We emptied the office for two weeks and shipped anyway.
Cover story · The studio
On 12 August the studio locked its own front door at 11 PM.
People had stayed back to empty the place themselves. Chairs stacked, systems bubble-wrapped, and somewhere in the clear-out, Saurabh's two-year-old jeans. Mejo handed over his car so everyone could get their gear home. Ekta stayed and documented the day, photographs and video, so there would be something to look back on. Forty-five people walked out of a building they had outgrown and did not come back for two weeks.
That afternoon Jiyash photographed someone working from under a desk, laptop on knees, monitor already boxed. Work under table, he called it. It was taken shortly before Zakia's career-growth presentation, which went ahead that evening in a building being emptied around it. At 9:42 PM Ekta posted the empty floor: "Hope you guys like the new design…. And a last view of what it looked like."
Akhila, watching it happen: "It felt like carrying souvenirs of ED's journey up a floor." And: "It's wild to think this company started 6 years ago with a handful of people and a dream. Today, we're 45 strong."
The renovation had been coming. What had not been planned was what forty-five people do when the room they work in stops existing.
Photographs of the site arrived in the group chat most evenings. Zakia, on 18 August, watching the walls go up faster than the work: "This construction is going faster than our own deadlines."
Saurabh found Gather on day one. Not day three, not the following week. Mansi, who works remotely and knows both sides of this: "What I truly want to appreciate is, that the solution for the whole team was there on Day 1 of switching to remote, it didn't take you long. And that's the kind of thinking on your feet is unmatched."
Stand-ups happened in a virtual office. Good mornings came through screens. Coffee breaks were taken from hometowns, apartments and PGs. By 14 August the journal called it the holy grail, and by the 18th some people had started working out of the studio anyway, lunch arranged, because a virtual office is still not an office.
The work did not pause for any of it. SemiCab went live. SISA AI launched. Recursion Partners kicked off on 13 August, the day the team went remote. Ashik and Varsha closed a fifteen-second animation from scratch in ten hours. Nanki and Nehal finished a stop-motion launch film for a book that then went to number two on Amazon. At 3:22 in the morning on 16 August, Vignesh posted a photograph of Nanki shooting that film on a cutting mat at home, lit by a desk lamp. Realtime render engine, he called it.
Ekta and Aishu designed the new space. Aishu is not on the team. She is an outside collaborator the studio has worked with before, including on TheMVP's space design, which means that when Everything Design came to design its own office it called the same person it calls for client work. Nanki drew the illustrations for the fabric divider. The wall that will read "Design your right to win" has not happened yet. For now there are empty photo frames.
On 26 August a client at Z47 asked Athira how the remote working was going. Athira told her the on-site team unanimously hated it and could not wait to get back in. The client was taken aback: "This is the first time I'm hearing people not liking WFH, this is a reflection of the great culture that you guys have built."
On 24 August the office fridge sold in under five minutes. On the 31st everyone came back. Akhila had the place set up before lunch, then stood at the kitchen counter at DayOne making sure the food kept coming, and ate last. The 31st was also Aditi's last day. She got one day in the new place.
And there is an orange door.
"so finally we got ourselves an orange door. a lot to be proud of, not just the door. always grateful to EVERYONE who helped us get here and to those who are supporting us in staying here. The privilege is hard to explain."
Five clients said congratulations on that post. Dharshan, the founder of SISA. Giridhar at Grundfos. Nihar at SuperErgo. Aakash at Becoming Quotient. Ann at Arya.ag, who has been watching and cheering the studio from the sidelines, in her words, for a long while.
At the townhall on 8 August, one phrase kept coming back. Nobody planned it. Figure it out.
The films were the thing. Nanki and Varsha pulled one off with Athira, Vignesh, Mehak, Rajashri, Siva and Akshay. The other teams' films were good too. Watching the work that goes into it is a privilege, like always.
Neha has been to four of these now, and wrote afterwards that most of it comes together in one or two nights of work: "Every quarter I come home a little more grateful to be part of a team that keeps pushing itself, figuring it out as we go, one absurd, brilliant idea at a time."
Looks like we are.
Athira, Sanjana, Swathi, Arpan and Saurabh cut the ribbon. All five have been here long enough to have watched the studio become this.
