May Made It Look Simple. The Work Was Anything But.

There is a peculiar moment in the life of a young company when the logo begins to multiply. It appears on a business card, then a website, then a login screen, then a slide deck composed at 1:12 in the morning by a founder who has discovered that Helvetica does not, by itself, constitute a brand. Soon there are six blues, four versions of the icon, and a trade-show banner that seems to belong to a regional bank. The company has not failed. It has merely become visually plural.

May built a business around that moment. Founded in 2009 by Southern California designer Garth Humbert, the studio called itself a collaborative creative agency. Its phrase for the job was better: the long-term creative department. May did not arrive, hand over a handsome mark, and vanish. It followed the mark into the places where businesses get complicated.

The archived portfolio reads like a tour through the startup economy of the early 2010s: cloud platforms, electronic signatures, building analytics, home cleaning, venture capital, autism services, travel, and a book about customer development. The sectors changed. The underlying assignment did not. Make the company recognizable, then keep it recognizable when the work moves from a rectangle on a screen to a shirt, an app icon, an investor deck, or the administrative back end nobody puts on a billboard.

“We're not just a vendor, we're an integral part of your company.”May, archived company description

The logo was the first sentence

Consider RightSignature. May helped establish its original brand - logo, style guide, and online experience - then kept going. The assignment expanded into promotional shirts, an iPhone app, and custom icons. This is the mundane magic of identity work. A logo can be approved in a conference room. A system is proven only after someone asks it to survive a dozen awkward formats.

RightScale shows the same loop over a longer arc. The cloud-management company partnered with May near the beginning of its brand for a logo, stickers, and business cards. Later, May designed back-end administrative screens for the customer website. The distance between a sticker and an admin screen is considerable. What connected them was not a medium. It was retained judgment.

That is what distinguished May from the obvious alternatives. A freelance logo designer could make the mark. A web shop could ship the site. A product firm could arrange the controls. An internal team might eventually do all three. May offered the connective tissue while a client was still too young, too lean, or too busy to assemble that department itself.

What changed after the acquisition

Copper is the useful case because it begins with a disruption. The developer-tools company had acquired several key products. The collection had grown, but its identity no longer explained the whole. May was brought in to rebrand and relaunch it. Mark, type, palette, product branding, stickers, apparel, swag - the portfolio's own inventory is almost comic in its completeness.

Nothing in the public account says the old logo was ugly. That is the wrong test anyway. What failed first was coherence. An acquisition changed what Copper contained, and the old arrangement stopped being large enough to hold it. The strategic event changed the company's mind; design made the change legible.

There is a practical lesson here. Rebrands often begin with a request to alter the symbol because the symbol is visible. Copper's list starts deeper: the company had to integrate products and tell one story. The new mark mattered, but so did the product brands and the launch pieces. A change of identity works when operations and communication move together. If only the logo changes, customers receive a costume rather than an explanation.

Pretty was not the only metric

BitTorrent complicates the portrait in another way. May worked with its in-house team on long- and short-form landing pages connected to social campaigns. The pages were built to measure and track conversion. In other words, the design had a job beyond being admired. Different lengths could be tested. Attention could be observed. The page was part artifact, part instrument.

This is easy to miss when browsing an agency portfolio, where every project becomes a still life. The operational version is messier. A landing page needs a hypothesis. An app needs states. An investor deck has to help a person make a decision. A shirt has to be something a human will voluntarily wear. May's range suggests a useful definition of design expertise: not a signature look, but the ability to translate one strategic idea across very different constraints.

Humbert's client list stretched from startups to familiar names including TechCrunch, John Mayer, Aimee Mann, and RightSignature. One recommendation on his professional profile contains the detail every brand consultant secretly wants: at the Table Project, when the team wanted something to look good, they said, “let's Garthify it.” The compliment is warm and slightly dangerous. It means the client trusted the eye. It also means much of the system lived in one person's eye.

The small-studio bargain

A studio like May offered intimacy as infrastructure. Fewer handoffs meant less translation. The person who understood why the logo looked a certain way might also be the person deciding how a button behaved or how a deck opened. For a founder-led company, that can be faster than coordinating a branding agency, a product shop, and a marketing contractor, each with its own kickoff call and favored shade of blue.

The bargain came with conditions. The client had to provide access, quick decisions, and enough continuity for the studio to learn the business. The model was less convincing for a giant organization that needed dozens of designers operating simultaneously, or for a buyer seeking the cheapest isolated deliverable. It also became fragile when every important choice depended on one founder's taste. Embedded creative works best when the shared system becomes teachable, not mystical.

In 2018, Intervals offered a tidy final example. The project-management company asked Humbert to refresh its logo but preserve the original metaphor - rings suggesting a nucleus, target, or solar system. The result was not a reinvention. It was a recalibration. Recognition remained; the expression caught up.

May's original domain is now parked, and Humbert later co-founded another Temecula studio, Perfect Strangers. Yet the May portfolio feels unusually current. “Fractional creative team” has become a fashionable service label. May's plainer formulation was better. Be the department. Learn the company. Stay long enough to notice when the blue on the deck has wandered away from the blue in the app.

The work looked simple because someone kept carrying the same thought from one object to the next. That is the trick. Simplicity was not May's starting material. It was the thing the studio manufactured.