London, 1994.

AKQA began in a basement in London in 1994. The online marketing title ClickZ, in an interview published on 26 June 2012, said Ajaz Ahmed started the agency there that year. MediaPost and Campaign Asia, reporting on 17 October 2024, also gave 1994 as the founding year.

Ahmed’s route into the business ran through technology companies rather than advertising. ClickZ said he grew up on the western edge of London, where many technology firms had offices, and worked as a teenager for the software company Ashton-Tate and for Apple Computer, where he heard people talk about technology and media converging. He was taking university business courses, it said, when he decided to leave and start his own internet agency. With a small group of co-founders, he went after a short list of large brands, starting with Richard Branson’s Virgin.

The name is not an abbreviation of a company description. Ahmed told ClickZ that he was living in a house with two friends, each of whom had four names, and that the three of them used their initials as nicknames. His was AKQA, and it seemed to him an interesting name for a start-up. He said it set the business apart from the start and continued to do so.

Ahmed also described how the founding team came together. James Hilton answered an advertisement Ahmed placed in the design magazine Creative Review. Matthew Treagus was introduced to him by a friend in the technology field. Dan Norris-Jones was headhunted to be the company’s chief technology officer because Ahmed wanted someone strong in both mechanical engineering and software. The four, Ahmed said, were all about the same age.

The agency has kept those four capitals through the merger, the sale and the restructurings described below.

From a basement to Jermyn Street.

Ahmed has said the company thought of itself as closer to a product maker than an advertising agency. He told ClickZ in 2012 that hiring an engineer as chief technology officer gave AKQA’s methods a physical, mechanical-engineering and product-design mindset rather than that of conventional software development, and that the business was more akin to a product or software company than a typical agency. He said the company focused on product development rather than advertising during the 1990s.

The agency’s premises were part of how it presented itself. Ahmed told ClickZ that, once it left the basement, AKQA had a studio in Chelsea, then a house in Kensington, and then several floors on Jermyn Street in Mayfair, between a management consultancy and a magazine publisher. He described the Jermyn Street office as built from steel, glass, oak and limestone, with glass lifts, and said he missed that office because of its design and materials. The palette on this page borrows those materials.

He also said he turned down interviews in the late 1990s, when British media were looking for stories about young internet entrepreneurs, so that the company’s work would speak for it. He said the agency avoided taking projects from loss-making dot-com start-ups during the boom of that period.

The agency reached the United States by merger. ClickZ reported that a 2001 merger with the San Francisco advertising agency Citron Haligman Bedecarré brought AKQA to the city and established San Francisco as its US hub. In the same interview, Ahmed spoke about Velocity, a book he wrote with Stefan Olander, then a vice president at Nike, as a guide to working in the digital age.

Initials, agencies and a moving palette.

Digital-agency identities tend to start from a name rather than a picture. Many of these businesses picked short words, clipped coinages or sets of initials that fit a browser tab, a social handle and a conference badge equally well. Typography then carries much of the personality: a slash or an ampersand between two parts of a name, an all-lowercase setting, or a single word in a heavy sans can act as the logo with little else added. Because the name has to sit on screens of every size, simple letterforms that survive being shrunk to a favicon are a practical requirement as much as a style choice.

The agency’s own website is usually its main brand surface. Case studies, project films and interactive demos stand in for the shop window, so the grid, motion and type rules of the site say as much about the agency as its logo does. Some agencies also release their own apps, games or tools, and those products carry the studio name into app stores and onto phones that have nothing to do with client work.

For a designer, the useful lesson is how an identity built mostly from type, layout and motion keeps a recognisable voice while changing constantly from project to project.

Inside WPP.

AKQA joined the London-based communications group WPP in 2012. ClickZ reported on 26 June 2012 that WPP had agreed the previous week to buy the agency, and that Ahmed was leaving his role as chairman to return to the post of chief executive. MediaPost and Campaign Asia both confirmed in October 2024 that WPP acquired AKQA in 2012. WPP has owned AKQA since 2012.

Under WPP, AKQA gathered specialist design studios around it. The Drum reported on 6 December 2021 that AKQA had acquired majority stakes in the architecture and interiors studio Universal Design Studio and the industrial design consultancy Map Project Office in 2018. In the same report, it said WPP had bought a majority stake in the London branding and design agency Made Thought, founded in 2000 by Paul Austin and Ben Parker, and that Made Thought would be integrated within AKQA. The three studios together formed a collective called The New Standard, with each keeping its own name.

The agency’s place in the group changed again in 2020. MediaPost reported in October 2024 that, since 2020, AKQA had operated alongside its sibling agency Grey within the AKQA Group, which Ahmed led as chief executive.

The founder left in October 2024. MediaPost and Campaign Asia reported on 17 October 2024 that Ahmed had resigned as chief executive of AKQA Group after 30 years, and that a successor was being sought. In the interim, MediaPost said, the group would be run by the existing leadership teams at AKQA and Grey, with WPP’s chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius overseeing the business as interim chair. The four initials Ahmed chose in 1994 stayed on the door.

For a design guide, AKQA shows how a personal nickname can become a durable business name precisely because it means nothing to anyone else, leaving the work and the spaces to carry the identity. Compare Made Thought, the London studio that joined AKQA in 2021, and Map Project Office, the industrial design consultancy AKQA has held a majority of since 2018. For this guide we use limestone, steel and graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AKQA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.