Second highlight · Becoming Quotient
BQ ran as May's second highlight. It is back, because August was the month it stopped being a project and started being a thing people say out loud.
Mejo, on the appreciation board, to Sijeesh and Arpan: "Signing up BQ have left an ever lasting impact on Everything Design and on me."
Sanjana, on the same board: "this project means so deeply to me. It heals me everytime I work on it. Definitely a very important Becoming in my career."
In August the work spread across the studio. Sanjana, Swathi and Ekta on the brand. Samiksha on the guidelines and variables. Tejus found an outside vendor to colour-grade the BQ photos, a capability the studio does not have in-house and now knows where to get. Felix started the mascot animation. The brand font, with the symbol built into the typeface, shipped in July.
Then the founder, Aakash, turned up in the comments on a photograph of our own front door. Mejo replied: "Aakash becoming :)"
In this issue
Launches first, then the film room, then the new work, then everything that kept moving while the building did not exist. In no order.
From the editor
We took the roof off our own head and kept working.
That is the honest summary. On 13 August forty-five people started working from apartments, PGs and hometowns because the studio was being rebuilt. On 31 August we walked back in. In between, a website went live, a launch happened, a book hit number two on Amazon, six projects signed, and a fifteen-second animation got made from scratch in ten hours.
None of it was smooth.
Bharat Atomics did not go live, and it was not our timeline that failed. The technology page, the style guide and the final investor deck are all done, and the launch is waiting on decisions that are not ours to make. That is the honest version and we would rather print it than a sentence about momentum.
PrimeWealth did not go live either. It is waiting on compliance approval, which is nobody's fault and still the fourth month we have not been able to write the sentence we said in July we would stop writing. Mansi ran a marketing post for them anyway.
SemiCab did go live, and it is not finished. A few pages are still to come. We would rather say that than let a launch imply a full stop.
Leumas has not started. August was the selling and the scoping, and the confirmation came through in September. It is in the forecast, not the log.
Two things worth naming, both structural.
The first is that when the office disappeared the studio did not slow down, and the reason was not resilience. It was that Saurabh had a working substitute in place on day one, and Sushant is bringing structure to how the team runs, and Sijeesh is moving into project management to hold it together. Systems, not spirit.
The second is that we are getting better at saying what we cannot do. Tejus found an outside vendor for photo colour grading rather than pretending we do it well. Jiyash flagged the LightMetrics map problem to the designer immediately instead of absorbing it. Yash pushed for a single source of truth per project after a dev handoff went sideways. Athira inherited LightMetrics in a terrible state and said so, then got it back on track with Akshay and Sijeesh.
And one more, from the founder, in the group chat on 26 August: "What took u from 0 to 1 and the people which took you from 0 to 1 is generally told is not the best to take from 1 to 10. I want to challenge this and make it happen. That mindset shift will be little painful, but worth it."
The phrase from the townhall on 8 August was not a slogan. Nobody wrote it on a wall. It just kept coming up, in a room with two new joiners in it, and then it kept happening for three more weeks.
Month at a glance
Sectors this month
Venture capital · AI · Investment banking · Real estate · Finance · Healthcare · Water technology · Digital marketing · Education technology · Cybersecurity · Nuclear energy · Energy · Energy technology · Electrical infrastructure · AI infrastructure · Semiconductor · Video telematics · SaaS · Logistics and supply chain · AEO · Computer hardware · Enterprise IT hardware solutions · Career growth platform · Photography · Education · Risk and compliance
SemiCab is live. The homepage was approved and moved into development with feedback, QC and fixes fully closed out, and Yash kept it moving alongside four other tracks. A few pages are still to come, so this is a launch and not a finish. Mansi built the contact page and the Lottie animation.
SISA AI officially launched at sisa.ai. SISA works in payment security, and the relationship runs long enough that its founder, Dharshan, turned up in the comments when we posted a photograph of our new office door.
Vecton raised 6 crore on 11 August. We delivered their website on the 12th. Vecton is a repeat client, and the relationship started with a rename: Graphik AI became Vecton, which in the founders' words made them look techy and equipped them with the right arsenal. Their brand refresh opened our April dispatch. Jiyash ran Kandou and Vecton in parallel and landed both. Harishma oversaw her first project on this one. Mansi built the solutions page.
