Eighteen people in E1. Designing the next decade of software brands.
Halftone is a London marketing studio founded in 2021 by Iyana Brooks and Alex Mörch. We work with technology companies — at the brand, the product, the channel and the campaign layer — and we measure ourselves on whether the work earns its keep three years later.
A studio with the discipline of a software team.
Most marketing agencies are organised like creative departments. We’re organised like a small product team — strategy, design, engineering, performance and editorial in the same standup, owning the same outcome, on the same roadmap.
That’s why our brand work survives three rebrands without our help, and our performance work survives a CMO change without ours. Systems instead of campaigns. Tokens instead of templates. Numbers instead of opinions.
We’re not the studio for everything. We don’t do FMCG, we don’t do political work, we don’t do agencies-of-record. We work with founders, operators and design leaders at technology companies that take their craft seriously — and we expect to be held to the same bar.
Six values. Written down, hard to break.
Few things, deeply
We do six disciplines, and we say no to the rest. The work is better when we know it cold.
Outcome over output
Every engagement is measured against a real number. We rebuild scope before we rebuild the deck.
Systems over assets
We design tokens, not screenshots. Brand systems, not brand campaigns. Things that survive growth.
Inside the room
We sit with the engineering team, the customer-success team, the founders. Not the marketing team alone.
Long engagements
We renew with three quarters of clients. We refer the ones we’re wrong for. We measure tenure.
Quietly
We don’t do awards. We don’t do thought-leadership theatre. The work is the only reputation we trust.
Eighteen humans. Eight you can email today.
The studio is run by partners, not departments. Every engagement gets a partner-led pod of four to six. These are the people who answer the brief.
13 years across brand and product. Previously creative director at Pentagram London and head of brand at Stripe Press. Lives in Hackney, runs ultras at the weekend.
Former product lead at Linear and McKinsey strategy hand. Writes the brief that ends the meeting. Speaks five languages, two of them well.
Built the growth team at Monzo from 4 to 38. Runs paid, search, lifecycle and analytics across the studio. Will tell you the data before you ask.
Staff engineer at Klarna and Vercel before Halftone. Owns site infrastructure and the design-system pipeline. Is calm in incident channels.
Ex-Wired UK and FT Magazine. Runs the editorial masthead and our internal journal. Does not let a sentence ship that doesn't earn its weight.
Ten years across film and motion at Buck and Studio Dumbar. Director on every hero film we ship, and most of the social cuts.
Programme manager at IDEO and Stripe before us. The reason 24 case studies shipped on time. Schedules a calendar like a graph.
Type, identity, and the difference between them. Trained at the Royal College of Art and worked at Manual / SF before joining.
Four rules we don’t break.
Written into the partnership agreement, signed by every operator in the studio, reviewed every two quarters.
We say no often.
We turn down roughly 70% of inbound. If we don’t think we can ship the outcome, we say so on the first call and refer you to someone better placed.
We sit in your room.
Most of our work happens in your tools — Notion, Linear, Slack, Figma, your warehouse. We don’t hide behind agency portals.
We bill flat, weekly.
Engagements are scoped at fixed cost and a weekly cadence. No timesheets, no scope theatre, no surprise invoices.
We hand it back.
Every engagement ends with a working handover — your team owns the system. We govern only when you ask us to.
Five years. Quietly.
- 2021Founded
Iyana Brooks and Alex Mörch start Halftone in a flat above a cafe on Hanbury Street, with three clients and one rule: do six things deeply.
- 2022First retainer
Meridian Bank signs a 12-month performance retainer. Priya joins as a partner. Studio grows to seven.
- 2023Atlas v1
We ship the first version of Atlas — our brand-systems engine — for Sable & Co., powering eleven sub-brands on one stack.
- 2024Studio of 14
Editorial, motion and ops leadership join. Twenty case studies shipped. NPS of 92 across 36 months.
- 2025Selected work
Halftone-led launches include Lumen.ai, Northrange and Sable. Three founders on the cover of Wired UK.
- 2026Atlas v2 + B-Corp
Atlas v2 launches as a productised offer for design-led teams. B-Corp pending. Studio of 18, still in E1.
We hire by referral. Slowly.
Most roles are filled before they’re posted. If you want to work here, the move is to write us a letter — not a CV — and tell us what you’d run.
Got a brief? We can read it tomorrow.
Most engagements start with a 30-minute call and a one-page response by the end of the week. Send us a deck, a doc, a Loom, or a sentence — we’ll tell you whether we can help and who else might.