Studio

Aetheria is an interface practice. We are engineers who art-direct and designers who ship, which is a sentence every studio writes and very few can support — so here is the operational version of it: the person who designs a screen in this studio is the person who writes its shader, and nothing leaves without a measured frame budget attached.

How an engagement runs

We build the hardest thing first. Not the sitemap, not the moodboard — the one technical problem that decides whether the project is possible. If it cannot be made to work in three weeks, everybody has learned something cheaply. If it can, the rest of the project is decoration around a solved problem, and it moves.

What we will not do

We do not take work where the interface is a wrapper around someone else’s decision. We do not produce a design system and leave before it has survived contact with a second team. And we do not ship a motion effect that has no fallback, because the visitor who has asked their machine for less motion is not a smaller-priority visitor.

Where we are

Tokyo, San Francisco, Zurich and London. The clocks in the footer are live; between them there is always someone at a desk, which is not a marketing claim so much as an accident of how the practice grew.