The Tabl explainer and the Tabl teaser both went out. Mukund wrote back on 7 August: "At first pass, it's come out as well. Any chance you can do some audio magic and make my voice sound like Amitabh Bachan? Just kidding." He appreciated the team again on the 21st. This was the first project after Everything Motion and Everything Film merged, and Felix's read on it is that the team worked as one unit with very minimal to no hiccups. Quantifai have since come back for a third film.
The Armory case study film came out on 19 August and, in Akhila's words, captures the essence of what we did from the starting point, with attention to detail down to the comedic timing. It resonated in the office and with the client. Mejo, posting it: right time, right client, right timing in terms of our capabilities, right team.
Nanki and Nehal made a stop-motion launch film for The Story Map, Sandeep Nair's book for Penguin. The book then ranked number two in Business Communications on Amazon, number one for a week, and number one in Podcasts and Blogging. Nanki did three stop-motion pieces in August, more than in the rest of the year combined. Nehal made the props, and the pre-release copy reached the studio on 20 August.
FOC revealed its new identity on 18 August. Tejus wrote the initial script. The bigger decision was handing project ownership to Yugan and Sreejith. Naveen built the site on Lumos, working with parts of the framework he had not touched before.
Signed in August. Tejus on the script: it came out quite well, not just in the content but the style and flow of the storyline, which fits the upbeat, party vibes of the brand. That is not an easy thing to get right. Mansi is on the film and Samiksha on the storyboard.
Also signed in August. The script runs technical in places, and that was a choice: who is watching matters more than how many.
The client liked the script enough to extend the duration and the budget of the film.
It was made against a last-minute requirement and we did not follow our own process to get it out. Tejus has flagged that this keeps happening on Ayr projects and that we need to say we cannot execute without the process. The relationship is good in the ways that matter, though: Ayr's founder referred us Scimplify.
The script is finally done, and it covers what it needs to while holding a narrative. Script, budget, recce and shoot plan are the next lock. Mansi is on layouts, Nanki on the cover compositions.
Three design frames from Nanki. It goes live in September.
Tejus found an external vendor who can colour-grade for us and got the BQ photos graded. We are not equipped to do this well internally yet, and the honest fix was to go outside for it.
Shot on 27 August in their HSR office.
Kandou, Mojro, SISA, Indian VC and JP Morgan Chase all went out on the channel.
Signed and kicked off on 13 August, the day the studio went remote. Client kickoff, discovery and a two-part brand workshop, run by Athira with Samiksha. The Our Understanding document had to be presented at the start of the workshop.
The brand strategy workshop ran in Nagpur and went well, on 18 August. We are running MasterSoft jointly with Neon Trumpet, and Reza and Arpit were in the room with us. Our YouTube films came up there, unprompted.
Signed in August. Vignesh led it.
A new website project, signed in August.
A repeat client after six years. The visual route was locked after a dry run that, in Mehak's words, went terrible, and was rebuilt in a day. Nanki did the branding, her first in two years, and built a pattern generator so MVP can own and extend the identity themselves. Wamika worked the collaterals.
FinLender became The Decimal Capital on 10 August. The naming and narrative landed, and Zakia built the visual route across weeks two to four while working from home. Athira did the brand narrative, visual route and logo.
The technology page, contact page, homepage updates, style guide and final investor deck are all done. It did not go live. Vignesh did the renders.
The most difficult project of the month. Athira came back from leave to find it stalled with pressure from both sides, and rebuilt the platform page content from scratch across three versions, plus solutions pages for fleets, OEMs and Indian fleets. Akshay and Sijeesh got it back on track. Jiyash built the page in two days and caught the map issue early rather than sitting on it.
One of the month's most important ongoing projects. Pepper's visual strategy was approved in August. Samiksha built the variables for the brand guideline, copied a wrong base file, and had Sanjana come in and fix it. Her words: now I got a better understanding of how it needs to be done.
On 20 August it went out into a room. Pepper ran Index26, Unlocking the black box of AI search, in Bengaluru after San Francisco and New York, and the standees carried both logos: we are designing Pepper's right to win. Strategically. Verbally. Visually. The same phrase is going up on a wall in our own studio.
The month's second highlight, above. Mascot animation started with Felix, guidelines and variables with Samiksha.
