Fellowship diploma

Haldane College of Surgeons 2025

The Haldane College came to us with a diploma that had been reset four times in twenty years and had lost something at each pass. The brief was to go back to the 1904 plate, keep what was worth keeping, and produce something that would still look correct in another century.

The document is engraved in one colour on watermarked laid stock. The college arms are cut in intaglio, and the rule beneath the signature line carries the college motto in microtext. There is no colour work at all: at this scale, relief and paper do the whole job, and the restraint is the point.

Notes from the job file

The guilloche band around the arms was cut fresh rather than copied from the old plate, because the original ratios had never been recorded and the surviving impressions were too worn to measure reliably. The new figure is close in character and identical in nothing.

Names are added by the college itself, in ink, by a calligrapher. We supply the sheets blank and the register of sheet numbers.