00About · Started 2002 · St. Augustine, Florida
A small firm that would rather measure than guess.
DarkSquare started in 2002 on one idea: a brand decision should rest on evidence, not on an appeal to authority or expertise. Along the way we adopted a mathematical theory of communication, and everything we do, the audit, the strategy, the production, the direction, runs on the data it produces. Five people, one dataset per client, and an academic in the creative director’s seat.
- 2002Started
- 45+Clients, enterprise B2B technology first
- 7Client acquisitions, by Cisco, eBay and Blackstone among them
- 16 yrsTeaching design at the college and graduate level
Everything we do, on one grid.
Four stages, one dataset. Hover a stage to see what it includes; hover a row to see where a capability runs. Start anywhere: each stage stands on its own.
Branding is a data problem.
Most agencies brand on one person’s taste. We treat it as a communication engineering problem: collect the right data, understand it properly, and design stops being a matter of opinion. It becomes alignment.
- 01
Square One
Everyone with veto power answers 21 questions about the business. Alone, not in a workshop, because a room converges on whoever talks first. The 50 to 70 page report is usually the first time anyone has read leadership’s beliefs back to them.
- 02
Constellations
People react to images long before they find words. Constellations puts a range of ideas and elements in front of a live audience of your buyers and maps the reaction. The direction comes out of what comes back, in under 48 hours. We built it because we got tired of defending directions with taste.
- 03
The AI brand system
The data doesn’t stop at the strategy deck. It becomes a system trained on your brand and nothing else: we produce with it, your designers get trained on it, and it runs in the tools your team already uses, so what they make all day is on brand without anyone standing over it.
Where it comes from
The method started as a graduate thesis: “The Nature of Information: Utilizing the Principles of Information Theory for Better Visual Communication,” Savannah College of Art and Design, 2010. It took Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, the one under every network you use, and applied it to design: a message has a measurable chance of arriving, and design can raise it. Sixteen years later the thesis is a product.
Making other people’s designers better is the job I’ve been doing longest.
I hold a terminal degree in the field, an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and I taught design at the college and graduate level for sixteen years: Flagler College, where I helped build the design BFA, the University of Baltimore’s graduate programs in publication and integrated design, and the Art Institute of Charleston. Branding, typography, design theory, and every semester, whether a student could explain their work to someone who wasn’t a designer.
That is the job in the seat. I’ve run DarkSquare since 2002, through seven client acquisitions, and I built Constellations because I wanted the evidence in the room before I asked anyone to agree with me.
Teaching also left me with a network I still use. When a project needs a specialist, I usually know the one.
- Degrees
- MFA, Graphic Design, Savannah College of Art and Design · BFA, Fine Art, Alfred University
- Teaching
- Flagler College · University of Baltimore · Art Institute of Charleston
- Practice
- DarkSquare, since 2002
- Instrument
- Constellations, founder and CEO
- Board
- The Michael S. Heiser Foundation · Institute For Community Solutions, advisory
- Writing
- The New Business of Graphic Design, co-creator, with Ed Gold
Five people. Same brief, same data.
Small on purpose. Everyone here has worked from the same method for years, most of them for a decade. When a project needs more hands, we bring in specialists we have worked with for as long, on the same brief.
Andrej CihoTechnologyCo-founder and CTO, ConstellationsBuilt Constellations with Joseph. Two decades of engineering across web platforms, commerce systems and open source, and the person we call when a build has to survive an enterprise IT review.
Jakub TřískaSenior developerWith DarkSquare since 2016Builds the websites, at the level IT departments audit: performance, security, accessibility, and the governance that keeps a site stable after launch. He says the least and ships the most.
Rebekah FreemanLead designerWith DarkSquare since 2013Leads design across identity, print and digital. Thirteen years of turning a strategy into a system that holds up in every hand it lands in, from a trade-show wall to a business card.
Siobhan FordSenior designerWith DarkSquare since 2016Brand identity and campaign design. Trained in advertising before design, so the work starts from the audience and the message, then finds the form.
Start with a conversation.
One call and we'll tell you if this is a fit. If it isn't, we'll say so and point you somewhere better.