Først Agency

“Hello everyone! This is Dimi from Symbolon Branding, we are a fresh, up-and-coming brand identity design agency in the UK. We recently started working together with my very talented business partner Maria, essentially joining our forces, but also our business structures, processes, and plans, which meant that we needed some clearer insight on what each of us had to offer, but also make sure we both explicitly are on the same page about the services we offer as an agency.

So, the Business Catalyst felt exactly like what we would need to make sure we have the most fruitful and productive of conversations about our services. Ioana was an excellent facilitator and guided us patiently through each and every step of the web design service offering helping us outline everything we need from each other and from our clients. So we're now confident that the entirety of our process is absolutely clear. Nothing got lost in the merger. And we're both confident in handling our pitching pricing and planning. We also got a valuable process that we can reuse to cover every single service that we offer, so we haven't done a more valuable investment in our business so far.

I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who's offering any type of structured service to clients, creatives and non creatives included. So thank you and thank you CultCat! "

“A few weeks back, I joined my friend Dimi in his agency venture. And at that point, with both of us doing essentially the same job, we needed to find a way to make sure we're aligned, and that we're always on the same page. Ioana was a very valuable partner in this process in helping us merging our systems, she help us outline and structure our services, whilst she guided us through the process of getting organized. We now have a detailed guide for us to use to make sure we have an established system, and nothing gets lost or forgotten on the way.

In the end, she made sure we had a great looking document to show in new meetings or on our website, which I'm sure we get, which I'm sure will greatly help with lead conversions.

Thank you team! The whole experience has been great and I'm sure it's going to make a huge difference in our process. "

“Hey there, my name is Shane Moran and I hired CultCat earlier this year for about a two week project. And yeah, the guys did a fantastic job. The project itself had loads of gaps that needed to be filled, we needed to create a full brand identity and logo for a client of mine. And yeah, the guys just did an exceptional job really delivering but also providing solutions to issues that hadn't been talked about at the very start of the project. So this is really a valuable thing that the guys brought to the table. And I'd highly recommend working with CultCat for any kind of design or brand strategy issues that you have coming along.

Thanks very much guys!"

Okay. Hey, everybody, my name is Rohail. This is Jerzy. Nice to meet you. We're with H-town Takeover, and we've been working with Ioana and CultCat, and it has been an awesome experience!

Jerzy

They were identity designers. And, you know, before we started our engagement with Ioana and CultCat, we had only done the Discovery for our brand, but we had yet to choose a creative direction. And she really helped us decide on where to go forward. You know, we created some moodboards, she made some stylescapes, she made an amazing logo for us.

Rohail

They were awesome!

Jerzy

And now we're going to be delivered a style guide, so we can use for our internal team to move on forward.

Rohail

Yeah, and you know, what really made me want and I was telling Jerzy I really pushed for Ioana and CultCat, because this team, Ioana especially, was so involved, and she was asking really good questions. And she was making, like really good suggestions. And everything just felt like she cared and she wanted to make it better. And she wanted to make it the best. And I really don't think our our outcome would have been as good if we didn't work with her. So it was pretty freaking awesome.

Jerzy

Just like Rohail said, I think the questions Ioana asked really try to target the vision and the heart of who we were. I know she really wanted to learn our story before we even began any identity design. And the fact that she asked the right questions and showed that she cared put her on top of the competition, as opposed to other people that it seemed like they were not really trying to help us and push our vision forward. But with Ioana, we were able to do that.

Rohail

And the deliverables are all on point. Everything we could have asked for we got, you know, we just have one more step and in the style guide, brand guideline, the style, the style guide. Yeah. Jerzy’s is the guy that handles all of this. I'm just you know, I'm just here. But at the same time, very, very awesome work. Their deliverables were on point. And you want to add anything?

Jerzy

No, I'd say that the meetings we had discussing the style guide and the moodboards, they were very fruitful. I know we had some great discussions when it came to the logo.

Rohail

Yeah,the logo, the logo was a very, very intense process. Because, you know, there were parts where me and him were agreeing, because the logos were also good, right? So there were two logos that we just started arguing about. And they were both freaking amazing. And at the end of the day, we both agreed that they were both friggin amazing, but obviously want us to win. Right. So my favorite part was definitely the moodboards, stylescapes. Like, there were so many conversations and personality and the branding aspect and like what we wanted and Ioana was involved in that step, like the whole way, and it was just so much fun to work with someone that actually cares.

