Studio Freight is a global creative studio that moves missions forward with strategy, design, experience, and mettle (we use the last one as a reminder that it takes real dedication to build great things).

We partner with teams at early-stage startups and well-known pioneers like ElevenLabs and Perplexity to launch brands, websites, campaigns, and special projects (the wilder the better). While every team is different, the common goal is to be seen as dedicated partners who care as much as they do, which we jokingly refer to as a bit of a ruse, because we aim to care about the details that most don’t in the spirit of making things truly great.

Journey

We started in Columbus in 2016, far from the industry’s usual centers and without the relationships that open the first doors, so we made our own way. In the early days, we said yes to nearly everything and treated every project like the whole studio rode on it. We used to say we don’t get interesting projects, we make projects interesting.

Along the way, we’ve worked across many different styles and categories to remix expectations, whether it’s bringing an insurgency attitude to B2B SaaS or a slick tech vibe to ecommerce. And like others we admire, we’ve built experiences and technologies with new tools, from building 3D worlds in the browser to incubating Lenis, the smooth-scroll library (now managed by Darkroom Engineering).

These days we spend our time with people building what comes next, founders and teams with real missions and the resolve to see them through. For us, great design is the baseline, not the goal. The work we care about starts after that, understanding a mission well enough to move it forward, and helping companies that would win anyway win bigger.

Showcase

Psyop

Psyop has spent twenty-five years shaping culture for the likes of Nike, Google, Coinbase, Disney, and Snoop Dogg. Its cinematic work across animation, live action, VFX, and gaming earned it the nickname the Pixar of advertising. The output kept climbing while the brand fell behind, its logo carrying the whole load and hundreds of case studies buried behind a director roster only insiders knew how to read.

We looked at the title sequences of directors like Scorsese and Tarantino, where the type is treated as seriously as anything else on screen, and built an identity expressive enough to hold its own and restrained enough to let the work lead. The new site turned that buried portfolio into something searchable, filterable, and shareable in a single link, a sales tool that never looks like one. Psyop made its name making other brands impossible to miss, and this finally returns the favor.

ElevenLabs Store

ElevenLabs is making voice a more natural way to use technology, so when their creative team wanted a presence for NY Tech Week, an ordinary merch drop was never going to say it. They imagined a store you could talk to, where people browse, place an order out loud, and haggle over the price in conversation.

We designed the merch capsule and built the storefront around the same energy that runs through the company, sharp, playful, and deeply technical without ever feeling cold. With the conversational ordering layered in, the shop stops being a place to buy a shirt and becomes a small, tactile conversation with the brand itself.

Perplexity Comet

Perplexity built its name on an answer engine that returns concise, cited responses instead of a page of paid links. Comet carries that further into a complete browser, and when the team brought us in to launch it, the product was still a concept. No demo, no feature list, no wireframes, just a conviction that knowledge should be easier to reach and easier to trust.

So we designed the possibility rather than the product. The visual language grew around cosmic themes, with planets standing in as vessels for what Comet could hold and parabolic lines borrowed from orbital paths carrying motion across the system. Typography expands on hover, rewarding curiosity with a little more of itself. The site descends from space to Earth as you scroll while the announcement video travels the other way, so each one returns you to where the other left off.

Esther

Esther enters a category that has recycled the same pirates and sticky sweetness for decades while tequila and gin quietly claimed the cultural high ground. It is the premium single-origin Colombian rum out to win that ground back, one changed mind at a time.

Its brand runs on duality and reflection, down to a bright green cap you can spot clear across a bar, and it came to us to carry that identity onto the screen. We wrote new rules as we designed, working out how each element should move and behave online until the whole system took on an internet aura entirely its own.

Culture & Team

Our team comes from many places and backgrounds, including former educators, artists, scientists, engineers, and ministers. We love that there are many experiences and philosophies behind every conversation. We don’t always agree but therein lies the opportunity to arrive at the non-obvious. 

What keeps our differences from turning into noise is how we work. We practice the art of brutal elegance, which is essentially about being honest about what actually matters even when it means dropping good ideas for one great one, and disciplined about making things exactly as they should be, no more and no less. All with a sense of shared purpose and mutual respect, as defined in our principles. Our seventh, “Rally Others On,” encourages us to talk each other up, assume good intentions, and remember we’re all mostly making it up as we go.