London, United KingdomTaking projects from March

Brand and product design for companies that make something real — serving London, United Kingdom and specializing in Brand identity, Product design, Packaging.

Maya Oyelaran — portrait
12+ yearsYears of practice

About

Fewer decisions, made properly

I trained as an industrial designer and moved into brand work when I realised the products I liked best were the ones whose packaging, interface and support pages all sounded like the same company. Twelve years later that is still the job: making the parts agree with each other. I work directly with founders, usually as the only designer, and I hand over systems rather than files — colour, type and spacing rules written so the next person does not have to guess what I meant.

12Years designing
47Products shipped
9Countries worked in

Selected work

Recent work

Kestrel Bicycles

Brand & Packaging

Kestrel Bicycles

Halden Ceramics

Identity

Halden Ceramics

Ferrow Audio

Product Design

Ferrow Audio

Norrland Provisions

Packaging

Norrland Provisions

Atlas Field Tools

Brand & Web

Atlas Field Tools

Meridian Coffee

Identity & Packaging

Meridian Coffee

Colour tests for the Kestrel range

Colour tests for the Kestrel range

Type specimen, second pass

Type specimen, second pass

Packaging mock-ups on the bench

Packaging mock-ups on the bench

Wayfinding studies, Harbour Line

Wayfinding studies, Harbour Line

Swatch book for the autumn palette

Swatch book for the autumn palette

Editorial grid, working spreads

Editorial grid, working spreads

Signage prototypes at half scale

Signage prototypes at half scale

Press check, Kestrel catalogue

Press check, Kestrel catalogue

What I do

Services & expertise

Brand identity

Brand identity

Product design

Product design

Packaging

Packaging

Design systems

Design systems

Art direction

Art direction

Workshops

Workshops

How I work

Four things I hold to

Understand before building

The brief is where the risk hides. A day spent on what is actually being asked for saves a fortnight of building the wrong thing well.

Ship in slices

Something real and usable early, then again, then again. Progress you can click on beats a status update every time.

Write it down

Decisions, trade-offs and the reasons behind them, in the repository. The next person to open the file gets the argument, not just the answer.

Finish properly

Motion, empty states, the slow connection, the wrong input. The last ten per cent is the part anyone actually notices.

Kind words

What clients say

3 reviews

Maya spent the first week in the workshop rather than at a desk, and it showed in everything that followed. She understood that the mark had to work stamped into wet clay before it worked anywhere else, which is not a constraint I had thought to explain. We came away with a system I have applied myself a dozen times since without needing to ask her what was allowed.
Iva KristiansenFounder, Halden Ceramics
We had eighteen months of feature requests and an app that showed all of them at once. Maya's first deliverable was a list of things to remove, with the reasoning attached, and it was uncomfortable reading in the best way. Support tickets about the settings screen dropped to almost nothing after launch, which is the only metric I actually cared about.
Daniel OkonkwoHead of Product, Ferrow Audio
What I valued most was being told no. We asked for a heritage look and Maya explained, with examples, why that would put us in the same bracket as companies charging half our price. She was right, and the version we shipped has aged far better than the one I originally asked for would have done.
Rowan EllisManaging Director, Atlas Field Tools
Maya spent the first week in the workshop rather than at a desk, and it showed in everything that followed. She understood that the mark had to work stamped into wet clay before it worked anywhere else, which is not a constraint I had thought to explain. We came away with a system I have applied myself a dozen times since without needing to ask her what was allowed.
Iva KristiansenFounder, Halden Ceramics
We had eighteen months of feature requests and an app that showed all of them at once. Maya's first deliverable was a list of things to remove, with the reasoning attached, and it was uncomfortable reading in the best way. Support tickets about the settings screen dropped to almost nothing after launch, which is the only metric I actually cared about.
Daniel OkonkwoHead of Product, Ferrow Audio
What I valued most was being told no. We asked for a heritage look and Maya explained, with examples, why that would put us in the same bracket as companies charging half our price. She was right, and the version we shipped has aged far better than the one I originally asked for would have done.
Rowan EllisManaging Director, Atlas Field Tools

Questions

Questions, answered

Fixed price for a defined scope, quoted after a paid discovery conversation rather than before it. I have found hourly billing punishes the client for my thinking time and rewards me for being slow, which is the wrong incentive for both of us. Discovery is usually half a day, and if we decide not to work together you keep the notes and the positioning work regardless of what happens next.

Often, but not always at the very beginning. If you are still changing what the product is every fortnight, a finished identity is the wrong thing to buy and I will usually say so. What tends to work better at that stage is a short engagement on positioning and a deliberately provisional visual direction, then the full system once the thing you are selling has stopped moving underneath you.

Source files, exported assets in the formats your suppliers ask for, and written rules covering colour, type, spacing and the decisions I made that are not self-evident from looking at the artwork. The written part matters most. Files tell the next person what I did, and the rules tell them why, which is the only thing that stops a system drifting once I am no longer in the room.

Get in touch

Start a conversation

Tell me what you are making and where it is stuck. I reply to everything within two working days.

Based in
London, United Kingdom