Immaterial

Studio

Immaterial is the design studio of Marco Braunschweiler. I create brand systems, interfaces, and products.

Profile

People come here when they have a problem that they cannot solve. This could be some issue with visibility, or they're not happy with how they're being perceived, or they don't even know what they want, and we are there to figure that out together.

Branding · UI · App development · Marketing · Editorial

Clients

Clients that I've worked with include Acura, Sonos, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and others.

Selected projects

Who do we work with

For companies I work with, I have had the most success by creating with smart, driven people from a set of needs that are personal, values-based, and often market-driven.

Having a background in art has given me an aesthetic approach—specifically from the transliterated Latin aestheticus—meaning the study of sensory experience. It's all ultimately about the feeling. While research and positioning are a solid backbone for understanding a project, I prioritize intuition and feeling — nobody has ever listened to a good song and said, 'I wonder what the research was like for this.'

Projects typically take 6–12 weeks depending on scope and complexity.

Technical details

I mostly work by myself and with trusted colleagues. From 2020 to 2024, I focused on finding a rock-solid process to build brand systems and have extended that approach to experiences, both interface and full end-to-end apps like Liquid Calling. I start with a concept, find the edges of the constraints, build an accordant design system, select a technical implementation, and iterate from there.

I work primarily with modern JavaScript frameworks—React and Next.js for the frontend, paired with TypeScript. For content and data-driven projects, I use Python for scripting and analysis. When working with legacy systems or specific client needs, I tend toward PHP and WordPress environments.

React · Next.js · TypeScript · Python · PHP / WordPress

Background

My interest in design started with skateboarding as both an expressive form and a relational tool to read a design environment critically, and these two poles typify my approach.¹ My background is in art, specifically in conceptually focused practices that manifest into worlds which either show or actively alter societal structures like Michael Asher.² The way I build, design, and code pulls from Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building; he indicates that a well-designed space, like a garden, is organic, can grow, and seems to exist naturally, without feeling designed, though this is actually the result of meticulous planning and research over time, whatever the modality is.³

I am American and Swiss, originally from California, though I grew up in the Midwest and was shaped by that hard-working Protestant culture. I currently live in a small town at the crest of a mountain in central Italy, where I enjoy smoking choice tobacco and staying up really, really late.

1. Howell, Ocean. "The Poetics of Security: Skateboarding, Urban Design, and the New Public Space." Urban Policy, 2001.

2. Asher, Michael. Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979. Edited by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983.

3. Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

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