Duotone

An image rebuilt from exactly two colours, shadows in one, highlights in the other. Photography folded into a brand's palette.

Duotone maps an image's tones onto a two-colour axis: everything dark becomes the first colour, everything light the second, and the photograph stops being a window and becomes a surface. Its gift to identity work is uniformity, wildly different source images emerge speaking one chromatic language.

The craft is in the axis: ink and gold, in our case, keeps images unmistakably ours while the originals stay legible. Contrast must be protected, two colours too close in value turn the image to fog, and skin deserves care, faces read strangely in aggressive mappings. Design motion even warms greys to duotone on hover, the treatment as event.