Work

Fictional Concept Study

BLACKWOOD

A one-page site for a barbershop run by two brothers — our study in letting the room and the craft, not a stock photo, carry the price.

Website · 3 pages · Barbershop · Concept study · 2026

BLACKWOOD concept — the homepage masthead: a barber mid-fade over a seated client inside a green-and-brass barbershop, the wordmark BLACKWOOD BARBERSTYLE set large over the photograph.
BLACKWOOD — homepage · concept

01 Overview

A good barbershop sells a room, a routine and two names you trust with a razor. Most of them still sell that through an Instagram grid and a phone number. BLACKWOOD is the site that puts the room itself on the page.

Two brothers, one leather-and-brass room, a regular's worth of trust — and a website that, if it exists at all, is a template with a phone number on it. The thing that actually sells the shop, the room, never gets shown.

So we built the site around the room: real art-directed photography of the chairs and the wait, the brothers named and pictured before you ever sit down, prices set like a menu instead of three boxes, and one button — WhatsApp — that starts the booking without a form in the way.

BLACKWOOD isn't a real barbershop. It's a design study — the brand, the brothers and the reviews are invented to explore an idea, not to stand in for a client.

Type
Website · 3 pages
Industry
Barbershop
Role
Concept · Art Direction · Web Design · Build
Format
Desktop + Mobile
Year
2026
Status
Fictional Concept Study

02 Art Direction

One light, one story, three rooms of it. Every frame is warm practical light off brass fixtures — so the site reads as a shop that was photographed, not a stock library with a logo dropped on top.

The BLACKWOOD hero photograph: a barber mid-fade over a seated client in a leather chair, brass mirrors and pendant lighting behind them.
The frame

One whole pose, not a generic haircut: a barber mid-motion, clippers at the temple, the client and the room both still in view. The pose is named in the brief so nothing gets left to a guess.

The BLACKWOOD cutting floor: three black leather barber chairs facing brass-framed mirrors on dark emerald walls.
The room, not a re-crop

The cutting floor gets its own frame — three chairs, brass footrests, a marble counter with the tools laid out. A barbershop's price is the room; the room needed to be shown, not implied.

The BLACKWOOD waiting lounge: two tufted leather sofas facing each other beneath a large vintage-style world map.
The wait, framed like the chair

Even the waiting area gets a considered shot — two leather sofas, a world map across the back wall. Nothing in the room reads as an afterthought, so nothing in the photography does either.

03 Type & Colour

One condensed display face carries every headline at billboard scale, one body face stays out of the way, and the palette is two rooms — dark green and warm paper — held together by a single metal.

Palette

Emerald and near-black carry the whole site; bone is the paper it sits on. Brass is the one thread — buttons, numerals, rules — and the red exists for exactly one thing: the open/closed dot.

  • Emerald Deep backgrounds & cinema #08221b
  • Bone paper & light text #f2ede3
  • Brass the one metal, everywhere #c8a24a
  • Signal one dot, nothing else #d81e1e
Typography

A shout and a whisper, nothing in between.

  • BLACKWOOD Big Shoulders Display · 800 · Wordmark
  • Den Mann als Mann behandeln. Big Shoulders Display · 600 · Headline
  • HERRENSALON · ERFURT SEIT 2019 Big Shoulders Display · 600 · Uppercase label
  • Ledersofas, Messing und eine alte Weltkarte an der Wand. Chivo · 400 · Body

04 Desktop

The page reads like walking in the door: the room first, then the price, then the two men holding the scissors, then the proof. Nothing is asked of you before it's earned.

The whole BLACKWOOD homepage as one continuous scroll, from the dark hero through the emerald sections to the closing reviews on ink.
The full one-page flow
  • The BLACKWOOD Salon section: a wide photograph of the cutting floor bleeding off the left edge, with the headline “Der Salon” set over it.

    01 Der Salon

    The room runs the section as a spread, not a grid — a wide plate bleeding off the left edge, the headline sitting on top of it, a second plate overlapping below.

  • The BLACKWOOD pricing section: a numbered list of services with prices, set like a menu on dark ink.

    02 Preise

    Set as an editorial list, not three price cards — hairlines, oversized numerals, one service per line. Every row is its own WhatsApp link with the service pre-filled in.

  • The BLACKWOOD brothers section: two portrait photographs of the shop's owners side by side, each with a name and specialty.

    03 Die Brüder

    Theo and Nico, named and pictured, before a single word about services. You know who's holding the razor before you ever pick up the phone.

  • The BLACKWOOD reviews section: a large 4.8-star rating beside three customer quotes on black.

    04 Bewertungen

    The rating stated at full size, three quotes set loose beside it — not shrunk into a widget at the bottom of the page.

05 Mobile

A haircut gets booked from a phone, usually the same day. The narrow screen keeps the same room, the same brothers and the same one button — nothing is dropped to make it fit.

Same room, one hand — nothing dropped to fit the phone.

06 The Craft

BLACKWOOD isn't real. The craft behind it is.

This is how SYNCUP turns a room and two names into a brand people book a seat at, weeks out.

Everything you just scrolled — the photography, the type, the WhatsApp-first booking — is what we bring to a real barbershop, salon or studio. Yours would carry your room, your reviews and your names.

BLACKWOOD Barberstyle is a fictional barbershop — a design study by SYNCUP Agency. The shop, its owners, its address, its phone number and its reviews are invented and don't represent a real business.