Take five with POV Budapest: how Alright Studio builds work to last — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Alright Studio spent much of the past half-decade finding out how much it could do, and is now more interested in what it can do exceptionally well. For the Brooklyn-based studio, founded in 2017, that means a smaller core team, closer collaboration and more emphasis on design as a craft. It thinks less in terms of separate disciplines, because the big idea has to work across an identity, website, product and campaign. At POV Budapest 2026, Partners Spencer Joynt and Garrett DeRossett are giving a talk called ‘After We’re Done’ – about what happens to the work once it leaves the studio. In this interview, they explain why the first week of a project is more talking than presenting, what the Rugiet relaunch with Pentagram showed them about a strong identity not needing to be everywhere, and the kind of work that makes them nervous.
TBI Hi Spencer and Garrett! How are things?
AS Good! Busy, as always, but good. We’re in a bit of a transitional moment at Alright – getting a bit leaner, more focused, and as per usual, thinking pretty deliberately about what we want the studio to be next. And, of course, we’re very excited to come to Budapest. :)
TBI What’s new with Alright Studio in 2026?
AS This year, in some ways, marks a bit of a return to our roots. We spent a good chunk of the past half-decade or so figuring out how much Alright could do. Right now we’re more interested in figuring out what we can do exceptionally well.
That means a smaller core team, closer collaboration, and putting more emphasis on design as a craft. We’re trying to preserve the looseness and curiosity that fueled our early years while taking what we’ve learned to apply to increasingly more complex work.
TBI How has the work the studio takes on changed in recent years?
AS For most of our existence, digital and technology became an increasingly standalone part of our practice. We still love that work, and it’s not going anywhere, but we’re thinking more holistically. What’s the big idea, and how many forms can it convincingly take? Identities, websites, products, campaigns and motion systems are all just different places where the idea needs to be.
The scale of our work is erring on the side of more complexity, but in a weird way that’s made us simplify how we think about them. We’re continuing to focus on finding the ‘Big Idea,’ the thing underneath all our individual design decisions, earlier in the process. A good concept needs a strong yet flexible backbone, and we’re learning that if you can arrive at that moment earlier and more collaboratively with our clients, it gets everyone on the same page in a way that creates interesting outputs with a purpose.
To some extent, that’s why we’re moving away a bit from thinking of ourselves as a series of disciplines. If the ideas are actually good, they should be able to travel across use cases and dimensions.
TBI What happens in the first week of a new project?
AS A lot more happens than it used to. Historically, the agency model is pretty theatrical. You disappear for two weeks, come back with a presentation, everyone reacts, and then you go away again. It can be a tough pill to swallow, but it’s become clear that this model is losing its ability to serve anyone.
Clients want more reassurance right now, which can sound like a recipe for endless meetings, but we posit that the opposite can be true. Showing someone rougher, more conceptual work with more time for conversation can build a tremendous amount of trust. Once someone understands why you’re pursuing an idea, they’re a little more likely to follow you somewhere unexpected.
So the first week is a lot of talking, looking and preparing. We don’t want our work to be a manufactured ‘reveal’ moment. It’s more important to find the thing, together, that we want to protect through the project duration.
We get nervous about work that doesn’t have much at stake.
TBI What makes you say no to a project?
AS While there are obvious red flags that will turn us away – attitude, ethical concerns, budget, etc – we don’t always have the luxury of being choosy. That means we look more for opportunities, and those can take a variety of forms. Sometimes the project is for minimal or no money, but the reward is a culturally significant project with a unique problem to solve. Sometimes it’s a big budget. And sometimes it’s just the gut feeling you get when all the personalities click.
Our craft matters enormously to us, but we want craft to be in service of an idea and a function. We get nervous about work that doesn’t have much at stake – and we’ve found that those types of clients tend to be the most unpredictable. In many ways, we try to say ‘yes’ to the things that allow us the widest range of possibilities, and we say ‘no’ to the ones where our input simply wouldn’t be helpful. Every successful studio has its ‘edge’ or ‘look,’ and while we want to be a shape-shifter to some extent, it would be a disservice to our clients to force our outlook on something that obviously could be more precisely executed upon by one of our peers.
A strong identity shouldn’t need to be everywhere to be felt strongly.
TBI Which piece of work from the past year are you most glad you took on?
