Independent product & design studio · Brooklyn, since 2017
Ashke is a small studio that partners with a handful of teams each year to ship software, design systems, and AI tools — built deliberately, documented honestly, and made to outlast the cycle that commissioned them.
— Recently shipped
Chapter I
Recently shipped
Three engagements from the past twelve months. Each row is a complete record: client, scope, year, outcome.
From the studio
On durable partnerships
Most studios pitch a discovery sprint, a phase gate, and a six-week delivery. We have tried that. It is a poor shape for the kind of work we want to make, which is software that another team inherits, extends, and quietly depends on for the next half-decade. The artefact outlives the engagement, and the engagement shapes the artefact.
An eleven-month partnership is, in our experience, the minimum unit that lets a designer learn a codebase the way an engineer would, and lets an engineer learn a brand the way a designer would. By month four, the disagreements are productive. By month nine, the work has a voice neither side could have produced alone. By month eleven, the team we hand the work to can defend it without us in the room.
The reason clients return for a second engagement — sixty-four per cent of them, across our history — is not loyalty. It is that the software we ship together is the same software their team can hold onto. We do not believe in handoff. We believe in transfer.
Chapter II
How we work, in four notes
A studio of nine senior practitioners. No juniors, no outsourcing, no account managers between you and the people doing the work.
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01
Embed for a season
We join your team's rituals — standups, design crits, planning — for the first month before writing a brief. The work begins as listening.
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02
Pair at the codebase
Designers and engineers from the studio sit beside yours — same repo, same review queue, same deploy keys. No spec decks thrown over a wall.
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03
Ship the primitives
We build components, tokens, and patterns before features. A product that rests on a documented primitive graph is a product another team can extend.
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04
Document for the next team
Every engagement ends with a written handbook — decisions, anti-patterns, the things we got wrong. Handbooks are how knowledge survives the studio.
Ashke was named one of Fast Company's Designers to Watch.
Fast Company · 2024
Chapter III
If any of this sounds like the work you need to make.
We take on a small number of new engagements each year. The first conversation is unhurried, off the record, and on us.
Or write directly — [email protected]