About the studio

Aero Studio started as two people sharing a desk and a single client. Ten years later there are six of us and we still take on roughly the same number of projects per year — we have simply become better at choosing them.

Staying small is a deliberate choice rather than a stage we have not grown out of. It means the people you meet in the first conversation are the people who do the work. There is no account layer, no handoff to a junior team after the pitch, and no incentive to stretch a six-week project into six months.

How we work

Most engagements begin with a week of reading and interviews before anything is drawn. We want to understand the constraints you are already living with — the legacy system nobody wants to touch, the regulatory requirement that shapes half the flow, the internal disagreement that has been quietly running for a year. Design that ignores these does not survive contact with the roadmap.

After that we work in two-week cycles with a review at the end of each. You see rough work early and often. We would rather show you something incomplete on a Tuesday than something polished and wrong a month later.

We write things down. Every project ends with documentation your team can actually use after we leave — not a folder of exported artboards, but the reasoning behind the decisions, so the next person to touch it knows which parts are load-bearing.

What we turn down

We say no to more work than we take. Usually it is one of these:

• Projects where the outcome has already been decided and design is being brought in to decorate it.
• Timelines that cannot accommodate a research phase, on work where the problem is genuinely unclear.
• Anything requiring us to design patterns intended to mislead people into decisions they would not otherwise make.
• Work we are not the right studio for. We will usually suggest someone who is.

The team

Two of us come from product engineering, two from print and identity, one from research, and one keeps the studio running. That mix is the reason our interface work tends to have a typographic bias and our identity work tends to arrive with a working stylesheet attached.

We work remotely across three countries, with a shared studio space we use a few days a month. Client work happens in whichever timezone makes the meetings bearable for everyone.

Rates and availability

We work on fixed-price phases rather than hourly billing. A discovery phase is typically two to three weeks; a full product engagement runs three to five months. We are usually booking six to eight weeks out.

If you are early and not sure what you need yet, that is a fine reason to write. Half of our best projects started as an unclear email.

Get in touch