London, January 2015.

Koto is a branding and design studio that began in London in January 2015. Design Week, in a profile by Rob Alderson published on 11 February 2025 to mark the studio’s tenth birthday, described its opening week. The artist Mr Bingo had offered the founders a desk in the corner of his east London studio, where they set up two dining chairs borrowed from the family of co-founder Jowey Roden. It was cold, the internet connection was poor, and the studio was ready to announce itself with a project for Getty Images already lined up.

That project fell through on the Thursday of the first week, Design Week reported. Chief executive James Greenfield told the magazine that he and Roden left early the next afternoon because there was nothing left to do, and that on the following Monday they started Koto again. The third co-founder, Caroline Matthews, had to complete an existing contract and joined a few months later.

Greenfield came to Koto from other studios. Design Week said he had worked as a senior designer and then in creative director roles at Airside, Man vs Machine and DesignStudio, and that at DesignStudio he worked on the Airbnb rebrand. He told the magazine that the attention that work received gave him the confidence to set up on his own. He also described a long interest in the business side of a studio, saying that by his mid-twenties he had become as curious about what a managing director did as about type.

The three founders now hold titles that split the business between them. A news item from the law firm Lewis Silkin, dated 8 April 2025, named Greenfield as chief executive, Matthews as chief operating officer and Roden as chief creative officer. The same item said the founders had worked on the studio’s investment deal alongside a fourth member of the leadership team. The structure keeps the three original names at the top of a business that has since spread well beyond the borrowed desk.

A name chosen to move away from surnames.

Many design studios are named after the people who start them. Koto’s founders chose a different route. The design publication The Brand Identity, in an article by Poppy Thaxter dated 15 September 2022, said the founders sat down before launch to decide what the studio should be called. They wanted a short, memorable name with meaning and a story behind it, and settled on Koto, which the article describes as a Japanese word for an emotional experience that goes beyond pure aesthetics.

The same article reported that the choice was meant to move the studio away from the convention of using founders’ surnames. Greenfield told The Brand Identity that, in the founders’ view, a studio is about more than the people who set it up, and that they wanted a brand the whole team could feel was theirs. A word that belongs to no single person can be carried by new partners, new studio heads and staff in other countries without changing the sign on the door.

The visual identity followed quickly. The Brand Identity said the founders worked out the studio’s values in a brainstorming session on the roof of Tate Modern, then narrowed and refined them. Roden and Greenfield designed the logo and the wider brand together in the studio’s first few weeks. The article described Koto as recognisable by its friendly logo and a vivid yellow, and quoted Greenfield joking that branding the business at its later size would have been much harder.

The studio’s own brand has also had to keep pace with its growth. In the 2025 Design Week profile, Greenfield said Koto was building a new website and that he had deliberately stayed out of the project, so as not to slow it down by signing off every detail. He also told the magazine that he was surprised by how many creative studios sell strategy, vision and mission to clients without setting out a strategy of their own, and said Koto’s leaders had written a clear one for the studio a few years earlier.

Names, websites and offices.

A design studio’s name is one of its first design decisions. Some studios carry the surname of a founder, a choice that ties the business to a person and to that person’s reputation. Others pick an invented or borrowed word, which can travel more easily between countries, survive changes of leadership and leave room for the people who join later. Both routes have to work as a wordmark, a web address and a line in a client’s credits.

Because a studio sells the work it does for others, its own brand surfaces are unusual. The studio website is often the main shop window, and its case-study pages do much of the talking: each one sets client work inside the studio’s own grid, typefaces and tone of voice. Job advertisements, talks, social posts and short films about the studio’s process add to the picture.

Offices and partnership structures can also become part of the identity. A second or third office changes how a studio describes itself, and a group of partners or a new owner can change who signs the work. For a designer, the useful lesson is how a studio keeps a consistent voice while showcasing many other brands.

From one room to five cities.

The studio’s early client work set its direction. Design Week reported that, after the false start, Koto was approached by Coca-Cola to design a set of emoji, a job the studio was given two weeks to complete. The client then put Koto on the pitch list for the Fanta rebrand in 2015, which the studio won. Greenfield called that win a turning point in the studio’s history.

A second turning point came in 2018. Design Week said Koto lost the pitch to rebrand Uber to Wolff Olins, and that Uber had told the studio it worried the job would overwhelm a team of Koto’s size at the time. Greenfield described the result as a wake-up call that led Koto to build up its operational layers. The same period saw the first two studios outside London: Roden moved to California, where the studio was taking on more technology work, and the designer Tim Williams set up a studio in Berlin. Koto also broadened its work beyond branding into campaigns, digital and motion design, the magazine reported.

People have moved between Koto and its peers as well. Adweek reported on 27 February 2019 that Louis Mikolay, previously a creative director at Koto in London, had relocated to join the San Francisco office of the New York studio Collins as an associate creative director.

By February 2025, Design Week listed studios in London, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin and Sydney, and named Koto’s holding company as The Rat and Two Horses. In April 2025, Lewis Silkin said Koto had announced a strategic investment from the private equity firm WestBridge, which widened the shareholder base beyond the founders to reflect the broader leadership behind the studio’s five locations. Greenfield, Matthews and Roden stayed in their roles.

For a design guide, Koto shows how a studio can choose a borrowed Japanese word over a founder’s name and carry one bright colour across several countries. Compare Collins, a studio named after its founder, and Wolff Olins. For this guide we use yellow, olive ink and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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