Decide, then decorate.
Colour is a decision. Type is a decision. A hover state is a decision. If we cannot say why, it does not ship.
The studio
A practice, not a department.
Dark Spark was founded in 2017 by two designers who were tired of work that looked like its category. Nine years later we are fourteen people in London and New York, still independent, still a partnership.
How we see it
The interesting brands do not look like their market. They look like themselves.
We work with companies who already know that, and with companies who have a suspicion. The job is to find the point of view, write it down so it can take a punch, and then build every surface — identity, product, site, campaign — as if the same person made all of it.
We are not a production house with a strategy slide. Strategy, design and engineering sit in the same room. If a sentence cannot be built, we do not put it in the deck.
Principles
Stay in the work.
We do not hand a brand over a wall. The people who write the strategy sit with the people who build the site.
Make it last.
A system that needs a refresh in eighteen months was not a system. We design for the fifth year, not the launch week.
Inside the studio
Fourteen people. Two cities. One table.
Strategy, identity, digital product, design engineering, motion, writing. Partners still take the first call.
Partners
Amara Cole & Julian Hart
Amara leads strategy and identity; Julian leads product and the digital practice. They met at a larger agency, left when the work started looking like the pitch, and opened Dark Spark with a single client and a room on Rivington Street.
The studio is still the size where both of them will be on your project. That is not a promise we make in a slide. It is the reason we have not grown past fourteen.
From people we have worked with
They treated the brand like a garment — structure first, decoration never.
Céleste Marin · Lumen AtelierClients now arrive at the first meeting having already understood the work.
Signe Holm · Northline