Johanna Lind
Founder, Creative Director
Twenty-two years, six of them at Pentagram Berlin. Draws every wordmark that leaves the studio, usually four times.
Lisbon 38°42′N · Copenhagen 55°40′N
The studio
Twelve people
who still draw.
Meridian has been independent since 2014. No holding company, no investors, no growth target — just a deliberate size that lets the people you meet be the people who do the work.
How it started, and why it stayed small.
In 2014 Johanna Lind left a large studio in Berlin because she had spent eleven months on a project without drawing anything. Tomas Ferreira left a newsroom the same summer for a related reason: he was writing about companies he was not allowed to help fix. They took a room above a tile shop in Lisbon, and the first client was a bakery that could not explain why its bread cost three euros.
The bakery is still trading. So is the studio, now with twelve people across two cities and a policy that has not changed since the second year: we take nine projects a year, and the founders work on all of them.
We have been asked several times to become something bigger — a merger in 2019, an acquisition in 2022. Both would have made everyone involved more money and made the work worse, because the thing clients are actually buying is a small number of experienced people paying close attention. That does not scale, and we stopped pretending it might.
What we are good at is the moment before the design: the argument, the sentence, the decision about what a company is actually for. Everything visual follows from that, and it is why our proposals read more like editing than decoration.
2014Founded in a room above a tile shop in Lisbon
12People, across Lisbon and Copenhagen
9Projects a year, both founders on every one
The people
Who you will
actually meet.
No account layer, no junior handover. The person who presents the work is the person who made it, for the whole project.
Tomas Ferreira
Founder, Strategy Director
Ex-journalist. Writes the positioning document that every other decision gets measured against, and keeps it to one page.
Adaeze Okonkwo
Strategy Lead
Runs the research. Has interviewed roughly 900 customers on our behalf and remembers most of them.
Rui Salgado
Design Lead
Type and grid. Set the 96-page Halden manual over one very quiet November and did not complain once.
Mette Sørensen
Design Director, Copenhagen
Opened our second studio in 2021. Packaging, print production, and the person who actually goes on press.
Ivan Kraljević
Design Technologist
Builds what we design. Turns a 40-page guideline into tokens, components and a site that scores 100 on accessibility.
We also work with a standing group of six collaborators — photographers, a copywriter, a packaging engineer and a motion director — who have been with us long enough to know the answer before we ask.
How we operate
Four rules we
have not broken.
These are not aspirations on a wall. They are the reasons we have turned down work, and they are worth reading before you brief us.
Say the hard thing early
The uncomfortable observation on week two is worth more than a beautiful deck on week ten. We would rather lose a project honestly than win it by agreeing with you.
Make it, don’t present it
We show work in the medium it will live in — a real page, a real pack, a real screen — because a logo on a grey square has never told anyone anything true.
Leave a system, not a dependency
The measure of a good handover is how rarely you need to call us afterwards. We build things your team can operate, and we write down why every rule exists.
Small on purpose
Twelve people, two cities, nine projects a year. Growth would mean the founders stop drawing, and the reason clients come to us is that the founders still draw.
Recognition
Selected awards
& press.
We enter about four shows a year, mostly because our clients enjoy it. It is a poor measure of a studio and a decent measure of a project.
2025
D&AD — Wood Pencil — Branding
Halden Optics
2025
Type Directors Club — Certificate of Typographic Excellence
Fold & Cadence
2024
European Design Awards — Gold — Visual Identity
Atlas Civic
2024
Awwwards — Site of the Day & Developer Award
Kestrel Health
2024
Red Dot — Winner — Brand Design
Verger Coffee
2023
Brand New Awards — Shortlist — Financial Services
Northbound Capital
2023
Communication Arts — Design Annual — Packaging
Ostro Ferments
2022
ADC Annual Awards — Bronze Cube — Publication Design
Lumen Press
Also written about in It’s Nice That, Eye Magazine no. 108, Slanted 41 and Design Week’s 2024 studio survey.
Say hello
Come and see
the room.
Both studios are open to visitors, and we will make you a decent coffee. If a call is easier, the brief form takes four minutes and reaches both founders.