High craft with soul.
Built for
Digital,
made physical
We design for every kind of screen, and for twenty years our best work has sat where the screen meets something you hold, wear, drive or work beside.
01The screen meets the object
Nokia and Withings health wearables, the interface for Ford’s autonomous vehicle simulator (IDSA Gold), and brands for Cobot and Gritt robots.
02Two cultures, one studio
Sky and the BBC in London, Fujitsu and Audi in Tokyo. We understand both cultures deeply, and bring the best of each to everything we design.
03We make our own
Auwa is our own illustrated world, created by Rieko. We take it from screen to shelf in-house: the stories, the app, the site and the figure itself.
Our work
Learning from
the makers
Every year we return to Japan and spend time with makers who give their lives to one thing: a knife, a comb, a sheet of paper. That patience shapes how we design, down to the details people never notice but always feel.
Shigefusa
On waiting a little over a year for a knife.
Making Washi
Cold water, mulberry bark, a thousand-year gesture.
Oroku-gushi
Made from wood that breaks axes. Named after a girl.
Yaoyorozu no Kami
Eight million gods live in the world around you.
The Onsen Lesson
What hot water and strangers teach about being alive.
Nozawa Fire Festival
A village renews its bond with its guardian spirits.
Koya-san
Prayers chanted on this mountain for 1,200 years.
Narai in Snow
Four hundred years of the same street, unchanged.
Yakushima
On the island where the trees outlived history.
Japan and UK
We help Japanese companies reach a global audience, and global brands land in Japan, working in both languages. Auwa, Waseda, Fujitsu, AXA Japan.
Products
we run ourselves
Alongside our client work we design, build and run two ventures of our own, so we know first hand what it takes to ship a product and live with it.
Illustrated worldAuwa
An illustrated world rooted in the Japanese belief that everything has kokoro, a heart: stories, a journal and a hand-finished figure.
Art market dataMore Rare
Price indexes for collectable art, starting with Banksy: every print, what it is worth today and every auction result since 2006.
What we build with AI,
and what it solves
RepeatableCommand
A routine task, codified into precise structural logic so it runs identically every single time. It offloads repetitive execution to the system, protecting your team’s focus.
ExampleTurn a client meeting transcript into a perfectly formatted project brief.
StandardSkill
A baseline capability loaded automatically, ensuring quality never relies solely on the user. It hardcodes your established best practices directly into daily workflows.
ExampleApply your design system and tone of voice to everything a model produces.
SpecialistAgent
An autonomous specialist with a single job, dedicated memory, and strict permissions. It handles operations in the background without constant human oversight.
ExampleScan monthly supplier invoices to flag errors and summarise cost trends.
KnowledgeContext
The foundational layer holding what your company knows and how it makes decisions. This proprietary data is exactly what makes the model’s final output uniquely yours.
ExampleUse your company data to answer team queries without deep searches.
Questions
Because AI has made production cheap. Anyone can now generate a logo or a set of screens, and most of what comes back is almost good. Knowing what to cut, what is slightly off and when to stop is what twenty years at Nokia, Apple and Sky taught us. It matters even more on a physical product, where the screen ships inside an object that is hard to change once it is made.
We are at our best with companies that make physical products: robots, hardware, wearables and vehicles. Project-led work covers brand and product launches (Cobot, Gritt), discovery sprints (Nokia All-in-One) and design audits. Embedded partnership puts senior design inside your team, as with Nokia for nine years. We also bridge Japan and global markets.
Two ways to engage. For deliverables (product audit, launch package, discovery sprints), we send you a fixed quote. For embedded or partner work, we charge a daily rate by team size on a rolling three-month minimum basis. We’ll recommend the shape that fits the brief, and re-quote if scope expands. Most engagements run from £25K to £75K.
Every project is founder-led from start to finish. Tom and Rieko handle strategy, design and build directly. When the work needs specialist skills (3D, backend engineering), we bring in trusted people we've worked with for years. Creative direction sits with us; you talk to the people doing the work, not an account manager who briefs them later.
Some of our deepest work is best discussed privately, often under NDA. Two examples: the Nokia All-in-One programme (precedent for the Pure 2.0 design system that won iF Design and Red Dot), and the Ford 2030 FSD Sim (winner of IDSA Gold for Digital Interaction). We share methodology, and password access where appropriate. Just ask.
Engagements scale from one week (a design audit) to five or six weeks (a brand identity) to many months (an embedded partnership). Team scales with the work, from one founder to a team of five. Brand and website together takes eight to ten weeks from kickoff. If we're at capacity, we'll give you a realistic start date rather than spread ourselves thin.
Recognition
Our work has been recognised by the world's leading design institutions. These are standards that we carry into everything we build today.
The method
1. Align
You talk to the founders from day one, with no account managers between you and the work. We agree the scope, the stack, what success looks like and where to start, and you have a plan within days.
2. Simplify
We cut more than we add. Every screen, flow, and interaction has to earn its place; everything else gets removed before you ever see it. Twenty years of knowing what almost-good looks like is the filter.
3. Build
We prototype to prove the concept, then harden that same code for production. The same hands carry the work from the first sketch to a live product, so nothing gets lost between design and engineering.
4. Refine
We ship to a live environment with accessibility and performance built in, because mockups handed over die in inboxes. The first weeks of tweaks after launch are part of the engagement, not an extra.
The team
Tom Vining
Co-Founder
Product strategy, design systems and full-stack build. Formerly Head of XD at Nokia, and before that AKQA, R/GA and W+K Tokyo.
Rieko Maeda
Co-Founder
Creative direction, illustration, and brand. Japanese-born, London-based. 20 years shaping products people connect with emotionally.
The Network
Specialists
Long-term collaborators for motion, 3D, and backend engineering. Same people we've worked with for years. Same hands, same standard.
What are you making?
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