The Context

Every rebrand comes with a story. I’ve read enough of them by now to recognise the pattern: a little soul-searching, a dash of self-reflection, and a tidy little ending where everyone learns something. They never mention the part where something breaks, or the money runs out, or the floor drops out beneath them. That’s where our story began; with an email that made our stomachs drop and forced us to rethink what the hell we were doing.

Earlier this year, our biggest client was hit by the USAGM funding freeze — a shock that rippled through the whole internet-freedom ecosystem. Just a few months before we’d been in Taipei for RightsCon, reassuring partners that our situation was different, that we’d been spared the uncertainty others were already facing.

I was in the living room when I read the email, an Allen key in one hand, baby-bay assembly instructions laid out in front of me. It’s not a rational thought, but I’ve always believed that when things are going too well, life finds a way of correcting itself, a kind of ‘good-time’ tax. When I opened that email and read the news, my first thought was, “aye, there’s the rub.”

It turned out the rules that had changed for everyone else had caught up with us too. And what  once felt so familiar had turned unpredictable overnight.

The Freefall

Until then, we’d been working on easy mode. Hard-won, sure, but still the kind of setup most small studios dream of. Our funding model meant we could offer design support pro bono backed by the funder, and hand-pick the projects we believed in. We’d built strong relationships with the clients we worked with year after year, had a steady income, and were exactly as busy as we wanted to be.

That first week was a blur of internal meetings, client outreach, and jaw-tightening anxiety. Early on, I hid it from my partner — worried that speaking it aloud might make it real. We still had projects to finish, but many had been put on hold, which perversely gave us more time to worry. We weren’t facing total collapse; we’d been working to diversify, and thank God we had, but the runway was short and the pressure immediate.

The Pivot

I don’t know where the idea came from. The internal mantra wasn’t especially confident; it basically boiled down to “do something.” It was less a plan, more an imperative, something to hold onto, something still within our control after so much of our agency had been stripped away.

A full rebrand would have been a luxury – a chance to stop, take out the map, and rethink everything. We didn’t have time to stop. We were like high divers trying to correct the angle of the fall, pivoting in mid-air, just hoping to make a smooth landing.

That’s how the word pivot stuck. Rebrand felt too strong. We weren’t reinventing ourselves. We were still Ura. What we were doing was refining our offer; trying to understand, clearly and specifically, what it really was. What started as a panic response — something, anything, to grab hold of — became the beginning of a deeper reckoning.

When the funding dried up, it stripped away the illusion that we had everything figured out. We’d been running on autopilot; comfortable, maybe even complacent. Trapped inside our own bubble, working on cool projects with good people, but rarely looking up. Our reputation carried us through; word of mouth did the talking, but we didn’t. We’d stopped articulating our value, stopped telling our own story.

The Work

Over the years, we’d worked on so many projects where our role was to patch things up. We’d go deep on research and auditing to understand the full picture, and in doing so we kept uncovering issues that weren’t part of the scope at all, deeper structural problems sitting beneath that surface fix. You’d pull one thread and find five more knotted beneath it. And then the deadline hit.

Under the old funding model, that was fine. The model worked. Budgets were tight, timelines were short, and the brief was almost always the same: make the most meaningful improvements we could within the time we had. Sometimes we’d return for another round; another patch, another improvement. Other times, it was a one-off sprint and then we’d hand things back and move on.

But the projects where we had the most impact were the long-term ones: the partnerships where we weren’t just dropping in to diagnose and depart, but embedding ourselves within teams. Learning the product, the people, the constraints, the small political realities that shape every decision. Those collaborations created real momentum. We worked faster, cleaner, and with more context. We weren’t outside consultants; we were part of the system.

If we wanted to make meaningful change, we needed a different approach. Lasting progress meant rethinking the system itself, not just the parts we could patch in a sprint. 

That realisation is what led us to refocus around what we now describe as full system redesign: a way of working that looks beyond individual features or visuals to understand how everything fits together: architecture, workflows, decisions, language, and expression, all as parts of the same whole.

The Landing

We gave ourselves three months to make sense of it all, to smelt everything down and cast it into something new. A full rebuild, not just of the website, but of how we talk about what we do.
Three months isn’t long. Long enough to overthink it, but short enough to force decisions; what to keep, what to drop, what to finally say out loud. The pressure was clarifying. It made us sharper, more deliberate.

We came out of it with focus. We stopped seeing ourselves as a loose collection of designers and started to understand Ura as a single, coherent structure — something with intent. The site, the voice, the services: they’re all expressions of that clarity.

But this isn’t the part where the story ends neatly. The new site isn’t even live yet. We don’t know how big the splash will be, or whether we’ve stuck the landing. All we know is that we’ve made the full rotation — the pivot, the fall, the breath before the surface.

What matters now is that we’re facing in the right direction.
The rest is just iteration.