Afterthought is a design and creative studio founded in 2025 by Anurag Gautam and Tina Gidwani. We work on brand identity, naming, packaging and digital — with founders, institutions and the occasional well-meaning monopoly.
We are two designers who have spent the last decade in other people's studios. Most of what we learned there was useful. Some of it was that the best work tends to happen when the two people in the room are the two people doing it, and that the worst work happens when there are too many people in the room.
So we made a small studio. Two founders, a roster of trusted collaborators, and roughly four engagements a year. We work across two cities because that is where we live; we work in two languages because that is who we are; and we do most of our best thinking on the second pass, which is where the name comes from.
Afterthought — the thing you would have said, if you'd had a minute more.
We met in 2018 on a re-brand neither of us were quite leading. We've worked on most of the same projects since. Afterthought is the first thing we've started together.
Anurag leads the visual side of the studio — identity, type, packaging, the way a system holds up six months after it ships. Before Afterthought, he was a senior designer at studios in London and Bangalore, working on identities for hospitality groups, museums and one well-known airline he is too polite to name.
He draws better than he writes and, to his own surprise, has begun to enjoy writing about why.
Tina runs strategy and verbal identity — the brief, the name, and the sentence we keep coming back to. She spent six years at a larger studio in New York leading naming and positioning for early-stage companies in climate, health and finance, then a year at a publishing house re-thinking the tone of voice of a 70-year-old magazine.
She is the studio's first reader, the studio's last editor, and the reason we don't ship the first round.
A four-part manifesto we re-read most Mondays. The four lines below have so far survived.
The obvious answer is the one everyone else already has. Our job begins after that one is on the table and politely set aside.
A deck slide and a designed object both take about an afternoon. One of them is more honest about whether the idea is any good.
Every brief we've ever received has been wrong about something — almost never on purpose. The first month is for finding the one true sentence underneath.
Identities atrophy without care. We build systems our clients can operate themselves, and stay near the phone when they decide to grow them.
We take on roughly four engagements a year. For projects that need motion, illustration, photography or production at scale, we bring in a small group of people we've worked with before. We tell you who they are at the kickoff.
We re-write the brief in our own words and run it past you. The first useful artefact of the project.
Two directions, made far enough to argue with. One of them, usually the calmer one, becomes the project.
System, type, applications, the website if there is one. Weekly working sessions, fortnightly reviews.
A one-page guide, a working file, and a small retainer to keep the system honest in the first six months.
We answer every email ourselves. A short, honest reply within a week — even when the answer is "not us, but try them."