N 30.27 / W 97.74 AUSTIN, TEXAS STUDIO EST. 2018 FOUR PROJECTS, ALWAYS

Brand identity studio

A brand identity studio in Austin that caps scope on purpose.

Logo marks, visual identity systems, single-purpose project pages and paid visual consultations — four projects at a time, run by one designer since 2018.

2concept directions, never five
9–14page guideline documents
4projects on the books at once
See the services and the estimator

Most identity work sold to a small business is over-scoped. Forty logo directions land in an inbox and nobody can pick between the twelfth and the thirteenth. A hundred-page brand bible gets opened once, at the handoff meeting, and never again. Six rounds of revisions arrive, and by round four the client is just asking for the same mark back in a different accent colour. Yufemayi runs the other way: two directions at the outset, one mark refined until it holds, a guideline document short enough that someone on a five-person team will actually open the PDF. When a fifth revision round would just repeat the fourth, the studio says so and stops billing for it. That refusal is most of what you are paying for.

N 30.27 / W 97.74 The studio's work table with layout sheets, colour chips and a cutting mat in warm window light.
On the table todayLayout sheets for a current mark, a fan of Pantone chips, a steel ruler and a cutting mat. No screen in the frame — the first pass at any mark happens on paper.
How a mark actually gets made

Two directions, then one decision, made in the open.

A brand identity project starts with a working session, not a questionnaire. We talk through what the business does, who pays for it, and what the last logo got wrong — usually it's that nobody can tell you why the colour is blue. From there we sketch two directions by hand before anything touches a screen. Not five. Two, because a client comparing five options is really just guessing, and a guess isn't a decision anyone can stand behind six months later.

One direction gets picked and refined. It goes through construction in Illustrator as true vector paths, checked at three inches and at three feet, tested in black on white before a single colour gets applied. The mark ships as outlines — .ai, .eps and .svg — with a one-page spec sheet giving the exact hex, Pantone and CMYK values, so a printer two states away can match it without calling us first.

A finished letterpress stationery suite fanned across ochre paper.
Finished, not a mockupLetterpress business cards, letterhead and an envelope from a project delivered last spring, printed on 100lb cotton stock.
Print, priced honestly

Foil stamping and letterpress cost more than a digital proof, and the estimate says so before anyone picks a finish. We don't fold print costs quietly into a bigger design fee.

See print add-ons in the estimator
“We take on four brand projects at a time, never more.
— studio policy, since 2018
A studio wall pinned with type trial sheets and colour swatches.
Type trials, pinned upEvery identity gets a pairing tested at working sizes before it's approved — a display face and a body face that still reads set small in Word, because that's where most of it will actually live.
A cork board pinned with ochre, olive and terracotta colour swatches.
The palette we keep coming back toSandy paper, faded ochre, olive and washed terracotta — the studio's own working set, sun-bleached rather than screen-bright, and the reason our own site reads the way it does.

Two cases, read straight through

All work

Marra Goods

Asked
A logo that would foil-stamp cleanly onto leather and hold up at three millimetres tall on a care tag.
Decided
A single-weight mark with no thin strokes, tested at four foil pressures before the final die was cut.
Changed
Packaging went from a printed sticker to a stamped tag, at a lower unit cost once the run passed 500 pieces.

Southbank Provisions

Asked
A hanging sign and a cup design that didn't look like every other new café on the block.
Decided
An ink colour pulled from the awning rather than a stock brand red, matched by Pantone number across print and paint.
Changed
Regulars started using the mark's shorthand mug icon as the café's own nickname within a month of the sign going up.

If the scope sounds right, say what you're working on.

Tell us the business, the timeline, and whether there's an existing mark to react to. We reply from the studio, not a sales queue.

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