The studio
Zaaka is a design and engineering studio in Johannesburg. We turn ideas into production systems businesses run on, and build the brands around them.
What we actually do
Most studios sit on one side of a line: they design and hand over, or they build what someone else designed. We do both, because the gap between the two is where projects lose their quality — the detail that made a design good is exactly the detail that gets dropped when it is being interpreted by someone who was not in the room.
That means we take on fewer projects than an agency of the same size, and go deeper into each one. If you need twelve people on something next week, we are the wrong studio. If you want the person designing your product to be the person building it, we are worth a conversation.
Recent work is written up in full, including the decisions we would defend and the ones we would make differently.
How we think about the work
Own what you paid for
Hosting, licences, analytics, source code and design files go in your name from the start. Nothing we build depends on us continuing to exist. Studios that make leaving difficult are managing a risk that good work would have removed.
Say the hard thing early
If a brief asks for the wrong thing, if a budget will not stretch to the scope, if a deadline is not real — we would rather say so in week one and be argued with than agree politely and deliver a disappointment.
Measure what you claim
Fast and accessible are easy to promise and easy to check. We run the numbers before calling anything finished, and we will show you them rather than asking you to take our word for it.
Where we are
Johannesburg, working remotely with clients in South Africa, the UK and Europe. The time zone helps more than it hurts: an hour ahead of London and an hour behind most of Europe means a full working day of overlap rather than a handover window.
Tell us what you are trying to ship
A brief, a rough idea, or a system that has stopped keeping up.