About Inkfield Creative Studio
A creative studio on Cheeh Road in Carolina Beach, working with businesses across coastal North Carolina.
Why we test before recommending
Inkfield Creative Studio was founded to stop creative decisions being made by the wrong people.
Our designers had all presented routes to leadership teams who chose the one they preferred. Everyone in the room was intelligent, invested and entirely unrepresentative of the audience the work was for.
The conditions are wrong as well as the people. A boardroom sees work large, in good light, with the reasoning explained. A customer sees it small, briefly, unexplained, while doing something else.
Liking is not a useful measure. We test whether people understood what the business does and what they recalled afterwards, because those predict behaviour and preference does not.
So we fund the testing ourselves. A research line is the first thing cut when a budget tightens, and a studio that bills for it has a quiet reason to let it go.
What you own
Source files on completion, layered and editable, so another studio can continue the work without rebuilding it.
Fonts licensed in your name, purchased for you rather than held under a studio licence that stops working when we part.
The test data, in full, including the results that argued against the route you chose.
Guidelines written for somebody else, detailed enough for your team or a future agency to apply without contacting us.
What every client can expect
Tested before recommending
Every route tested with a real audience sample first.
Studio funds testing
Never billed to the client, so it cannot be cut from a budget.
Comprehension measured
Recall and understanding, not whether people liked it.
Results unedited
Including when our favoured route tests worst.
No speculative work
We do not produce unpaid concepts for any pitch.
Files and fonts transferred
Layered source files and licences in the client name.
Who you will work with
Savannah Whitlock
Creative Strategy Manager
Designs and runs the audience testing behind every route, and reports the findings to clients including the ones that contradict the studio's own recommendation.
Managing Director
Leadership
Founded the studio and set the rule that testing is funded by the studio so it can never be cut from a client budget.
Design Director
Design
Fifteen years in brand and packaging design across the Southeast, responsible for craft standards and production quality.