Mexico City and New York.

Savvy, usually written Savvy Studio, is a branding and architecture practice that works from Mexico City and New York. PRINT magazine chose its co-founder and creative director, Rafael Prieto Carbajal, as its Designer of the Week on 4 December 2015. The profile gives the firm’s name simply as Savvy, describes it as a Mexico City and New York City based branding and architecture studio, and says Prieto studied at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. It adds that the studio’s reach had extended from Mexico to New York, Kuwait and beyond, and that he was due to speak on branding and packaging at the HOW Design Live conference in Atlanta in 2016.

Prieto described the studio’s method to PRINT in a few words: personal, forward, artsy and crafty. He said Savvy did not have a type of design so much as a type of concept and creative process, and that once a concept was in place the team designed whatever the brand needed in order to communicate with its audience as directly as possible. At the time, he said, the studio was working on a food market between SoHo and Chinatown and on a hotel in Brooklyn, and it hoped one day to design a museum identity and a city’s wayfinding system.

The two-city arrangement is set out in an interview published by Surface on 21 October 2020, which calls Prieto the founder and creative director of an architecture and branding practice based in New York and Mexico City. Prieto told the magazine that a business partner led the studio in Mexico, that each city had its own team, and that the two worked together on some projects depending on the technique required and who was the right fit. He described the arrangement as a constant cultural exchange between designers from different countries with different specialties.

Research, culture and craft.

Savvy describes its own work as a dialogue between design, art, function and emotion, and its website groups identity, interiors, art direction and editorial projects together. In the 2020 Surface interview Prieto said the common thread across very different clients was the process rather than a style. The studio, he said, is founded on research and culture: every project has a cultural background and a provenance, and the team tries to find out about it and embrace it before becoming creatively involved in a concept and translating that knowledge into a brand or a space.

He also described how the studio makes things. Prieto told Surface that much of its inspiration came from music, painting, performance and poetry, and that after a concept’s foundations were set the team explored ways to make it visually interesting and real. The studio draws many of its logos by hand, he said, and prints on fabrics and different papers to give them personality and texture, before bringing the results back into digital form. He described the aim as a merger of craftsmanship and innovation.

Prieto linked branding and architecture through the idea of experience. He said the practice was interested in creating a whole experience and defining every moment of interaction between a maker and the people meant to enjoy the result. His example was Mast Books in Manhattan, an art bookshop that was moving into a larger store. Savvy worked on both the brand and the space, he said, choosing typefaces and materials that would keep the spirit of the original shop so that regular customers would not feel intimidated by the change, and arranging the new layout so that books could be displayed with more calm.

The studio also works on editorial projects. grain edit described on 22 May 2017 a brochure Savvy made for Index, an art book fair for independent publishers, which used a range of paper sizes and a brightly coloured flier inspired by the variety of styles and materials found in contemporary publications.

A studio name that names an attitude.

Design studios in Latin America and Australia build their own identities from a small set of surfaces. The first is the name. Some studios carry a founder’s name, which puts a person at the front of the business; others choose a short invented word or a pair of letters, which leaves room for new partners, new offices and changes of ownership. When a founder’s name is later shortened or reframed, the change itself becomes part of the studio’s story.

The second surface is language. Studios that work across borders often publish their websites in two languages, and the choice of which language comes first, and how the two sit side by side, says something about the audience a studio expects. A short coined name tends to read the same in Spanish, Portuguese and English, which is one reason such names travel well.

The third surface is the work. Case studies on a studio’s website, studio books and printed publications act as portfolio and advertising at once. How a studio photographs, writes up and orders its client projects often says more about its identity than its own logo does.

A bookshop of its own, and dated client work.

One of the studio’s Mexico City projects is its own. In an interview with Design Milk published on 6 August 2019, Prieto, as creative director of Librería Casa Bosques, said that seven years earlier the team had been looking for a new home in Mexico City for “our studio Savvy”. Walking in Colonia Roma, he saw a Franco-Mexican house and went in; the space was too big for the studio alone, so he decided to give a proper place to chocolates and to his long-standing passion for art books. He explained that the name translates as “House of the Wood”, chosen for the sense of peace he feels among trees. Our Casa Bosques guide covers the chocolate in more detail.

Prieto told Design Milk that the shop’s furniture and shelving had been changed over time because the team was, in his words, a design studio that sometimes got bored of looking at the same thing. He listed other retail work by the studio: a store about design and mezcal in the Mitte district of Berlin, the Etudes shop at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, a pop-up for Outdoor Voices, and shops for the eyewear brand Retrosuperfuture in Los Angeles and Dubai.

In New York, Dezeen reported on 3 July 2018 that Savvy had designed the interiors, branding and illustrations of Summer Day Cafe, an Italian-American restaurant in Tribeca. The magazine said the scheme drew on the beach photographs of Joel Meyerowitz, with a palette of yellows, whites and reds taken from his book A Summer’s Day, signage made from pictures in different typefaces and techniques, and striped booths, chrome-edged tables and line drawings of seagulls and sailboats. In Surface in 2020 Prieto picked out a publication made with A Magazine, curated by Acne Studios, about the company’s headquarters in a former Czech embassy building designed by the architect Jan Bočan, photographed by Philippe Chancel.

For a design guide, Savvy shows a studio whose identity work runs from a hand-drawn logo to the shelves of a shop. Compare the Mexico City studio Futura and the Monterrey studio Anagrama. For this guide we use yellow, red and deep blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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