Studio

Independent since 2016.

aday.studio is the practice of Aday González. It joins product thinking, interaction design, software engineering and visual direction into a single way of working, at a scale where those four never have to be translated between people.

01 · What it is

A studio sized to keep the whole product in view.

The work started in 2016 with complete products rather than pieces of them. A game that needed art, gameplay code, an economy and connected services. A social prototype that needed a mobile client, a backend and a reason for people to open it twice. In both cases the interesting problems sat between the disciplines, not inside any one of them.

That has not changed. The studio takes on work where product, interface, engineering and craft have to be decided together, and where a handover between four specialists would lose more than it gains.

02 · How the work runs

Four rules that survive contact.

  1. 01

    One pair of hands, start to finish

    The person who designs a decision writes the code for it and maintains it afterwards. Nothing gets thrown over a wall, so nothing gets specified in a way that only survives a slide.

  2. 02

    Build in the real medium, early

    Interfaces behave. A static comp cannot tell you whether a transition reads, whether a list stays legible at real density, or whether an interaction survives a slow connection. The working version answers first.

  3. 03

    Systems over screens

    A product is a set of rules that keeps holding once the happy path is gone. Progression, state, permissions and failure are designed with the same care as the first screen.

  4. 04

    Ship what can be maintained

    Complexity is a cost paid every month after launch. The version that survives is usually the smaller one that someone can still reason about a year later.

03 · What that covers

Four disciplines, one decision.

  • Product

    Framing, scope, feature architecture, progression and economy systems.

  • Interaction design

    Interface systems, motion and state, responsive and accessible behaviour.

  • Engineering

    Application and game clients, APIs and services, real-time and 3D interfaces.

  • Visual direction

    Identity systems, illustration, technical art and the craft layer on top of the build.

04 · Plainly

What this is not.

Not an agency, and not a team you can scale on demand. Work runs one engagement at a time, which is the reason it can be owned end to end and the reason availability is limited.

The published work is honest about its state. Paperbot is available on Google Play and Wysh is retired; both are shown as they are. They are here because the decisions inside them are still the clearest evidence of how this practice works.

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