it’s done well, nobody notices. The colour grade that makes morning light feel nostalgic? The VFX cleanup that erases a lighting rig? The sound design that makes silence feel pregnant with meaning? All of it exists to be invisible. The moment you see the work, the spell breaks.
So when London studio Microdot needed a new identity, they handed Standard Projects—a brand, experience, and technology studio based in Melbourne—an interesting problem. How do you make fundamentally invisible work feel visible and compelling, without undermining the very craft you’re trying to celebrate?
To an extent, Microdot’s credentials suggest they don’t need much help getting noticed. Since launching in 2025, their work has appeared at Sundance and Stockholm film festivals, streamed on Netflix, and featured in campaigns for Maison Margiela, Nothing and Nike. Founders Adam Clarke, Mikey Smith and Zdravko Stoitchkov describe themselves as equal parts cinephiles, avant-garde artists and technical experts; a combination that allows them to push reality’s boundaries while maintaining the pixel-perfect precision that keeps the illusion intact.
But credentials only get you so far. In a field where the finished work rarely reveals who touched it and how, post-production studios need identity systems that can hold their own across wildly different contexts. One week you’re next to an A24 film, the next you’re in a meeting with a tech brand’s marketing team. Your identity needs to feel at home in both conversations, without trying to match either aesthetic.
The solution
Standard Projects’ solution was to stop looking at what post-production creates and start examining the tools and artefacts of creation itself. And so the new identity draws exclusively from cinema’s technical language: edge codes, timecodes, film grain, scrubbers, slitscans. These elements aren’t decorative additions but functional components of the brand system. Edge codes work typographically and structurally. Scrubber interactions on the website borrow mechanics from the editing software Microdot uses daily.
This matters because it solves the visibility problem at a conceptual level. Most people never see edge codes or understand what a slitscan is, yet they recognise these elements as authentic to the world of filmmaking. You feel it even if you can’t articulate what you’re looking at. The brand makes the micro details of post-production visible without requiring technical literacy from the audience.
The positioning line
The central concept behind the identity is reflected in the phrase “Rendering Imagination”. This is both literal (rendering is the final technical step where everything comes together) and aspirational (suggesting creative ambition beyond pure technical execution). More importantly, it reframes what could be dry technical work as something closer to magic.
What truly makes the system sing, though, is restraint. Standard Projects’ creative director, Dan Flynn, and his team could have gone maximalist with the cinematic references, but they understood that discipline enables expression, rather than opposing it.
The entire identity uses Akzidenz Grotesk. The palette stays largely monochromatic. Cinematic elements weave through rather than dominate. This allows the identity to recede when necessary, letting Microdot’s work take centre stage, while remaining unmistakably theirs when viewed in isolation.
The website demonstrates this philosophy in practice. As you scroll through the homepage, images develop and resolve like negatives in a darkroom; slightly psychedelic, quietly subversive, nodding to Microdot’s experimental side without demanding attention. Case studies play out cinematically. Dynamic titling shifts and breathes. Micro-interactions reward close observation without penalising casual scrolling.
None of this happens by accident. The client team weren’t passive recipients but active collaborators with strong instincts and deep technical knowledge. They’d reference obscure film techniques or experimental video art, sending the project in directions Standard Projects wouldn’t have found on its own. Even the studio name informed the work; Microdot references both Cold War spy microfilm and a type of LSD, a duality that resonates with the strategic and visual approach.
The collaborative intensity shows in the final system. This isn’t just a brand about post-production; it’s a brand made by people who live in that world. You can sense it in how the references integrate rather than decorate, how the technical elements function structurally rather than superficially.
Key takeaway
For designers and studios facing similar challenges (how to represent craft-based work without being either boring or bombastic), the Microdot identity offers a useful model.
Find the language that already exists in your client’s world. Understand why those elements exist and let that inform how they function in your system. Trust that the audience will feel the authenticity even if they can’t explain it. And perhaps most importantly, know when to step back and let the work speak for itself.
Post-production will always be fundamentally invisible. But Standard Projects proved that the tools and language of creation can be visible, expressive and distinctly ownable… without breaking the illusion that makes the work powerful in the first place.