Jerzy

Would you recommend this? I would definitely recommend working with Ioana again. She was an amazing identity designer. I know she does discovery as well, but for what we were for what we needed her for she killed it. I think she knocked it out of the park. It was a complete home run. It was very successful. We're ready to see what the style guide is going to be. But from everything that's been delivered so far, I couldn't be happier. What about you?

Rohail

Same, like the from A to Z, it has been such a smooth selling process, and they have been on top of everything. And I would definitely recommend this and I already have recommended Ioana and CultCat to several of my friends and who have companies and what they're trying to do, sso…

Jerzy

Is there anything else I'd like to add? Um, I'd like to say that the vibes are amazing. The meetings are very fun. They were timed very well. They were executed perfectly, you know, the presentations and interactions we had were very professional. And if we had to do it again, We’d do it again with you guys. Thank you so much!

Rohail & Jerzy

100% and so engaging. So involved, like I said, I can't stress that enough and I’d say let's get it! Okay, let's get it. Let's get it.

Rohail

Thank you so much! Was good.

“Hello, I’m Jose Caballer, Chief Experience Officer and Chief Creative Director of The Systm. And I wanted to leave a testimonial for my work with Ioana and her team, Mircea and Alina, a powerful unit of talent …

About myself, I was the 13th employee at digital agency Razorfish in the 90s, I left there and founded my own agency, The Groop, here in Los Angeles, and did that for 12 years with clients such as you know, Al Gore and for Live Earth, and My Space redesign, at some point we did hundreds and hundreds of projects, we focused on product development.

I was on the board of the LA chapter of AIGA, American Institute of Graphic Arts, I went on to co-found The Skool, which became The Futur to educate designers around business, the business of design. And after that, I went to Consensus web3, a blockchain company in New York, helping them with getting design culture, and also helping them with organizational development. How do we design the culture of this company?

I’m really excited to leave this testimonial, to give you this testimonial, to share with you this testimonial, the project we worked on together was called Music.com. And the objective of the project was to help create the new NFT platform for Music.com. It was already in progress, we were brought in to help improve, where they were at, there was already development happening, and there was already an existing design.

So the challenge was really how to jump in and prove it as it was already moving. So, you know, we had to do everything from redesigning the screens and the system. But we worked closely together to create user personas, sitemaps, new sitemaps, wireframes, for some of the functionality that existed and how to improve it, and also new functionality.

We had to systemize all those things into Figma deliverables, from where we showed the old screens to the new screens, across the board and working with the developers to deliver that into visual QA, that was a bulk of the heavy lift that the team conducted and integrated into our, you know, what was a, a quest, indeed, multiple development partner, the client, a system.

And Ioana’s you know, I would call it like a Six Sigma, and that Six Sigma, like a SWAT unit. That’s really the way that they kind of came in, integrated and what I would say that, but the results, because it expanded to everything from how do we do screens for the educational videos in the same language.

At some point, we said, okay, hold on, we have to take a bit of a pause and actually work on, like, what does the brand look like in this moment in this transition? So we did brand work, stylescapes? What do you call that? Moodboards. Like, it was just, it was a very full spectrum project.

And really, from the results of the participation and the contribution, of this amazing unit of, of creatives and was a great systematization, an amazing breadth of creativity, but also the quality level, I use the word powerhouse. There wasn’t anything that they couldn’t do. Fast, effective, in line with a strategy, easy to work with.

Communication, availability, all those things. It’s almost like for me, the perfect collaborative, kind of like, you know, dock, if we were like a ship, you know, here you have been the development partner, you have the client, you have all these things, you know, Ioana and her team just docked in, did amazing work.

And, you know, it was super powerful, and I’m very grateful! And yes, would work 100% again, with the team, I’m looking forward to that and recommend it to anybody who is looking for a team that they can, that they can they can sink into their own and augment their own capacity, to deliver on web3 and you know, strategy on, you know, production, from illustration, like it’s a it’s a full service or a full spectrum provider.

And thank you, guys, so much for all your support on all my projects!"