About the studio

A little strategy. A lot of design. And just enough madness.

Mad N Creative is a design studio that spends an unusual amount of its time on the part before design: working out what the problem actually is, and whether it is the one worth solving.

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Studio

Offices: Delhi-NCR · Gujarat · Dubai · Abu Dhabi
Working: With clients internationally
Practice: Brand · Product · UX · AI
Principle: Diagnosis before prescription.

Our story

How the studio ended up working this way

Mad N Creative started as a design studio doing what design studios do: a brief arrives, the work goes out, everyone is pleased. Some of it was good. Some of it solved nothing, and the uncomfortable part was that we could usually tell which was which before we started.

The pattern was consistent. The projects that worked were the ones where we had argued with the brief. The ones that did not were the ones where we had been efficient and agreeable: where the client had already decided what to build, and we had been hired to make it look considered.

So we changed where the engagement starts. Now the first weeks look less like design and more like interrogation: sitting with the people who do the work, reading two years of support tickets, listening to recorded sales calls, asking the question the internal team has stopped being able to ask.

It costs us some work. Clients who want an execution partner find us slower and more argumentative than the alternatives, and they are right. What it buys is a much higher hit rate on the work that matters, and a studio that is useful to a leadership team rather than only to a design team.

The name is a reminder of the balance. Strategy, seriously applied, with enough madness left to propose the thing nobody in the room was going to say out loud.

How we think

We work at the intersection

Most product problems are not design problems, business problems or technology problems. They are all three at once, held by people who each only see one of them.

01
Business
What is commercially at stake, and what has to be true for the work to pay for itself.
02
Design
Structure, interaction and craft, in that order, because the last cannot rescue the first two.
03
Technology
What the platform, the data and the delivery roadmap will actually allow this year.
04
Human behaviour
What people do rather than what they say, including the workarounds they built themselves.
05
AI
Where probabilistic systems genuinely change the economics, and where they are an expensive feature.

The expensive mistake happens before anyone opens a design file.

How we work

A loop, not a waterfall

The sequence matters, but so does the fact that it comes back around. Learning that does not change the next decision is not learning.

01
Problem
Establish what is actually wrong, in language specific enough to be disproved.
02
Insight
Find the thing behind it that nobody inside the company can see any more.
03
Strategy
Decide what to do about it, and what to deliberately stop doing.
04
Design
Structure, flows, interface, states, system, the visible part of the work.
05
Build
Ship it with engineering, inside the delivery rhythm, not over a handover wall.
06
Learn
Instrument it, watch what happens, and let the evidence change the next decision.

Why Mad N Creative

Four things we hold to

We will tell you the brief is wrong
It is the least comfortable thing we do and the most valuable. A studio that only executes the brief is charging you to be agreeable.
Evidence over seniority
The most senior opinion in the room loses to a recorded user session. That rule applies to us as much as to the client.
Small teams, senior hands
We take on a limited number of engagements so the people you meet are the people doing the work. No pyramid.
Leave capability behind
Every engagement is designed so your team can keep going without us. A dependency is a business model, not a service.

Capabilities

Everything we practise

Four practices. Most engagements draw on at least two of them, which is why we scope around the problem rather than the department.

In their words

What clients say after the work ships.

01
AI · Digital Transformation · Product Strategy
“Most teams would have redesigned the screens. This one questioned the journey behind them, tied AI, customer experience and business strategy together, and made a genuinely complex transformation feel simple. It changed what we thought was possible.”
SpiceJetIndia
02
UX Strategy · Service Design · Digital Innovation
“Clarity is rare on a problem this complex. They brought it from the first week, pairing strategic thinking with a real understanding of how people work, and the experience that came out of it felt intuitive to the people who use it every day.”
Crown Prince CourtAbu Dhabi
03
Design Systems · Enterprise UX · Product Innovation
“Design at our scale only works if it holds together across products and teams. Their design system brought consistency to a genuinely complex estate, and it was built to keep scaling long after launch.”
Swiss ReGermany
04
Branding · Customer Experience · Creative Strategy
“A brand is more than a logo, and they treated it that way. Creativity, customer psychology and digital experience came together into a presence that feels distinctive, consistent and easy to remember.”
Mad Over DonutsIndia
05
AI · Creative Technology · Experience Design
“Creativity and technology rarely sit this comfortably together. They questioned the obvious answer, explored what AI and experience design could really do, and brought a perspective that pushed our thinking forward.”
AdobeIndia

Clients

Who we have worked with

Consultancies, banks, a government office, an airline, an insurer, a publisher, technology companies and consumer brands. A fuller list is available on request.