2018: Studio Rodrigo Year in Review
The Studio at 6
2018 was a year of both constancy and change for us. As a creative business, the studio feels solid and steady, tackling challenging projects, delivering good work, with a vibrant culture and strong ethic. We graduated a cohort of designers on to new challenges, into design teams at Amazon and Microsoft, start-ups, and bigger agencies, while bringing on some new designers to continue to push the studio forward.
Khoi joined the board of AIGA NY and Ritik sharpened the communication of the studio mission and values in a talk given over the summer at Hyperakt.
During our annual internal review with the studio team, we were once again impressed at the quality of challenges we take on, companies and organizations who choose us as collaborators, and designs and products that emerge as an output of those collaborations. As we do each year, we are happy to take a moment to reflect on and celebrate that work.
Values Into Action
As creative people, we have unique abilities to help define the world we want. It’s our work to do that on behalf of clients day in and day out. As a studio, we’ve made a commitment from the beginning to support organizations that we feel are helping create a more creative, diverse, equitable, just, and honest world.
In 2018, we purposefully amplified that commitment in ways big and small. These included more talks, more published writing, and more direct action, including hosting a series of post card writing parties from September through the election in November.
This American Life
We have been proud and lucky collaborators with This American Life for over five years, and working with Ira Glass, Seth Lind, and Whitney Dangerfield to overhaul the This American Life website was a treat. They are a team with a complete vision and collaborating with them to make their 20+ year, 650 episode fresh and accessible was a highlight of the year.
Serial Season 3
We also had the pleasure of continuing our work with the Serial team, helping to design and launch the Serial Season 3 website. Both Serial and This American Life were collaborations with the amazingly talented Rich Orris at Strange Bird Labs.
The Frontline Dispatch
The investigative journalism of the Frontline team across the globe is crucial, and we have been able to help them bring their journalistic work to podcasting with The Frontline Dispatch. For Season 2 of the podcast, we updated the identity and helped launch across podcasting platforms.
Being able to support the storytelling and journalistic work of Frontline, This American Life and other podcasters we work with feels like making a small contribution to the vital, valuable work those teams are doing, and we are grateful for the opportunity.
Artfare
Artfare is a mission-driven start-up empowering working artists to better connect with and manage relationships with collectors. Our collaboration with Aki Karja and the Artfare team has been tremendously rewarding, allowing us to design a beautiful app experience, create a platform that empowers creative people, and help incubate a business that we hope can deliver and sustain meaningful change in the art world. We’re especially excited for the openings that Artfare is organizing in February and May to launch this great new platform.
UMA
When Hart Lambur and Allison Lu approached us to help bring to life their new start-up, whose mission is to create a blockchain-based platform that would enable universal access to markets for financial derivatives, we were excited to work with them. As founders, they bring an incredible wealth of financial expertise from their time at Goldman Sachs and in start-ups like Openfolio and Tala. Collaborating on naming, brand identity, and their launch website allowed us to dive deeper into a blockchain platform that we hope has meaningful and positive real world impact.
Rare Bits
The founding team at Rare Bits is whip smart and we started out the year iterating with them on their MVP platform. Another interesting blockchain platform, in this case creating marketplaces for non-fungible collectibles is interesting and was a great learning experience. We worked quickly along side the founding technical team to bring this platform to life, and after raising their Series A, the Rare Bits team has been off and running all year.
Object Limited
Will Nathan, founder of Homepolish, has built a crazy new physical and digital business called Object Limited out of Bisbee, Arizona and New York City. A mobile commerce platform enabling tastemakers to scout and sell incredible vintage finds has the potential to consolidate a billion dollar industry. Another start-up we are excited to see grow in 2019.
OpenSpace
OpenSpace is another start-up with an incredible technical team, building a computer vision / machine-learning program to analyze massive data sets of image and create a “time machine” for job sites. We helped CEO Jeevan Kalanithi with his launch marketing site and customer onboarding guides. Expecting big things from this team in the real estate tech space in the coming year.
Preferred Return
We worked closely with Preferred Return CEO Keyvan Ferouzi to develop an identity, marketing presence, and online platform for this technology-enabled financial services company helping start-up CFOs tackle key compliance, reporting, management, and growth challenges.
Adobe Fonts
The Adobe Fonts team needed some digital design help to accelerate the redesign and re-launch of their web platform ahead of the Adobe MAX conference in October, and we were happy to help!
Xfinity My Account
It is hard to capture the breadth and depth of our collaboration with the Xfinity My Account and Existing Customer self service teams at Comcast, but our multi-year collaborative working relationship has helped overhaul and streamline their customer self-service tools across web and mobile platforms, enabling simpler experiences for customers and driving value for the business.
Tomorrow Lab
Our friends Pepin Gelardi and Ted Ullrich at Tomorrow Lab are some of the smartest innovation thinkers and tinkerers around. We were happy to lend a hand elevating their revamped website.
PRX
As podcasts and narrative audio have boomed, the team at PRX has been quietly creating enabling technologies and services to fuel that growth. A team that we have been happy to collaborate with over the past five years, 2018 saw an opportunity to refresh the PRX brand and online presence.
TurboVote
We have continued to support the incredible team at TurboVote who have built technologies and campaigns to drive voter engagement and turnout, with 2018 being a milestone year for their mission.
Embedding and Accelerating
We continue to embed with corporate clients to accelerate the product design process on projects where our studio’s design expertise works alongside technology, operational, and domain expertise from our partners. We had some great and ongoing projects with teams at Intersection, the Hospital for Special Surgery, Vice Media, and NBC.
Looking Forward to 2019
Collaborations from the later part of 2018 that we are looking forward to see launch in 2019 include:
- web app + site for Spell.run, a cloud-based AI/ML infrastructure platform
- a rebrand and new digital presence for Context Travel
- some fun new things for Union Square Ventures
- a cool audio app from ShapeShifter Labs
- a new people-centric recruiting platform for Pointr
