Lia Ferran
Co-founder, Design
Type, identity, the bossy half of design reviews. Trained in Eindhoven; can't go a week without arguing about kerning.
The studio
A small studio with a long memory.
ModernShapeWorks has been five people since 2020 — that's the size at which we stop arguing about the work and start arguing about lunch. We turn down the projects that wouldn't suit a studio our size, and we keep a long list of friends we send those clients to instead.
Who you actually work with
Five people. The same five, every time.
We don't use freelancers or sub-contract. Whoever you meet on the kickoff call is on the build.
Pol Massana
Co-founder, Build
Front-end, performance, runs the kickoff calls. Believes in plain PHP, two-second load times, and proper semicolons.
Júlia Vilà
Senior Designer
Editorial design, illustration, the studio's answer to anything that needs a good colour palette. Joined in 2021.
Sergi Riba
Engineer
Full-stack with a quiet allergy to frameworks-of-the-month. Owns our small CMS, the deployment script, and the on-call rota.
Aïda Bonet
Project Lead
Schedules, edits, the person who actually emails you back. Previously project lead at a Madrid identity studio for six years.
Principles
Five working principles.
None of these are taglines. They're the five things we say no to projects over.
01
Slow on purpose
Three projects in flight at any time. It's the only way the attention stays this close.
02
Type does most of the work
Before any decoration, the page should hold up as a typographic object. Decoration earns its place after, not before.
03
Real images, real people
We don't buy stock photography. If a project needs photographs, we art-direct a real shoot or we don't use photographs at all.
04
No invented urgency
No countdown timers. No "limited spots". No fake scarcity in our work or in our pricing. Honest deadlines, honest rates.
05
You can leave at any point
Every contract is month-to-month after kickoff. If we're not the right studio, we say so first; if you decide we're not, you keep everything we made.