Essentials
From $6,000
- Single deliverable, 4-week scope
- 2 rounds of revisions
- Weekly async check-ins
- Source files on delivery
- 30-day aftercare
Sanur is an independent design and engineering studio. We build brand systems, websites, and digital products for clients who care about craft.
Selected work
Northwind · 2024
Helix Bio · 2024
Ombre Perfumes · 2023
Folio Journal · 2023
Signal Coffee · 2023
Paper Quarterly · 2022
How we help
Positioning, naming, and voice work that holds up once the rest of the system is built around it.
Logos, type, color, and the in-between rules that make a brand recognisable across every surface it lives on.
Interfaces for web and mobile apps, from first wireframes through usable prototypes to final assets ready for build.
We build the sites and front-ends we design. Clean HTML, considered animation, performance that holds up under real traffic.
Photography, illustration, and motion briefs for the assets that pull the rest of the identity into focus.
Homepage copy, product writing, case studies — the words that make the design make sense.
Honest pricing
Essentials
Studio
Bespoke
From the studio
Ana Márquez · Apr 2026 · 6 min read
Every year we think about hiring, and every year we decide against it. Here's the thinking behind a decision we keep on making.
Jonas Ek · Mar 2026 · 4 min read
Picking a body font for a new brand is harder than picking a display one. A short note on why.
Ana Márquez · Feb 2026 · 8 min read
Turning down work you could have done is one of the hardest things about running a studio. It's also, we think, one of the most important.
The studio · Jan 2026 · 5 min read
Notes on pacing, timezones, bandwidth, and the weird way a change of scenery shows you what your routine was actually doing for you.
Start a project
Tell us a bit about the project, the people involved, and what a good outcome looks like. No template emails.
Case study
Every touchpoint felt like it belonged to a different company.
Northwind has been bringing small-production European wines into the country since 1984. Their identity had grown in layers — one typeface for the trade catalogue, another for the consumer labels, a third for the website.
We rebuilt the visual system around a single voice: a wordmark drawn from the founder's handwriting, a restrained typographic palette, and a label system flexible enough to handle the 180 producers in their portfolio. The catalogue went from 240 pages of inconsistency to a quiet 160 pages that actually read like one company introducing itself.
The work took about nine months end to end, across identity, packaging templates, the trade catalogue, a small consumer-facing site, and a new set of sales materials for their reps.
Case study
Patients were calling the lab because they couldn't find their own results.
Helix runs a specialty genomic-testing lab. Their existing portal had been bolted onto the lab-information system in stages, and the support load showed it.
We redesigned and rebuilt the portal front-end. New information architecture, new visual language, clearer handling of the "results pending" state that was generating most of the support tickets. We also rewrote the patient-facing explainers for every test they offer — plain-language rewrites reviewed by their clinical team.
Support calls about results-finding dropped by roughly 60% in the first quarter after launch. Our side of the project was 14 weeks; engineering is ongoing on a small retainer.
Case study
An online presence that didn't flatten what made the brand feel handmade in person.
Ombre is a two-person perfume studio in Lisbon. They'd built a cult following selling directly at markets and wanted an online presence that read true to the rest of the brand.
We built an identity around a custom-drawn wordmark, a single colour per fragrance, and packaging that leans into texture — letterpress on cotton board, dip-edged labels, a box that closes with a paper band instead of a sticker. The site is deliberately quiet: a one-page ordering flow with each fragrance treated like a small essay.
Direct online orders now account for about a third of their revenue; the market stall continues.
Case study
Each article is a layout problem, not a template fill.
Folio is a print-first design magazine that wanted a web home without losing the thing that made the print issues worth collecting. We designed and built a custom CMS and reader experience that treats each article like a small piece of editorial design.
The reading interface borrows from the print issue's typographic rules — a generous grid, drop caps on feature pieces, pull-quotes that actually feel like pull-quotes. Behind the scenes, the editors have a visual layout tool that lets them set column widths, insert image-only spreads, and override type on a per-article basis.
Six months post-launch, session length is up, bounce is down, and the editors haven't asked us for a single template change.
