I didn't design this brand for a client. I designed it for the company I worked at.Handmade is a São Paulo-based design consultancy. During my time there as Senior Product and Brand Designer, the company had grown fast: from a small studio to an agency trusted by major Brazilian corporations on complex SaaS products. But the brand hadn't kept up. It still looked like a small studio. The identity refresh was mine to own.

The Brief I Wrote Myself
‍The brand needed to reflect Handmade's duality: deeply digital, deeply human. The company works at the intersection of systematic thinking and creative craft. An identity built only on digital references would feel cold. One built only on analog warmth would feel dated. The answer had to be both.

And because the company's name is literally Handmade, the logo couldn't look like it was constructed by a machine. It had to look made.

Research and Direction
I analyzed how comparable design consultancies present themselves, examining logo complexity, the ratio of construction to gesture, and how much personality was embedded in the mark versus the system around it.

The finding: the more deliberately "crafted" the logos looked, the more they felt like a performance of craft rather than actual craft. I went the other way.

Logo
After extensive sketching, the solution was in simplification, not addition. Brushstrokes refined until they conveyed movement and balance without decoration.

The wordmark got the same treatment: no space between words, only the "H" capitalized. One word. One breath. Maximum legibility.

Visual System
The asset library was built around the brand's core tension:
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- Digital artifacts: Cursor tags, selection boxes, and UI-native shapes that reference the team's screen-first work culture.
- Human artifacts: An intentionally imperfect circle, representing organic creativity that no algorithm replicates.

The library was designed for a team of designers: flexible enough to encourage creativity, systematic enough to maintain coherence. Design system logic applied to brand assets.

Outcome
New logo. Brand guidelines. Visual asset library. Refreshed website. A brand that finally matched the quality of the work being done inside the company.

Role: Creative Director and Lead Brand Designer (in-house)
Context: HandMade Design, Senior Product and Brand Designer (2020–2022)