About
Business first,
design second
In our first meeting, we don’t ask about your brand story. We ask how much you want to grow this year and where you’re stuck.
You won’t find awards or team photos here. What you’ll find instead: what we’ve done, how we take on work, and the kinds of projects we can’t take.
01Eight years answering the same question
Every day, that job came down to four questions: who are we selling to, what are we solving, why us, and what does success look like. Design came in much later.
Founder of Muzi Studio. Spent eight years at Google and YouTube working on how products go to market: product marketing for APAC, and YouTube’s channel consulting program for Greater China. Now works between Taipei and Tokyo.
Business Senior Product Marketing Manager, Google APAC (current)Platform Partner Manager at YouTube, led the Greater China channel consulting programBrand Project Designer at Red Peak, New York, on rebrands for major global companiesEngineering 15 years of building websites
02The first question is always your business
Sometimes, once we’ve asked, the answer is to leave it alone for now. Once, a client’s quote was fine; the problem was the sales process. Another time the website was fine; nobody knew where to start reading it. Both times we said so, and told them who to talk to instead.
The first third of a project usually goes here. Looking back, it’s often the part clients say was worth the most.
We do eight things, in three groups: working out what to build, building it, and making sure people find you.
03Three disciplines, one plan
Hiring separate firms for brand, web, and content makes sense. Each one is an expert in its area. The cost is that you become the person who has to stitch the three together.
We plan all three together. Brand, web, and content go into one plan, and the same team carries it through.
The usual wayUsDesign goes to A, the website to B, content to C. Each one is an expert in its area.All three sit in one plan and are planned together, so there are no handoffs between them.Three calendars. The cost of pulling it together falls on you, and the gaps between handoffs are exactly where projects get out of hand.One team on one schedule, with no waiting on outside replies. That’s what makes a two-week sprint possible.Between the person you talk to and the person doing the work, everything is passed along secondhand.The people who hear you out are the people who do the work. Nothing is passed along secondhand.
Color and type live as tokens in both the guidelines and the website, so the design files and the code are the same thing. You won’t see “we’ll have to ask the engineer” in our quotes.
04The trade-offs, up front
Working with a small team comes with a few things you should know before the first call.
AvailabilityWe can only take on so many projects at once. That’s the cost of cutting out the project management layer. When we’re full, we’re full. We don’t say yes first and figure it out later.No subcontractingIf something comes up on our side, we’ll give you a new timeline and a choice: wait, or end the project and settle up for the work done so far. We won’t hand you off to someone you’ve never met.We need you thereThe two-week Anchor phase needs you in the room. If you leave every decision to us, what comes out will be ours, not yours.Where we areTaipei and Tokyo. We work online from start to finish and meet in person when needed. We work in Chinese, Japanese, and English.
Where we stand
Four of them, numbered on from the sections above.
05We start with your growth goals, not a brand story
A project that starts with the brand story ends up, two months later, with a narrative that reads beautifully. Then nobody can say what it has to do with customer count, conversion rate, or average order value.
We work the other way around.
01How much do you want to grow this year? In customers, price, retention, new markets, or funding?02Where are you stuck right now?03Does that part actually need design?
Sometimes the answer to the third question is no.
06What we deliver is rules, and you can verify them yourself
Brand projects rarely fail because the work is bad. More often, it’s finished and nobody dares touch it. Three months later, marketing needs a new social size, and an engineer hits a button state the guidelines never covered. The files are all there, but no one knows why that corner radius is 8 and not 12. That leaves two options: guess, and watch the brand drift, or come back and ask us, and now you’re tied to us.
So we deliver four things you can verify.
Token fileOne JSON file holding color, type sizes, spacing, and geometry constantsGeneratorA program that computes every visual asset from the tokensCraft rulesCheckable rules, written down instead of left to feelValidatorFlags an error when an asset has been edited by hand
Because the assets are computed, “we changed the color but missed one image” can’t happen. Change a token, and everything is regenerated.
The cost is a slower start. It only pays off in one situation: the brand isn’t a one-off, and you won’t be the only one using it.
07Where we use AI, and where we don’t
We use it.
UseResearch, competitor scans, transcript cleanup. Mistakes are easy to spot, and we can run it again.Drafts and variations while we’re exploring. High volume, disposable.First drafts of documents and guidelines. Structural work, where editing is faster than writing from scratch.Don’t usePositioning and choosing a direction. That takes understanding your situation, not just your description of it.Final quality and detail. For now, only a person can see the gap between looking right and being right.Our commitments and accountability to you. You can’t hand accountability to something that doesn’t live with the consequences.
08We don’t hand over anything you can’t edit yourself
After a brand project is delivered, the usual next step is going back to the original studio for every change. We put “you can edit it yourself” in the acceptance criteria.
Every page opens directly in the page editor. Changing a color doesn’t take a specialist: change one token value, and the identity assets and the website update together. You can produce new sizes on your own, because the rules are written down instead of living in someone’s head. And if a change is wrong, the validator flags it before launch, not after.
We still take maintenance contracts.
The difference is that it’s your choice.
Book a 30-minute call
It’s free. In the first meeting, we ask how much you want to grow this year and where you’re stuck.