Case study
Make wholesale customers confident that Signal is a real business.
Signal roasts on a five-kilo drum in a garage in Lisbon and sells to about 30 cafés across Portugal and Spain. Their site had been DIY since day one and was starting to embarrass them.
The new site had two jobs: convince wholesale buyers Signal could supply at scale, and let direct-to-consumer customers buy beans without the experience feeling like a Shopify store. We built a bespoke front-end on a headless commerce backend, foregrounding origin stories and roast-date transparency.
Wholesale enquiries doubled in the three months after launch. The DTC ordering flow is short and uncluttered, and the team can update product copy without touching the codebase.
Case study
Every department distinguishable at a glance by typographic colour alone.
Paper Quarterly is a four-issue-a-year print journal about materials, process, and small manufacturing. We designed the issue template, picked the typefaces, and handled the first four issues front-to-back.
The constraint we set ourselves: one grid, four sections per issue, every departmental treatment legible at a glance. No decorative rules, no spot illustrations, no themed covers — the type does the heavy lifting.
It's held up through 8 issues now, and the in-house team can lay out an issue without us.
Story
We can charge more, take fewer projects, and spend more time on each one.
There's a particular kind of business advice that assumes growth is the goal. If you're not expanding, you're stagnating; if you're not hiring, your good people will leave; if you're not scaling, you're leaving money on the table. For about the first two years of running Sanur, I believed most of that.
Every January we sit down and ask ourselves, seriously: should we hire a fourth? And every January we decide the answer is no, for reasons that keep changing but keep adding up to the same thing. The work we're proudest of is work where all three of us touched every piece of it. That becomes hard to engineer at four, and close to impossible at six.
This isn't a manifesto, it's a note. We might hire a fourth next year. But I wanted to put the thinking on the record, because people ask us about it all the time, and because I suspect more studios would stay small if staying small felt like a real option.
Story
The thing that makes a body face good is precisely the thing that makes it hard to evaluate in isolation.
Picking a display typeface is fun. Picking a body typeface is work. Display faces are meant to be looked at; body faces are meant to be looked through. Body faces get out of the way — and that's hard to test on a specimen sheet.
When we're building an identity from scratch, we pick the body face first. Narrow your candidates to maybe three. Set each one in a long stretch of realistic client copy, not lorem ipsum — if you don't know what the client will write about, make something up that sounds like them. Print it at the size it'll actually be read at, on paper, and live with it for a day.
A few things we've learned: x-height matters more than weight. The apostrophe shape matters more than you'd think. And anything that looks interesting on the specimen sheet will almost certainly become exhausting at paragraph length.
Story
Mostly fine is the trap.
Every project you take is a project you're not taking. That sounds obvious until you're looking at a quote that would cover three months of expenses and a project description that's mostly fine.
Mostly fine gets you six months of competent, un-memorable work that won't go in your portfolio and won't lead to the next great brief. Great briefs come from great work, and great work almost never comes from mostly-fine projects. So in some real sense, taking the mostly-fine project costs you the next great one.
We've gotten better at saying no. A few heuristics: the client and the brief need to match. If the client is sharp but the brief is muddled, we ask to help them rewrite the brief — usually for a small fee. If the brief is sharp but the client is anxious, we still say no. The other heuristic: is there a version of this project we'd want to put at the top of our portfolio a year from now? If not, it's a no — regardless of fee.
Story
The parts of our normal week that felt essential were mostly commute-shaped.
The three of us spent January working from the same villa on the south coast of Bali. It wasn't a retreat — we were on normal projects, normal calls, normal deadlines. We just happened to be doing them seven time zones off.
The day shifts earlier. First Slack messages at 5am, coffee at 6, deep work until noon, breaks stretched out, client calls pushed into evening. Counter to what we expected, our best thinking moved to the morning instead of the afternoon. None of us was willing to claim that'd stick when we went home.
Without our usual commutes, the week had an extra ten hours in it, and we spent almost all of those hours on things that turned out to matter. We're not moving. But we booked the same villa for October.