A Tempe studio building identities, campaigns, and websites for founders who want to be remembered — not just noticed.
View Selected Work→A brand becomes a belief the moment a stranger can finish your sentence for you. Every name, every mark, every pixel of the site either builds toward that moment — or borrows against it.
We build identities, campaigns, and websites for founders who refuse to borrow.
A selected cut across identity, digital, and campaign work. Every project here is a specific answer to a specific commercial problem — pretty is a by-product, never the brief.
Nothing in this category yet — start the first.
Nine moves, one engagement. A naming project might use three of them; a ground-up brand uses all nine — but this is the full shape of how Nocturne works.
Interviews, audits, and the awkward questions. We learn how the business actually makes money and what customers say behind your back — before anyone opens a mood board.
One sentence that picks a fight worth having. Who it's for, why you, and what you will never be. Everything downstream gets judged against it.
Naming and verbal identity — the words in the room before any design shows up. Shortlists that clear trademark sanity checks and still sound good said out loud.
Logotype, mark, color, type. The part you hired us for — designed slowly, presented once, and defended with rationale instead of options by the pound.
A brand that survives contact with reality: templates, grids, motion rules, do's and don'ts. Guidelines your next hire can actually follow at five on a Friday.
Design and build, in-house. Fast, accessible, and written to sell — the identity working a night shift while you sleep.
The reveal, sequenced: teasers, press kit, socials, signage, the inbox announcement. A new brand deserves a premiere, not a soft open.
The weeks after launch are where good brands become known ones. We stay on for the follow-through — campaigns, collateral, and the ideas that didn't fit v1.
Search share, conversion, the number of people pronouncing the name right. We report what moved — and quietly retire what didn't.
Mara Ellison founded Nocturne in 2019 after eight years inside big-agency brand teams — the kind where the deck is beautiful and the strategist never meets the client. She kept the craft, cut the layers, and moved the practice to Tempe: every engagement is led by the person whose name is on the work.
Today Nocturne runs as a three-person studio — design, strategy, and writing under one roof — with a trusted bench of photographers, developers, and print partners brought in per project. Small on purpose; the work stays in the room.
Three people, no account layer. The ones who design your brand are the ones on the call — every time, at every stage.
Identity systems, typography, and the motion work. A decade across packaging and digital product, with a letterpress habit that keeps sneaking into the deliverables.
Positioning, naming, and every word that ships. Former journalist — which is why the interviews go deep and the taglines survive a skeptical room.
They renamed us, re-dressed us, and rebuilt the site — wholesale doubled before the year was out. It finally looks like it tastes.
Currently booking a limited number of brand engagements. Tell us what you're building — we'll reply within two business days.
Tempe, AZ
By appointment
Monday — Friday
9a — 6p