AS It might be cliché, but we are generally glad we took on most things – every new engagement is an opportunity to learn how to do the next one better.
But, specifically, we worked with Rugiet on a new e-commerce experience for their brand relaunch. It started as a fairly straightforward website project and became almost the opposite. Their business was evolving quickly, and the requirements necessarily changed often as a result. Eventually we were working against an aggressive timeline to rethink and rebuild a pretty substantial digital product.
We had the opportunity to work alongside Pentagram to collaboratively develop Rugiet’s visual and tonal voice through design. Their identity gave us a really strong foundation, built around this idea of verticality and progress. Our challenge was finding out how that idea could become a website without just repeating the same visual motif everywhere. Thus, it forced us to stop treating brand, design, development, content, and conversion as separate problems and just solve what was in front of us, together. We couldn’t be too precious, and our work had to be remarkably flexible.
I think we’re glad we did this one because it reinforced something we’re thinking about a lot – a strong identity shouldn’t need to be everywhere to be felt strongly. Our brief was to understand Rugiet’s core idea well enough to know when to turn it up and down into something that was genuinely interesting, but at the end of the day, useful.
TBI What would you like to see more and less of in the design industry right now?
AS Probably less preciousness, less bullshit, and more collaboration.
There’s so much theatre in what we do. Big declarations about changing the world, overly complicated explanations for relatively simple ideas, and rigid processes designed to prove our expertise. We believe strongly in what we do, but we also think a certain amount of realism and humility makes the work better. ‘Changing the game’ isn’t really an actionable strategy.
We’d like to see more openness about where an idea can go once others get involved. Clients can make our work better. Other agencies can make our work better. Some of our favourite projects have involved teaming up with people we respect because they bring something to the table that we don’t. Sometimes that collaboration is even what turns a ‘maybe’ into an emphatic ‘yes’ before the project even starts.
Ultimately, we’d like to see less emphasis on protecting the sanctity of a ‘process’ and more on getting somewhere interesting together. Expertise gives us the confidence to be flexible, not an excuse to be rigid and combative.
TBI Your talk with Garrett at POV is called ‘After We’re Done.’ What’s the idea behind it?
AS It’s all about what happens to our work once it leaves the studio. Whether we’re building a brand or a digital experience, the work will inevitably evolve once it’s handed over. It gets interpreted, stretched, misused and even improved – and rather than fight that, we’re trying to design for it.
A big part of that is understanding who will actually inherit our work when the scope ends. Maybe it’s an experienced in-house team, or a marketing lead, or somebody’s cousin who just graduated from design school. These people will inevitably need very different things from us.
In that way, our talk is focused on how to design beyond the handoff. The goal isn’t to make something impossible to mess up. That’s probably impossible anyway. We’d rather set up the work to have a fighting chance of staying good once we part ways.
TBI POV’s 2026 theme, ‘The Act,’ is about design systems moving out of controlled environments and into everyday use. How are you thinking about that?
AS It feels pretty perfectly aligned with the premise of our talk.
A design system is often something that operates under perfect laboratory conditions. Everyone understands the rules. The designer is right there. Of course it works. But what happens when someone needs a format you didn’t plan for? The strategy changes abruptly? There’s a new product launched? Or, simply, someone just decides they don’t like one of our rules?
We used to think that endless rigour and precision could anticipate any scenario. And in many ways, yes, part of the way you prepare for this is to be incredibly detailed. But people will do what people do. And we want to instead give those people a good enough understanding of why our work matters and what it is saying so that they can make good decisions on things we didn’t know about when we made it.
That’s why collaboration can matter so much. If someone has seen the sketches and been shown the dead ends, they’ll get more than a design system. They’ll get all of the context as to what should be protected, and what can evolve.
At some point the work stops belonging to us.
TBI What do you hope people take away from your talk?
AS Maybe a little bit of permission to loosen their grip.
We’re going on nearly a decade of service, and each new year brings some crystallisation of what we’ve learned prior, or a reason to break that learning back down. Our craft is highly important, and we can be, admittedly, very particular designers. But at some point the work stops belonging to us, and that’s the entire point.
We think it is worth considering that our goal shouldn’t be to prevent our clients from messing things up, but instead to champion the idea that we’re a necessary but early first step in retaining something meaningful.