We help recently funded and bootstrapped startups find the right branding and design to help them launch the company they dream of being.
We pride ourselves on working with really passionate, big-idea companies, who care about their customers and want to design for them first. As a founder, you have to want to learn about the whys & hows of design to know the impact it can have – we teach you everything you need to know, and help you shape something that’s right for your vision.
We’ve been approached by and worked with a lot of different startups, some of whom were already large, and many that have grown to be –
Heroku, Mozilla, Stripe, Readmill, Trunk Club, Metalab, PRX, Librato, Ginkgo Bioworks, Massive Health, Openstudy, Thunderbolt Labs, Curbly, Mobile Commons, younity, The Allotment, and more.
Our passion is purpose, and if you think you could use some design guidance and help, email us, say hello, and tell us a little about what your vision is. Our first consultation is always free.
Our old friends at Ginkgo Bioworks came to us, needing to up their professional game. The branding we'd made for them a few years ago was in need a refresher – they wanted to start playing with the big boys in the industry, and we wanted to help them look like they belonged there.
We spent a couple weeks planning the video production & photography, the identity update, and the website, and in a couple short months we put together an entire new system for them to work with, and a video showing off who they are and what they do best.
Ben, the founder of the premier editing studio The Allotment over in the UK, found us when he was in need of a new identity. He was in an interested position – he needed to upgrade his image, but only wanted to appeal to his current clients, the likes of BBC, Channel 4, and a handful of other presitigous producers he already worked with.
So we came up with a visual identity system – complete with custom-designed Branding Guide – to help keep his voice, image, and client base consistent, while upping the level of professionalism he was dishing out.
The Wayward Explorers is a unique joint venture with freelance photographer Kyleen James. With both parties contributing photography, we write stories of our adventures and share them. The branding & web design are hand-coded, with a focus on creating something more geared toward new and developing technologies, and how they can aid the storytelling part of what we're doing.
The League of Moveable Type is extremely near and dear to our hearts – we started it back in 2009, and it's grown far beyond it's humble beginnings since then, with a growing following and business to match.
We periodically work with The League to upgrade their branding, develop real content and design, and help them build up their business. It's a tight partnership, and we're always working on new things, including a few exciting things to come later this year. We're proud to be there.
We frequently experiment with our own ideas & side projects, and one of the most recent was good timing™ – a way to keep calculate our hours after we'd already forgotten to track them.
We've always found it tough to track time; you start working with the intention of doing something important, but have to take yourself out of it before you start, to turn on a timer, and to turn it off when you're done. Instead, maybe we can just recount what happens at the end the day, and have the computer do the work of figuring out how much time we worked on what.
It being our own side project, we got to develop the identity, the UI, and actually develop the thing ourselves. It's still in development, but it's been useful so far.
One of our longest-standing clients has been a small talent agency in Los Angeles that represents unique commercial actors. We've worked together consistently for years, updating and upgrading their site when it needs it.
Most recently, we developed an integrated, custom backend service so that their clients can keep their acting & modeling profiles – headshots, measurements, contact information, etc. – up to date, any time they need to, which has saved countless hours and let their clients feel more in control and current.
Another fun side project, Literati.me was a product of an weekend hackathon to make something to keep track of and share your progress in the books you're currently reading.
We developed the site, and then developed an embeddable widget to integrate into other sites – which we ended up using on a future client project for The Golden Triangle Literary Magazine.
And while not insanely popular, it did gain the attention of an exciting startup in Berlin called Readmill, which later led to us briefly working together before it got aquired by Dropbox.
On top of helping our clients make their businesses work, we've made a few of our own. Our experience in backend programming and serious development have given us the resources to make a few tools of our own, and this is our oldest one.
We've run it consistently since starting A Good Company in 2009, and we've got thousnads of customers showing off amazing work of their own.
We maintain all the branding, development, and design to make sure A Good Portfolio stays awesome.
A weekend passion project, we banded together to build something different and useful within 48 hours, and Iconico came out. Though no longer maintained, we frequently need to design icons for iPhone apps we're working on.
We can talk all day about the clients we've had in the past and projects we've loved working on. If you're interested in learning more about our most popular services, we've got a lot to say about those, too.
If you're interested in talking about a custom project, shoot us an email at [email protected]
