Polymode is a bi-coastal, queer, and minority-owned graphic design studio leading the edge of design with thought-provoking work for clients across the cultural sphere. We collaborate with innovative businesses, community-based organizations, and those shifting the world through social justice. By advocating for clear and transparent structures of communication, compensation, and relationships, Polymode creates a radical approach to design where the product emerges from a process of mutual respect and enjoyment. Our team promotes ecological and social sustainability in and out of the studio. Polymode’s core principles are to ignite minds, impact hearts, and uplift marginalized voices, through poetic research, design, and educational initiatives.

Our specialties include books, curation, education, exhibition, identities, interfaces, publications, visual design, websites, workshops, and writing. We operate between the complexity of designed systems and lived experience—our core principles of visual expression, media adaptability, and typographic function.

We operate with the ethos of Studio as family. Our clients include Art Gallery of Ontario, City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, David Kordansky Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Mark Bradford at the Venice Biennale, MOCA, MoMA, The New Museum, Phaidon Press, Phoenix House, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Orange County Museum of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem.

Poetic Research

Poetic research takes into account the factual with the formal, the universal with the outsider, the sacred, the mystical, the cerebral prophet, and the fool. Let it be lofty, let it be magical and ancestral, let it be sensory, let it be funny with a divine kiss of queerness. It holds the space of a project searching for the details in archives, footnotes, and marginalia within the great force of history. Finding the tone of voice and incorporating form as a mode of thought—true, but it also just comes down to us wanting to make cool shit. Our poetics unearth and amplify; remember connections and lineages; shapes grids, structures information, and clarifies content. It is not all woo woo, sometimes it asks how many words fit, what is a realistic timeline, or how to save money. Research guides Polymode and its clients in making with a question.

Partner

Partner

Partner

Partner

Senior Designer

Associate Partner

Senior Designer

Senior Designer

Studio Manager

Studio Manager

Design Intern

Media Designer