A tea company wanted younger people to see themselves as tea drinkers. Ha Design Studio answered with hot pink. Alongside black and white, it was a pointed choice for a category the project brief wanted to make feel younger. Before there was a color palette, there was a question about who might be looking.
That ordering is the interesting part. Anyone can ask for a brighter website. A more useful brief asks which assumption the website needs to disturb. For T.H.A.O. Tea Company, the intended audience was people aged 16 to 40. Ha’s design used photography, custom icons, blocky lettering and parallax scrolling. The website received the 2014 Best Beverage Mobile Website award. The recognition gives this particular design decision a public record; it does not turn a palette into a universal recipe.
01 / A tea brief, in three colors.
Illustrative palette, not official color specifications.
A brand has to leave the mood board
Ha Design Studio is a graphic design business whose services run from brand identity to print, packaging and websites. That combination matters because a company does not meet its customers in a single, beautifully controlled setting. It meets them through a presentation, a printed piece, a browser window. The materials have different dimensions and different jobs. Someone has to decide what travels between them.
A customer identified as Ira W. describes hiring the studio for a new company’s logo, business card and slide template. It is an unglamorous little list, and an instructive one. The slide template is where an identity becomes available to someone who did not design it. The business card puts it into circulation. The logo has company.
Think of the test this creates for a design buyer. Can the identity accommodate a dense slide as comfortably as an empty cover? Can an employee apply it without inventing a new visual system? Those are practical questions to bring to a studio offering this service mix. A handsome presentation of the design is only one occasion on which it will be judged.
“good design is a lot about restraint”Ha Design Studio’s published studio description
Different customers, different assignments
The customer record includes construction, corporate rebranding and consumer businesses. Kathy Cox of Sunzeri Construction describes a combined logo and website overhaul, with the studio asking questions about the company’s goals and mission. Jason Trenh of Megaforce Corporation describes a corporate rebrand with an open house only weeks away. In one account, the emphasis is understanding the business. In the other, the calendar is already applying pressure.
Neither situation is solved by announcing a favorite typeface. A rebrand involves decisions about what a business wants people to recognize; a deadline determines when those decisions have to become usable materials. These accounts make Ha’s work legible as a service. The customer arrives with a business situation. Design is the means of responding to it.
The broader customer-story directory also includes LunchBots, Pizza California, Holistic Legal Services and Three Sisters Flowers & Events. Read that range as a set of different audiences, rather than a collection of interchangeable logos. A prospective diner and a prospective legal client bring different questions to a screen. The designer’s task begins with taking those differences seriously.
The same studio, a healthcare brief
Trainer Rx supplies a second, quite different piece of evidence. In 2015, Ha Design Studio received a healthcare WebAward for the project. The Web Marketing Association’s mobile winners list also records Trainer Rx as that year’s Best Health Care Mobile Website. It appears in the published W3 Best-in-Show lineup as well.
Web + mobile recognition.
Healthcare WebAward · Healthcare MobileWebAward · W3 Best-in-Show listing
The useful comparison is between assignments, not between trophy counts. Tea asks one kind of question about perception. A healthcare website occupies another context. The awards document recognition across those contexts; they do not measure customer revenue or establish that every visitor understood every page. For a prospective client, they are a reason to examine the work and ask why its choices suited the brief.
Ha’s market position is easiest to understand at that scale: a boutique creative service that joins identity work to its applications. An independent logo designer, a specialist web agency and a larger multidisciplinary firm are all possible alternatives. Which makes sense depends on the assignment. A buyer who needs a connected set of materials has a different purchasing problem from a buyer who needs one narrowly specified asset.
The names behind the finished screen
The award credits identify Thuy Ha as founder and creative director. There is a smaller, more personal glimpse in Heartbox Photography’s 2015 portrait account. The photographer describes a fellow small-business owner who encouraged her to try things, and recalls Ha asking, “Why not?” It is an observation from a collaborator, with the modest scale and warmth that implies.
A website’s credits also complicate the idea of a lone designer producing everything. The tea project names Ha as owner and principal designer, Ozzy Rodriguez as developer, and Vivian Sachs Photography for photography. These are separate contributions to the same result. The finished screen brings them together so neatly that the visitor need never think about the division of labor.
Print belongs in this story too. West Valley College’s Summer & Fall 2018 class schedule credits Ha Design Studio with cover design, while identifying other people for publication design and production. That is a precise contribution. It shows why reading credits carefully is more useful than casually attributing an entire publication to whoever made its cover.
Buy the assignment you actually have
Ha’s business model is client design work. AgencySource lists an hourly range of $100-$149 and a minimum project size of $5,000. Those are directory figures, not a current studio quotation or the recorded cost of the tea or Trainer Rx projects. Their useful role is to frame a scope conversation, not to settle one.
A buyer can make that conversation concrete. List the materials, the person who will approve them, and the date they must be ready. Separate the work of deciding the identity from the work of applying it. Ask what the finished handover includes and which contributions require other specialists. These are suggested buying questions, not a claim about Ha’s contract terms.
- Who needs to recognize themselves?Describe the audience before choosing the look.
- Where will the design live?Name the actual screens and printed materials.
- What must it help someone do?Give each deliverable a job.
The lesson worth borrowing from the tea project is the order of decisions. Copying hot pink without the audience question would copy the most visible part and leave the reasoning behind. Equally, visual consistency cannot decide what a business offers or who it wants to serve. Those decisions need enough clarity for design to express them.
Put a business card beside a website and a slide deck. Ask whether they seem to belong to the same business, and whether each makes its own job easier. Ha Design Studio’s service mix makes that a sensible place to begin. It is a small exercise. It can produce a much better brief.