Every frame in our concept work is generated. We built a pipeline that reads a reference, names the idea underneath it, transposes that idea onto a different brand, renders it, then proofreads the render. Client work is the exception — Rogue ships from the design files, Minus Two from the live store. Notes on what broke and what held.

A hotel group that agrees on exactly one thing. A year after publishing the concept, we tested it against the real properties in Bangkok, Ibiza and London: is a single inverted wordmark enough to hold a brand architecture together?

Most streaming brands are experienced at thumbnail scale, compressed, on top of moving video. For our Kick concept we ran every candidate mark through the actual encoding pipeline before choosing one.

Nara comes to us from six years of editorial and identity work across São Paulo and Lisbon, and will lead the typographic side of the practice from the Brazilian studio.

Our Crocs concept came out of an injection-moulding floor rather than a design studio. What we learned about deriving a visual language from a manufacturing process.

Our founder on the gap between the problem a client writes down and the problem they actually have — and the three questions we ask before agreeing to solve either of them.

A talk on speculative work as R&D — why our sharpest thinking has come from projects nobody paid for, and how to run concept work without it becoming a portfolio vanity exercise.

In our adidas Runners concept, acid lime never means excitement — it only ever means data. A short piece on what happens when you assign a colour exactly one job and refuse to break the rule.

The concept keeps the exterior of one of the most photographed buildings on earth out of its own institutional communications. Here is the argument, and the data we built it on.

A festival can produce fifteen excellent posters and still leave an audience unable to describe what it looks like. The two jobs a festival identity has to do at once, and how our Berlinale concept splits them.

After five years of running the practice between two apartments and a lot of flights, our Brazilian team now has a proper home on Rua Harmonia. The doors opened in June.

Not out of generosity. We found that pricing the exploratory phase made clients treat it as a deliverable rather than a conversation, and the work got measurably worse.

Ninety minutes of Brazilian bass, Berlin dub and one deeply questionable choice from our operations director. Streaming now.

Identity-led, typographically serious, comfortable presenting unfinished work. Portuguese and English. Full brief on request — write to jobs@caiobarreto.com.

What we got right, what we billed wrong, and the six decisions that actually shaped the studio. A retrospective from the founder.