A small design studio in Lisbon. We make identities, websites and products for companies that would rather be quiet than loud.
We are two designers who like slow decisions and fast prototypes. Every project starts with a week of looking and ends with something people use every day.
We keep the studio small on purpose. You work with the people who design the thing, from the first sketch to the last pixel, in your time zone or ours.
An identity for a small salt harvester on the Tagus estuary, built from the shapes the tide leaves in the pans.
Saltmarsh rakes salt by hand from pans that have been worked for a hundred years. They wanted packaging that felt as patient as the process, without looking like a museum.
We spent a week on the marsh at low tide, drawing the grid of the pans and the lines the rakes leave. That grid became the logo, the label system and the pattern pressed into the paper tins.
The range launched in four Lisbon delis and sold out its first harvest in six weeks.
Visit the shop (opens in a new tab)
A calm, fast website for a maker of small aluminium speakers, where every product page reads like a spec sheet you want to keep.
Ferro make three speakers and change them rarely. The old site hid that behind carousels and discount banners.
We rebuilt it around one long page per speaker: a still photograph, the materials, the measurements and a short note from the engineer. Nothing moves unless you ask it to.
Average time on product pages doubled and returns fell, because people knew what they were buying.
See the live site (opens in a new tab)
A series design for a small press publishing translated sea writing, with one ultramarine that carries every cover.
Ondine publish six books a year, all translated, all about the sea. Each one had been designed from scratch, so the shelf looked like six publishers.
We drew a single cover grid, picked one ink and let the endpapers change with each book. Inside, a quiet text face and generous margins for notes.
The series now reads as one shelf, and the press can design a new cover in an afternoon.
An interface for a weather research team that turns noisy sensor data into a forecast you can read in one glance.
Nimbus run sensors along the Portuguese coast. Their researchers were reading forecasts from spreadsheets with forty columns.
We sat with them for two weeks and found they only ever asked three questions. The new interface answers those three first, with everything else one tap away.
The design system we left behind lets their two developers add new views without us.
Read the research note (opens in a new tab)
