From motion work to branding, 2005 onward.

Gretel is a New York design studio whose own name has stayed the same since it opened. The speaker page for the Brand New Conference of 2015, published by UnderConsideration, says the studio was founded by Greg Hahn in 2005, and it names Hahn and Ryan Moore as its creative leads at that time. The same page describes Gretel as a studio developing brand strategy and visual identity for clients in the entertainment, cultural and advertising industries, and it lists Netflix, Vanity Fair, IFC, VH1, Google and MoMA among the clients it had worked for.

The page gives a short profile of the founder. It describes Greg Hahn as a self-taught designer who grew up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, and it says he was influenced by modernist buildings such as the Citicorp Building and the Whitney, by the downtown post-punk scene, and later by the designers Josef Müller-Brockmann, Paul Rand, Ed Fella and Saul Bass. It says his own work had covered branding, commercial campaigns, main titles, live-action direction, editorial illustration and environmental design. It adds that Ryan Moore joined Gretel in 2010 after working as a designer, animator and art director at the studio Leroy + Clarkson.

The studio began somewhere other than branding. In an interview published by Creative Boom on 27 June 2022, Gretel’s head of design Dylan Mulvaney said that Gretel began as a motion studio. He said he joined in 2009, when the studio was working on television commercials alongside show packages and branding for television networks, and that this network work was how its move into branding started. He said the studio then shifted its focus toward branding over the following years.

In the same interview Mulvaney described how Gretel approached its work in 2022. He said the studio aimed to express a client’s brand through dynamic identity systems led by principles rather than rigid rules, carried by signature behaviours in motion, composition and interaction. He said its projects moved through five phases, starting with a phase called Discovery, in which the team immersed itself in the client’s world, followed by a phase called Strategy, run by a dedicated strategy team.

Netflix in 2014, Viceland in 2016.

The studio’s move from television networks to wider branding has a date attached to it. Mulvaney told Creative Boom in June 2022 that in 2014 Netflix approached Gretel to do its global branding because of the studio’s experience in branding television networks. He said that after the Netflix project launched, Gretel began to receive branding enquiries from a range of other industries, and that it went on to work with organisations from a one-person dance studio to large companies. The 2015 Brand New Conference page also lists Netflix among Gretel’s clients.

Two years later Gretel designed a television channel’s identity from the ground up. It’s Nice That reported on 2 March 2016 that the New York-based studio had designed the identity for Viceland, the newly launched channel of Vice, curated by the film director Spike Jonze and created through a partnership between Vice and A&E Networks. The magazine said Gretel worked closely with Jonze and Vice’s chief creative officer Eddy Moretti on what was described as an “unbrand”, a functional, adaptable identity meant to frame the different tones of the channel’s programmes. It quoted Gretel describing the result as equal parts exhibition catalogue and street flyer, and as both generic and refined.

The motion-design site Stash published the studio’s own account of the project on the same day. In that statement Gretel says Jonze and Moretti asked for a transparent and empathetic brand, one that could step back and let the images pass through undiluted. Gretel says the channel’s content fell into three types, which it called smart and curious, light and fun, and deep and dangerous, and that the design was meant to bring each show’s personality to the foreground.

Gretel’s statement also describes the motion rules. It says the way Viceland moves is an extension of its default look, which it compares to ASCII, plain text editors and early HTML, with no effects and deliberately basic animation. It says the whole system rests on two core moves, hard cuts and linear slides, which can be used alone or combined to make blinks, reveals, ripples, stretches and waves. Gretel says the low-tech approach was meant to adapt to almost any platform with basic tools, and that the brand guides set out how the channel’s point of view carried into language, design, motion and editorial structure.

A studio known by one word.

American design studios name themselves in a few recurring ways. Some put the founders’ surnames on the door, joined by a space, a comma or an ampersand, so the people and the practice share one label. Others choose a single everyday word, a noun anyone already knows, and let the studio’s work give it a second meaning. Each route says something different: a surname partnership puts individuals in front, while a common word leaves room for new partners, new offices and new disciplines.

The second surface is the case study. A studio’s website orders, photographs and writes up its client projects, and those pages act as portfolio and advertising at once. The design press then republishes the same projects, often with the studio’s own descriptions, so the way a studio frames its work travels further than its logo.

The third surface is the product a studio makes for itself. Reissued design manuals, books, type releases and small runs of objects carry a studio’s name into shops and libraries, outside any client brief. Read together, the name, the case studies and the self-published products describe a studio more fully than any single mark.

Client identities after Viceland, dated.

A run of dated projects follows the Viceland work. Transform magazine reported in 2020 that Gretel had revealed a new brand design for the Stefanie Nelson Dancegroup ahead of the company’s 20th anniversary. The magazine quoted Greg Hahn, described as Gretel’s founder, saying the team was drawn to the tension between elegance and awkwardness in Stefanie Nelson’s choreography. It said the identity was built on a series of abstract graphic forms that echo dancers’ movements, drawn by the studio from the company’s archive of performance photography, and it named Elaan Bourn as Gretel’s design lead on the project.

A publishing house followed. It’s Nice That reported on 23 April 2021 that Kodansha, the Japanese publisher founded in 1909 by Seiji Noma, had released a new brand identity and logo developed with Gretel. The magazine said the work reached from the logo to book spines, trade-show designs, brand launches and a film titled Taking Flight, directed by Juan Cabral. Gretel’s creative director Sue Murphy told the magazine that the logo represents Kodansha’s position at a crossroads of cultures and draws on Japanese hanko stamps, working both as a stamp of quality and as a monogram. The same article noted that in 2019 Gretel had updated Nike’s customisation sub-brand from Nike ID to Nike By You.

A football club came next. Creative Boom reported on 21 January 2025 that Brooklyn-based Gretel had redesigned the identity of New York City FC, taking a refresh approach that kept elements fans already valued. The article quoted creative director Justin Au and associate strategy director Ian Beckman Reagon, and said the studio held focus groups with committed supporters before building a creative platform called The Five Borough Bond around the city’s contrasts.

For a design guide, Gretel shows how a studio can carry a habit from one medium into another: a motion studio from 2005 that learned identity work through television networks, then applied rules about movement, such as hard cuts and linear slides, to channels, publishers and clubs. Compare Netflix, the client Gretel’s head of design links to its move into wider branding, and Godfrey Dadich Partners, another studio in this collection. For this guide we use orange, ink black and concrete grey with a heavy grotesque, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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