How Zero Studios get things done

Zero Studios specializes in building brands, digital experiences, and memorable marketing campaigns.

Originally founded in NYC, and recently expanded to Milwaukee, Zero Studios are driven to create brand experiences that feel familiar, yet new. Their stellar team have crisp design narrative, a playful point of view, and create the most perfect color palates.

We chatted with Zero Studios about inspiration, their creative process, and how they use Dropmark to get things done.

Image of African American woman surrounded by illustrations of snuggly blankets
Content and Marketing for Buffy

What does your creative team look like?

Our creative team looks like a 15 headed sea creature. Bearded but androgynous. Ancient, yet 27 years old on average.

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Content and marketing for Knowlita, design for MIAD & branding for Eden Health

How does design fit into Zero’s culture?

Design is really at the heart of Zero’s culture. I think design and art are what drew us all into the industry - and the major driver behind doing what we do.

We try to reserve time and attention to design projects for the studio. Balancing work for us vs. work with clients is important, and ultimately allows us to stay fresh and integrate new ideas.

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Content and marketing for Foursquare & branding for Bloom: Art Therapy

What inspires your team?

Will’s Tender Renders, blockchain, humor, grids, color, simplicity, New York City, dogs, hot dogs, being surrounded by taxis, and being surrounded by nature.

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Branding for Dune Resorts

What is your team’s creative process?

We start with a ‘getting to know you’ or ‘discovery’ process where we interview stakeholders, understand intentions, and formulate goals as well as identify audiences. Then we all go salsa dancing.

Just kidding.

Generally, we try to squeeze out as much information about the brand and products as we can. From there we develop our strategies and use them as the basis for everything we do. Every creative decision directly maps back to the strategy.

The best design is always the one that works. We know the work will look / sound / feel great but it needs to work, and it needs to be done with purpose.

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Content and marketing for Madaluxe Group & branding for Concord Music Hall

How does Dropmark fit into your workflow?

Dropmark plays a big part in the discovery phase of our process. We’re identifying key characteristics of brands and gathering inspiration and mood boards that communicate those characteristics. It’s a really lovely tool that allows for organization and collaboration.

Sometimes we use it as an internal resource, and sometimes we share it with clients. Is your brand quirky? Great! Here is a collection with examples of things that communicate quirkiness.

Content and Marketing for Buffy

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve Dropmarked lately?

We’re all in a bubbly state of mind right now with a new client that we’re working with. We’ve been doing a lot of research into how to photograph, illustrate and talk about bubbles in an interesting way. So, we have a big Dropmark collection full of inspiration on different ways to focus on bubbles.

See more work by Zero Studios at zero.nyc and follow them on Twitter and Instagram.