I co-founded a studio for the data everyone else finds tedious, and gave it a face people trust.
Zahlenwerk is a two-person studio that turns the data everyone else finds tedious, financial statements, portfolio reports, workforce numbers, into products people actually want to use. I co-founded it and own design and go-to-market. Laura owns engineering and operations. Two people, one standard.
Approach
The name and the mark are the thesis.
Zahlenwerk means the works of numbers, the machinery of figures. It says what we do without a tagline. The mark is a single Z built on a 4×4 grid from squares and triangles, and that same grid generates our whole icon set. One system, provably one hand.
Clarity is the product, so clarity is the brand.
We sell legibility: making dense things obvious. So the identity had to be clear too, typography-forward, high contrast, no decoration without meaning. If a studio that promises clarity cannot make its own site clear, the promise is dead on arrival.
Proof over promise.
A small studio wins on evidence, not adjectives. So we lead with the work: four shipped products for real clients, Airbus, SPREAD AI, the Portfolio System, and HYPD. Not trust us, but here is what we already did.
Brand
The personality is quiet authority. A near-black canvas, a bold grotesque set large, one signal-yellow accent. Instead of stock imagery, a live candlestick chart runs along the hero: the studio’s raw material, market data, used as its only ornament. The numbers are the decoration.
The discipline shows in the details. The logo, the icons and the service cards all sit on the same 4×4 grid, so nothing is arbitrary. If we sweat this grid, imagine how we treat your numbers.
“Two people. One standard.” is the operating principle, not a slogan: no account managers, the founders on every project.
Positioning and services
Three clear service lines, in plain language:
- Product Engineering. Full-stack data-heavy products: parsing pipelines, APIs, and interfaces that make complex financial data legible.
- Product Design. Interfaces, identity, and typography for products where clarity is the feature.
- AI and Data Infrastructure. Document parsing, structured extraction, and MCP integrations that connect your data to Claude, ChatGPT, and whatever comes next.
Studio site
I designed and built zahlenwerk.studio. Its job: take a skeptical, senior buyer from “who are these two people” to “these are the people I want on this.” It opens with one line, Software built around numbers, and lets the work do the rest.
- A near-black hero, oversized type, and a candlestick chart as the only image.
- Leads with outcomes and named clients, not a manifesto.
- Performance-minded, the brand system rendered pixel-exact in code.
What I’d carry forward
Founding is a different design problem. With client work you get a brief. With your own studio you write it, and every decision, the name, the mark, the services, is a bet on who you want to be.
One idea held it together: the most boring material in the building, numbers, is where the best design work hides, because almost no one treats it with care. Take the tedious thing seriously, and it stops being tedious. That is the studio I want to keep building: small, senior, exacting.