Across brand identity, product UI and motion — across consumer, SaaS and a small number of cultural institutions.
Anika Odei & Tomás Ribeiro, since 2019 — a senior design partnership, not a studio of strangers.
Two former lead designers — Anika out of Pentagram's New York office, Tomás out of Instrument's brand practice in Lisbon — who left in 2019 to build the small, opinionated studio they kept wishing existed for their own briefs.
Above — a working still from the Linear identity refresh, 2024. Photographed by the studio in Lisbon.
Fig. 01 — The studio, 17:00, a Tuesday.
02 — The Shape of the Studio
Fourteen people. Four disciplines. One team from brief to launch.
Every Odei engagement is run by the same senior people you met in the kickoff — there is no account-manager relay, no offshore handoff, and no junior team quietly inheriting the work in week six. Below is the literal org chart, in numbers.
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06
Senior brand designers
Identity systems, type, editorial, packaging. Six of six lead in client workshops.
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04
Motion designers
After Effects, Lottie and Rive, in-house — brand systems ship ready for product and marketing.
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02
Product designers
Senior ICs from Linear and Mercury. Ship Figma systems alongside the brand work, not after.
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02
Strategists
Positioning, naming and category narrative. Embedded from week one, not bolted on at the end.
Plus two founders — Anika and Tomás — who run every engagement personally. The studio does not subcontract, does not staff up for big pitches, and does not run a "junior bench."
03 — How We Work
How we work, in plain language.
We are founder-led. Every project is run by Anika or Tomás — not delegated to a producer after the contract is signed. You meet us on the kickoff call, you see us in the weekly review, and one of us is in the room (or on the call) when the final files ship.
We do not hand off. The same senior designer who sketches the first wordmark animates the launch loop, the same motion designer who cuts the hero keyframe builds the Lottie file your engineers drop into the app. Twelve weeks, one team, one shared Figma file.
Motion is in-house, not a vendor line item. Four of our six senior designers animate natively in After Effects, Lottie and Rive — which is why our brand systems tend to ship feeling like a product, not a PDF of static guidelines.
We work in eleven-week engagements on average, against an industry standard of nine to fourteen months. We do this by killing scope creep before it starts, by writing the brief with you rather than for you, and by saying no to work we are not the right studio for.
We have been carbon-neutral since 2021, via a verified Climeworks removal portfolio sized to the studio's actual flights, server usage and printed case studies. It is a small thing. It is not nothing.
We turn down roughly two of every five briefs that land in the inbox, usually because the timing is wrong, the budget is too small for the ambition, or the work belongs with a different studio. We will tell you when that is the case.
- i. Founder-led, no account-manager relay.
- ii. One team from kickoff to launch — zero handoffs.
- iii. Motion built in-house, shipped in Lottie and Rive.
- iv. Eleven-week average engagement, not twelve months.
- v. Carbon-neutral since 2021, Climeworks-verified.
- vi. We turn down two in five briefs. Honestly.
04 — Since 2019
187 projects. Nine Awwwards Site-of-the-Day wins. $620M+ raised by clients.
Quiet numbers, laid out as type. The kind of proof a Series A founder actually reads.
Across 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024. Only eleven studios globally have hit four SOTD years; we are one of them.
Across Linear, Mercury, Arc, Vercel-adjacent brands and 40+ venture-backed teams while our brand systems were in market.
Tracked in Linear, measured against the original signed scope. The other 4% slipped by mutual agreement.
Measured independently by Arc Surveys ninety days post-launch. Industry average for a design engagement is 38.
Engagements run from $18k focused sprint work to $410k full brand + product system builds for Series B and beyond.
Selected press & recognitions
- Awwwards Site of the Day · 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024
- FWA Site of the Month · 2022, 2023, 2024
- Communication Arts Typography Annual · 2023 (Linear identity)
- It's Nice That · Featured studio, 2022 onward
- Brand New (under Atelier) · Three identities reviewed since 2021
- Sidebar.io · Front page, fourteen times since 2019
- ADC Annual Awards — Identity jury · Anika Odei, since 2022
05 — Working with Odei
Brief us on a project.
Anika or Tomás replies within one business day. We are taking bookings for Q1 and Q2 of next year across brand identity, product UI and motion systems — typically with companies spending $25k or more on design work.