Brooklyn, May 2013.

Work & Co designs and builds digital products for other companies: websites, shopping sites, mobile apps and the software that runs behind them. Wikipedia describes it as a technology and design company founded in 2013 and headquartered in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and says it opened in May 2013. It names five founders: Gene Liebel, Felipe Memória, Joe Stewart, Mohan Ramaswamy and Marcelo Eduardo. The company’s own website carries a copyright line that starts in 2013, and the firm describes its work there as solving complex problems through design and technology.

The name joins two short words with an ampersand and contains no founder’s surname. The partners have described the founding idea in their own words. Looking back in January 2024, Mohan Ramaswamy, a founding partner, said: “Ten years ago, we envisioned a new model bringing design and technology together.” The statement was reported by CXM Today on 10 January 2024, in its story on the company’s sale.

The studio spread out from Brooklyn over the following decade. Wikipedia says Work & Co opened an office in Portland, Oregon, five years after its founding, and expanded in Europe in 2019 with an office in Copenhagen. In 2022, it says, the company added offices in Los Angeles and Atlanta, taking it from six offices to eight. The list on Wikipedia also includes São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belgrade, so the firm works across North America, South America and Europe.

It also grew by buying smaller specialists. Wikipedia says that after 2019 Work & Co acquired Tendigi, a mobile app development company, and Acknowledge Digital, a data and analytics firm, and that in April 2022 it acquired the digital product consultancy Presence. Each purchase added a skill that sits close to product design: building apps, measuring how they are used and planning what to build next.

Working prototypes rather than reveals.

Wikipedia describes a way of working that the company has made part of its public identity. Work & Co, it says, shares working prototypes with clients throughout a project rather than unveiling finished work at the end. Projects are run by small, senior teams in which company partners and founders take an active, hands-on part. Teams are dedicated to one project at a time, which Wikipedia says removes the need for the timesheets common at agencies, and members work across design, product, engineering and quality assurance from the kickoff onwards.

The firm’s client work has been reported as dated events. On 13 June 2014, SmarterTravel reported that Virgin America had launched a new version of virginamerica.com after a blackout of several hours while the old site was offline. The airline stressed what it called responsive design, saying guests would be able to view and navigate the full website on any device and book more smoothly on mobile. SmarterTravel noted that each page was dedicated to a single function, with a few large images. Work & Co says the site launched in summer 2014 after a ten-month collaborative process with Virgin America, and Wikipedia credits the overhaul of the site and its flight booking to the agency.

Six years later the studio’s work appeared on New York’s subway. On 20 October 2020, the New York site 6sqft reported that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had released a real-time digital map of the subway system, created by the design and technology firm Work & Co. The map draws on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram and on the later map by Michael Hertz, combining Vignelli’s geometry with Hertz’s geography. Small grey blocks move along the coloured lines to show trains travelling between stations, and riders can click a station or a line to see the wait for the next train, elevator and escalator status and reroutes. The map replaced the Weekender, the authority’s guide to weekend service changes, and launched as a beta. Wikipedia says the project was done pro bono.

Other clients appear in Wikipedia’s account. It says IKEA named Work & Co as its digital product agency of record around 2019, and that PepsiCo hired the firm in 2018 for digital work on Gatorade, including the Gatorade.com site and the Gx and Highlights apps.

Prototypes, offices and a new parent.

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 Accenture Song.

The company changed hands at the start of 2024. CXM Today reported on 10 January 2024 that Accenture had agreed to acquire Work & Co, which it described as a digital product company that blends design, technology and innovation. The deal placed the studio inside Accenture Song, the creative arm of the consulting group. David Droga, chief executive of Accenture Song, opened his statement with the line “Game recognises game,” and said Song would keep bringing more technology expertise and creative work into what he called the Song family. Wikipedia says the purchase was completed on 22 January 2024. Accenture has owned Work & Co since 2024.

Ramaswamy’s statement in the same announcement set out how the founders saw the move. He said Work & Co and Accenture Song shared a belief in the power unlocked by pairing creativity and technology, and that the studio looked forward to working with Accenture Song’s scale and sector expertise. Wikipedia lists the company’s headquarters as Dumbo, Brooklyn, after the deal, and the work.co website still presents the firm under its own name, with a Brooklyn contact and a copyright line running from 2013 to 2026.

For Work & Co, the name has stayed the same since the Brooklyn opening in May 2013, through the offices in Portland, Copenhagen, Los Angeles and Atlanta and the purchases of Tendigi, Acknowledge Digital and Presence. The ampersand that sits between the two words has been part of it throughout.

The company’s dated projects also show the range of a product studio’s output. A booking site for an airline in 2014 and a live transit map for a city authority in 2020 are both software rather than advertising campaigns. Each was reported at launch by an independent outlet, one by SmarterTravel and the other by 6sqft, and each is still tied to the Work & Co name in the company’s own account of its work.

For a design guide, Work & Co shows how a product studio can keep a short, plain name through growth and a change of owner, letting its work carry the identity. Compare Accenture, the group that has owned the studio since 2024, and Instrument, another digital studio. For this guide we use brick, graphite and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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