A blank sheet.

There is a joke in the title, and it is on us. The blankest sheet of paper in consumer audio is a black rectangle, forty three centimetres wide, with a knob on the front and the sockets on the back. It has looked like that since the rack was invented, and the rack was invented to hold it. Hand a designer a blank sheet and a brief for Hi-Fi electronics, and the first thing they will draw is the box they were told to forget.

Designed from a blank sheet of paper, with no legacy industrial design to honour and no incumbent product line to extend. That was the brief we gave ourselves, and we had the rare luxury of meaning it. What follows is some of what we learned, with our friends at Heirloom to thank for the driving force behind it.

Form, function, and the third voice.

Louis Sullivan wrote in 1896 that form ever follows function, and most of a century of industrial design has been a long argument about the word "follows". Dieter Rams put it more usefully: good design is as little design as possible, and a product should be understandable without a manual. Hi-Fi has always taken that as permission to stop thinking. The box is honest, the box is understandable, the box is as little design as possible, so the box wins.

But there is a third voice in every brief, and it is rarely written down. Raymond Loewy, who gave the twentieth century a good deal of its shape, called it MAYA: most advanced, yet acceptable. People are drawn to the new and repelled by the unfamiliar, and the designer’s real job is to find the furthest point that still feels like something they already trust. Move too little and nobody notices. Move too far and the product is admired, photographed and left on the shelf.

In audio that third voice is loud. A listener who has spent years choosing equipment has a picture in their head of what seriousness looks like, and it is heavy, rectangular and dark. Move away from that and you are not only asking them to accept a new shape, you are asking them to revise what they believe about sound. That is a lot to ask of a cabinet.

What the exploration taught us.

We started where any honest exploration starts, by ignoring the rack. Objects that stood rather than lay. Materials the category never uses. Controls that read as instruments rather than switches. A form that could live in a room on its own terms, on a shelf or a desk or a sideboard, without a stack of other boxes to justify it. Some of the sketches were beautiful and some were silly, and the useful work was in telling the difference.

Three things survived the process. First, function is not negotiable, and in audio function includes heat, grounding, the length of the signal path and where your hand expects a volume control to be; a form that fights any of those is a sculpture, not a product. Second, the market’s expectations are a real constraint, but they are a soft one, and much softer than the category assumes; what people actually want is to be sure the thing is serious, and seriousness can be communicated by weight, finish, precision and restraint as well as by shape. Third, the blank sheet is a method rather than a result. You go out to the edge so that you can walk back with your eyes open, and the box you end up with, if it is a box, is a box because you chose it and not because it was there when you arrived.

That last point is the one we keep. Creek’s discipline has always been reduction, taking out everything that is not carrying the music. It turns out the same rule works on the outside of the product. Decide what the object must do, decide what the person must feel when they see it, and remove everything else. Sometimes what is left looks like a black box. Sometimes it does not. Either way it was a decision, and that is the whole difference.