Brand & Identity Designer — Lisbon
Available for projects — 2026
Design brands that refuse to blend in.
I’m Mara — an independent designer shaping identities for studios, founders, and cultural institutions. I help ambitious teams find a voice and give it lasting form.
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03 — About
A decade shaping how brands look, sound, and hold their nerve.
I started out in a two-person studio in Lisbon and never lost the taste for small, sharp teams. Over the last ten years I’ve designed identities for furniture makers, publishers, type foundries, and the occasional restless founder.
My work sits at the meeting point of editorial design and brand strategy: systems that are precise enough to scale and warm enough to feel made by a person. I care about the details most people never notice — and the few they always do.
10+
Years in practice
60+
Brands shaped
4
Design awards
04 — Services
Where I can help.
Four ways we usually work together — from a single wordmark to a brand, its system, and the site it lives on.
01
Brand Identity
Logotypes, wordmarks, and the complete identity system — built to flex across every surface a brand lives on.
02
Visual Systems
Type scales, colour, grids, and guidelines. The quiet rules that keep a brand coherent as it grows.
03
Art Direction
Campaign and content direction — setting the mood, the typography, and the way it all moves.
04
Web & Framer
Design and build of fast, editorial sites in Framer, handed over clean and ready for your team to run.
05 — Experience
A short history.
Founder & Brand Designer
Mara Vance Studio
Senior Designer
Base, Lisbon
Designer
Workshop Collective
Junior Designer
Field Office
06 — Words
Kind words from good people.
Mara translated a vague feeling into an identity we could actually run with. Every touchpoint finally feels like one brand.
Daniel Okafor
Creative Director
·
Juniper Press
Rare to find someone equally fluent in strategy and craft. The system she built still guides every decision we make.
Lena Hoffmann
Founder
·
Sonder Labs
She finds the essence fast, then sweats the details no one else would. The rebrand paid for itself inside a season.
Priya Nair
Head of Brand
·
Field & Form
07 — Process
How the work gets made.
01
Discover
We dig into your context, audience, and ambitions — and name what the brand actually needs to do.
02
Strategize
A clear positioning and creative direction, agreed before a single pixel is drawn.
03
Design
Identity, system, and application — explored in the open and refined through tight feedback loops.
04
Deliver
Final files, guidelines, and the support to launch it well, so the work lands exactly as intended.
08 — Contact