London, 2004.

ustwo is a digital product studio based in London, and its name describes its founders. Wikipedia says the company was founded by Matt “Mills” Miller and John “Sinx” Sinclair in the Shoreditch district of London in November 2004, registered as Ustwo Studio Ltd. It says the two had been friends since they were eleven, and that the name refers to that long relationship: “us two”. The design magazine Eye on Design, published by the AIGA, gave the same founding story on 15 November 2017, saying the studio was founded in London in 2004 by Matt Miller and John Sinclair, “often known as Mills and Sinx”.

The founders came from design work for phone makers. Wikipedia says Miller and Sinclair had worked at a design firm called Big Animal, which had Sony as a client, and that after founding ustwo they were hired by Sony Ericsson to help design a user interface. Further work, it says, came by word of mouth, including from the bank JPMorgan. The studio’s early direction was the young market for mobile software, and it began releasing its own apps alongside client work.

Those apps form a short timeline. Wikipedia lists MouthOff in 2009, an app in which a cartoon mouth on screen mimicked the mouth movements of the person speaking; Whale Trail in 2011, a game for children; and Blip Blop in 2012. It says MouthOff led to work for the retailer H&M, and Whale Trail to a deal with Penguin Group for an ebook and a television series.

The company has written its own name in lower case. Wikipedia describes the business as Ustwo Fampany Limited, “typically stylized as ustwo”. In 2015, Wikipedia says, the company renamed itself Ustwo Fampany Ltd, with “fampany” meant to blend “family” and “company”. The word is a made-up compound in the same spirit as the original name: both describe the people inside the business rather than the services it sells.

A studio that is not an agency.

ustwo describes itself as a studio rather than an agency, and it has said why. Eye on Design reported in November 2017 that ustwo billed itself as part studio, part agency, combining client work for companies such as Adidas, Sky and Jaguar Land Rover with self-initiated projects, including the game Monument Valley and the music platform Dice. Design lead Jay Chan told the magazine: “We really consider ourselves a studio not an agency, and a lot of that is down to making our own products as well as working with clients.”

The same piece described how the London studio looked. Visitors walking into the Shoreditch space met a life-sized cow standing on grass, among other props that the magazine likened to experiential theatre. Chan explained the thinking: “We take our work seriously but we try not to take ourselves too seriously,” he said, adding that the cow and grass were meant to tell clients they could relax. The interior works as a piece of brand communication in its own right, showing the playful tone that the name and the word “fampany” also carry.

Eye on Design said the studio grouped its client work into four strands, named Discovery & Strategy, Design & Build, Launch & Scale and Ways of Working, and assembled a new cross-disciplinary team for each brief. It also listed the studio’s own wellbeing apps, among them Pause, a relaxation app; Sway, described as an interactive meditation experience; and Moodnotes, a mood-tracking journal.

The studio has also spread beyond London. Eye on Design said that by November 2017 ustwo had outposts in Malmö, New York and Sydney, with London still the main studio. Wikipedia says that as of 2022 the company had studios in Malmö, Lisbon, Tokyo and New York as well as its London headquarters.

A name, a cow and a game.

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.

Games made in-house.

The studio’s own games became a visible part of its name. Wikipedia says ustwo released Monument Valley in 2014, and that Monument Valley 2 was presented at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2017. The British games trade title MCV reported on 16 April 2018 that ustwo’s head of studio Dan Gray described the sequel’s launch in June 2017: the team announced and released Monument Valley 2 on the same day, timed with Apple’s reveal of its new App Store at WWDC.

Gray told MCV that the team had originally planned to leave Monument Valley as a single game, but new staff who joined because they liked it brought the energy for more. “Not many people know this but Monument Valley 2 started as a selection of short stories and we ended up choosing one to make the game about,” he said. He added that the studio had also made a virtual reality game, Land’s End, in 2015, and that in April 2018 much of the team was prototyping two new ideas not connected to Monument Valley, which he declined to describe.

Wikipedia says the next major title, Assemble with Care, was one of the games available at the launch of Apple Arcade in September 2019, and that it was later released for Microsoft Windows in March 2020. Across these releases the games carry their own titles and visual worlds, while the ustwo name sits underneath as the maker. That arrangement mirrors the studio’s client work, where the client’s brand leads and ustwo’s lowercase name appears as the credit.

Over two decades the identity has held on to its origin. The company name still spells out the founders’ friendship, the 2015 renaming added a word for the staff around them, and the lowercase setting has stayed in place while the studio has added cities and games.

For a design guide, ustwo shows how a studio can build a name from a relationship and keep it light enough to carry both client credits and its own games. Compare MetaLab, a digital design studio, and R/GA, a New York agency built around digital work. For this guide we use coral, dusk violet and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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