David Traina has a problem with an old hoodie. It is a Triumph Motorcycles sweatshirt, faded, stretched and full of holes. His wife and children have objected. Friends have joined the prosecution. He continues to wear it. For someone paid to help companies recognize when their appearance has stopped doing them favors, this is a rather inconvenient attachment.
He has made the contradiction useful. In his writing about rebranding, the hoodie becomes an example of how comfort can outlast good judgment. Companies, he argues, also keep wearing identities that no longer fit. Familiarity does its quiet work. Nobody particularly wants to be the person who finally opens the closet.
That small confession offers a way into Traina’s working life. The San Diego agency founder asks clients to reconsider the familiar. He has also had to reconsider his own business, his assumptions about leadership, and an early verdict on whether he belonged in design at all.
A drawing kid in hunting country
Traina grew up in rural Georgia, where the local attractions included fishing and hunting. He preferred drawing and skateboarding. During the summers before his final two years of high school were over, he worked at an agency in downtown Atlanta, describing his position with the unglamorous precision of a “production runt.” The first rung of a creative career apparently came with very little ceremony.
By 15, he had decided he wanted to become a graphic designer. His route took him to Brigham Young University, where he did not get into the competitive graphic design BFA program. He completed a BA instead. An admissions decision had narrowed his academic options; it had not changed his choice of profession.
The useful education continued after graduation, at a small design firm in Provo. He credits a patient creative director and a talented senior designer with teaching him more than school had. There is a practical distinction here between being selected for a program and being taught to do the work. Traina’s career depended on people willing to do the latter.
A client called Microsoft
Agency work took him through Salt Lake City and Seattle. He spent four years in Seattle before moving to San Diego with his wife, two children and another on the way. A small division of Microsoft became his new business’s first client. Starting an independent studio with an established technology company on the books was a consequential piece of luck, and he describes it that way.
The relationship also produced work with a clear individual credit. For Microsoft IT’s 2014 annual report, Traina was credited with creative direction and Iro Mavrogeni with art direction and design. The digital report combined responsive design, illustrations, photography and interactive graphics to explain the company’s technology initiatives.
Its published project account says the report represented 70 percent of Microsoft IT website views during its first ten weeks. The figure belongs to that particular report and period. It is a useful example of design attracting attention to material that might otherwise sit quietly under the dignified heading of corporate communications.
of Microsoft IT website views in the report’s first ten weeks, according to the project account.
The agency that resisted a single lane
Traina’s business developed a deliberately varied client list. In 2023, he described that breadth as both an advantage and a difficulty: experience travels between industries, but prospective clients can be harder to persuade when they are shopping for a specialist. A broad portfolio gives an agency more reference points. It also gives its founder more explaining to do.
The range remains visible in the work: a space destination, a brewery, a grocery chain, a technology business and a guitar maker can all require the same agency to learn a different vocabulary. Traina’s own internal shorthand for the expected standard is “abhor mediocrity.” One imagines it leaves limited room for the comforting phrase good enough.
His agency’s current leadership distributes that work across distinct responsibilities. Mark Gallo is chief creative officer, Matt Bachmann chief strategy officer, Kristi Jones director of account services, Joe Ross creative director and Brandy Maciejewski chief people officer. David Traina remains founder and CEO. The surname on the business is singular; the organization that delivers the work is considerably more plural.
“Why’d they do it? To this day I have no clue.”
David Traina, on the early colleagues who joined his studio
Three seats on a flight to the Moon
For a founder who now discusses brand values at length, Traina is disarmingly clear that he did not begin with an elaborate statement of principles. He wanted to make good creative work with people he liked working alongside. As the agency grew, that informal understanding needed more definition.
An outside facilitator supplied an exercise: imagine rebuilding Traina on the Moon, with room to bring only three colleagues. Who would come, and why? The discussion produced roughly twenty qualities. Eventually, the leadership reduced them to four values: fearless, passionate, good humans and changemakers.
Traina says those values now inform hiring and client selection. They also give employees grounds to challenge him when caution seems at odds with the company’s stated appetite for courage. That is an unusually useful consequence of writing things down. The boss acquires a standard that other people can quote back.
Space, with the past tense removed
The lunar thought experiment has a pleasing counterpart in the portfolio. Traina worked on the rebrand of Space Center Houston, the visitor destination associated with NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The assignment involved changing a perception: an institution associated with the history of spaceflight wanted its identity to accommodate the future as well.
The agency’s work covered strategy, visual and verbal identity, guidelines, environmental graphics, marketing materials and website design. A geometric grid supported a family of shapes and patterns. The central purpose was straightforward: bring people and space closer together. That thought had to survive the journey from a strategy discussion to signs, screens and public experience.
The 2022 rebrand received four AMA Houston Crystal Awards in May 2023, covering organizational rebrand, brand guidelines, website and public display. The client credited several partners, including Traina, Thinkwell Group and VISION Production Group. For Traina himself, the project was a professional pleasure he publicly singled out. Even an experienced designer is allowed to enjoy the occasional proximity to Mission Control.
A guitar needs its own voice
At Powers Electric, the design problem was closer to the ground and considerably louder. Andy Powers, the guitar designer and Taylor Guitars CEO, was bringing a new electric guitar into a category full of familiar names. The agency built the brand around the character of Powers and his instrument.
The work combined strategy, identity, marketing assets and a website. Photography emphasized natural tones and personality. An interactive color selector let visitors explore finishes influenced by Southern California surf and car culture. The task was specific: help someone encounter the guitar’s differences before they could hold it.
For a founder who looks forward to band practice and surfing, it makes a fitting entry in the agency portfolio. Those personal interests do not establish who designed each detail. They do make the distance between professional subject matter and weekend enthusiasm seem pleasantly short.
The business had to change, too
By July 2025, Traina was describing a substantially different operating model. The agency had reduced a staff of more than thirty to a core group of twelve, with contractors handling work including production, development and video. It had also become fully remote and left the Scripps Ranch office it had occupied for more than a decade.
He described the move as financially sensible and difficult. His account identified economic uncertainty, competition and AI among the pressures on the business. The figures describe the agency at that point in time. They also complicate the familiar founder story in which every passing year must bring a larger headcount and a larger room.
The current culture page describes a team spread across the country, with mentorship, funded learning, volunteer days, internships with regional community colleges and an annual gathering. Summer Fridays end at two. These are concrete arrangements for keeping a distributed creative business connected. There is a calendar behind the philosophy.
A May 2026 San Diego City College advisory membership list also includes Traina under the design program. The connection places him back near an early concern of his own career: how people enter the profession, and what happens after the classroom.
Room for a different sort of practice
Asked to plan a week for a visiting friend, Traina proposed a route through museums, beaches, music and food. His choices included the Mingei Museum, surfing in Ocean Beach and La Jolla, a concert at Belly Up and a trip across the border to Rosarito. The itinerary had more than one surf stop. His preferences were clear.
In 2025, he looked ahead to more surfing, band practice and travel as his youngest child approached leaving home. Professionally, he hoped companies would resume postponed brand projects. His manifesto argues that clear values and positioning help businesses make decisions when the world around them moves quickly. He has had ample opportunity to apply that argument to himself.
The old Triumph hoodie remains a useful final complication. Here is a designer who understands the persuasive force of familiarity well enough to admit being persuaded by it. His career has required him to keep learning, accept help and change the shape of his own company. Asking clients to leave something comfortable behind carries a little more weight when you know the attraction yourself.