Completed by Jiyash, in parallel with Vecton.
Homepage copy drafted and revised off the research. Yash on build.
Style guide and dev checklist complete, QC changes handed over. Portfolio, content and resources pages next.
Goutham rebuilt the market-cap data pipeline for the fortyseven index page over a single weekend, after several constituent values read wrong against Screener and BSE. He audited all 47 companies, traced the failure to unreliable market-cap data on some NSE names, and wired a Screener to BSE to NASDAQ overlay into the build. Friday evening to Sunday evening, live and aligned. India pages, US pages and portal updates ran alongside.
CMS fixes and solution pages, with Goutham.
Portfolio and service pages, brand book, collaterals, development QC.
Visual identity locked. The build is behind.
Wireframe and page design underway, with Yash.
Shipped same day, against a tight turnaround.
Stalled on client non-response. We have set a 48 to 72 hour follow-up cadence rather than waiting open-ended.
Maintenance continues. A brochure was cancelled after we had already put time into understanding the document, which is a lesson about confirming greenlight before allocating deep-dive hours.
Continuing with our partner Design Brewery, with Harishma.
Joel gave his first client presentation on 5 August and it went well. Harishma called it out the same morning, and Ekta added the line that stuck: "I think Akshay is slowly becoming a real estate design expert." Athira took three client calls on a project she had no context on, and came away knowing she can do that more often.
New SVAM hoardings went up across North Bengaluru on 1 August. Joel and Akshay found them and sent the photographs back.
Mini concept document done, with Athira.
Back in action, with Arpan, Sijeesh, Hiral, Yash and Swathi.
Revised style and composition after client feedback. Varsha on illustration.
Progressing. Too early to reveal the details.
GSIS layouts and print. Welga Foods investor page and social. AJAX investor relations page and new product scope. Chitkara emailer. Trifecta. PrimeWealth marketing, while the site waits on compliance approval. Mojro and Neon Trumpet marketing carousels. Factors AI report two, illustrations reworked for three sections after the report was re-written. HEKA, where Naveen is running client communication entirely through chat.
Featured in this issue
And, in their own words
"What really came out was Everything Design's ability to work inside the constraints of the brand framework we'd set and still deliver illustrations of extremely high quality. The cover page alone I fell in love with. A ship in a turbulent sea, guided by a lighthouse to safe shores. Design completely elevated the research and the content we had."
Praveen · Co-founder, Factors.ai · India
"All the best Mejo Kuriachan and Team!"
Dharshan · Founder and CEO, SISA · India
Inside the studio
The big one. We rebuilt the office. Two weeks remote, forty-five people, and a bigger space at the end of it. Ekta and Aishu did the interior design. Nanki drew the fabric divider. The "Design your right to win" wall is still to come, and empty photo frames are up in the meantime. Akhilesh wrote the memoir of the space on the last night: a tiny room in Mejo's house with six people, then a third-floor apartment in a township building, then half of what everyone knows as today's office, then the full office, then this renovation. "Long journey."
Gather became the office. Saurabh found it on day one of remote working. Stand-ups, meetings and impromptu conversations all moved into it. Mansi, who is remote year-round, said it brought the team closer to the real experience than anything before it.
No Onam this year. It fell inside the fortnight, and there was no celebration, because there was no studio to hold one in.
Structure. Sushant is bringing structure to how the team runs. Sijeesh is moving into project management to hold it together. Both came out of the same pressure: bandwidth across design, dev and film, and a dev handoff process that keeps starting before the checklist is checked.
What we learned we cannot do. Photo colour grading, done well, internally. Tejus went and found an outside vendor for the BQ shoot, and the cost was reasonable. Hiring video editors is also proving hard, and most applicants are not fitting on a technical level.
Six and a half years, forty-five people, no job description. Mejo, on 27 August, explaining how that happened: he never liked reading JDs and could never fit himself into one, so nobody here got one. He never wanted to submit an assignment, so nobody here did an assignment. He never knew what to say in an interview, so the interviews are not like that. He never read an offer letter, so most people did not get one. The first JD is now being written.
The nicest win. A project we signed where another agency's founder did all the selling, the whole case for what branding is and why it matters. We were the better fit on scale and connected services and we got lucky. He raised the bar and did a favour to us and to the industry.
