A design studio first.

The M Group was founded in Phoenix and spent about three decades as one of Arizona’s top graphic design firms: identity work, packaging, campaigns, the kind of studio whose work you saw constantly without knowing whose it was.

Its signature was punctuation. The period on the “M.” was a bouncy ball: it bounced around the page, dropped, and split into a scatter of coloured dots. On a website, in the era when almost nobody was doing that, it was the thing people remembered.

The firm wound down about a decade ago. The name came back to the family, and it is a brokerage now. We did not redraw the M, and we did not retire the dot. Scroll the front page and it still does what it did.

Some habits stick.