Also this month.
And three pictures that explain the place. Harishma with a laptop stand balanced on her head, which Vignesh captioned a place for everything, everything in its place. Yugan at her desk, which is how she looks before every townhall. And Geovani asleep on a beanbag among the boxes, which is the suffering Ekta was referring to.
What people said · August
Appreciation board. Recipient on the left, the person who wrote it on the right.
"Thankyou so much for helping me figure out the visual route for TheMVP when I was confused on how to proceed with it after the dry run."
"Sending a warm welcome to all of you. I can already see the excitement and eagerness to learn and create from each one of you."
"Thank you for all the work you do, even if it's last minute, if it's urgent, and on priority. You guys always find a way."
"Signing up BQ have left an ever lasting impact on Everything Design and on me."
"People were seeing the youtube videos, a lot of compounding."
"The ePlane Company Pitch Film. Congrats."
"At office, when I'm just thinking of the problem, I come to you to figure it out. Today, I did that again, and you showed up virtually before I even reached out."
"The meeting went well. You presented also really well. Its a small win for today."
"Insane case study video! Really captures the essence of what we did for Armory from the starting point."
"That's the kind of thinking on your feet is unmatched."
"I really appreciate the effective communication you're maintaining with the HEKA clients."
Brag board
"Page is live and aligned. All happened from Friday EOD to Sunday EOD."
"I'm always looking to solve problems with creative solutions and more often than not, I just move on to the next thing I can do, next person I can help, remove roadblocks entirely. Things like this are a big deal since I often forget to pat myself on the back."
People
New joiners. Ashik joined the motion and film team on 3 August. By the 20th he had closed a fifteen-second animation from scratch in ten hours. Anushka and Nehal joined the design team on 10 August. Anushka went straight into SemiCab infographic work.
And one left. Aditi's last day was 31 August, the day everyone walked into the new office.
In their own words
Nehal, week one: "Starting as an intern, becoming a part of Everything Design, and relocating to Bangalore. I think I've started on a slightly crazy note. But somewhere in all of this, I started understanding something about Everything Design. You are kind of thrown into things and expected to figure them out. There isn't always someone telling you exactly what to do, step by step. You have to understand the system, find your way through it, ask questions, observe, and eventually make it your own."
And: "One thing I'm actually proud of is that I've shown up every day, on time. It sounds like such a small thing, but for me, especially with everything that has changed around me, just being present and showing up feels like a good start. I am struggling with the speed right now. But I know I'm going to overcome it."
Wamika, one month in: "I don't think I've figured out what kind of designer I am or what I'm going to be good at yet. But I do feel like the things I've been doing, the things I've struggled with, the people I've spoken to and the feedback I've received are all starting to build on each other."
Akhila, on the first day back: "Back to working onsite after nearly 2 weeks. Made sure to set up the rest of the office before lunch time. Lunch was at DayOne. I myself ate after everyone else did."
Birthdays. Siva, Aditi and Zakia, all in August. Akhila did not forget one.
Career growth presentation. Zakia presented her journey at Everything Design on 12 August, the same day the office was emptied around her. It carried a disclaimer slide: "This presentation is based on personal observation and questionable memory. [No designers were harmed in the making of it.]" Then a three-year map. September 2023 to September 2024: I was doing the work. September 2024 to September 2025: I started caring about the work. September 2025 to now: I started understanding why the work exists.
Athira did the last one, about a year ago. It is not a regular slot, which is what makes it worth marking.
On screen · August
Nine films went out this month. Tabl by Quantifai, teaser and product explainer. The Armory deeptech case study. The Story Map launch film. Snippets for Kandou, Mojro, SISA, Indian VC and JP Morgan Chase. Most of them on our channel, and the kind of thing our film practice does for clients too.
End of issue
Forty-five updates. Five things live. Six new sign-ups. Twenty-six sectors. Three people joined. Forty-five of us now. Fourteen days without an office, and a book at number two on Amazon by the end of it.
And an orange door.
Leumas kicks off. The Grundfos whitepaper film goes live. Quantifai's third film lands. Bharat Atomics goes live if the client side answers. The rest of SemiCab ships. And PrimeWealth, still waiting on compliance.
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