FAQ

Only every single waking minute…. just like every song, store layout, and app notification you encounter.

The real question is: to what end?

We don’t weaponize psychology to create false need. We wield it to create clarity and connection. Think of us as locksmiths, not thieves. We use the principles of the mind to help your brand open the right doors for the right people, so they happily walk through on their own. Manipulation implies force. We’re in the business of making alignment feel inevitable.

The “Curse of Knowledge.”

It’s not that you know too much… it’s that you forget what it’s like not to know. The surprising trick is fighting it by becoming aggressively simple.

We force brands to strip away insider jargon and assumed understanding. The most effective “trick” is often an exorcism of your expertise, leaving only the visceral, obvious idea a 10-year-old would get. It feels counterintuitive. It works because brains are lazy. Give them a speedbump of confusion, and they’ll turn around.

We start by asking, “What do we want people to DO?” Not feel… DO. Then we work backward through the neurological chain reaction that leads to that action.

Want a sign-up? Anticipation is a stronger driver than joy.

Want a loyal community? Shared indignation (at an industry pain point) bonds better than contentment.

We’re less like poets picking a mood and more like chemists mixing compounds for a specific reaction. The emotion isn’t the goal; it’s the catalyst.

We’re partial to the limbic system… the ancient, furry, emotional core that makes decisions long before the prefrontal cortex (the “smart” part) bothers to rationalize them.

But we’re not snobs; we court the whole family.

We design for the gut reaction (amygdala), craft for memory encoding (hippocampus), and write copy that gives the logical frontal lobe a satisfying story to tell itself about why the gut decision was “right” all along.

It’s a group project where the emotional brain is the CEO.

Yes, and it’s not subtle. Color alone can swing perceived value by 30%. A cohesive visual system doesn’t just look professional—it triggers cognitive ease, which the brain interprets as truth.

A cluttered, confusing interface doesn’t just look bad—it induces cognitive strain, which feels like distrust. We don’t just make things pretty; we engineer perceptual shortcuts that bypass skepticism and land directly in the “This feels legitimate” zone.

It’s less art, more applied neurology.

A profile? No. That’s a static snapshot. We build a behavioral model… a living, breathing, slightly paranoid simulation of your customer’s mind.

We map their hidden anxieties, their unspoken social scripts, the irrational shortcuts they take when tired. We don’t just know who they are… we know when they are most likely to abandon a cart (3:17 PM on a Tuesday, decision fatigue is real), and what trivial visual cue will make them feel understood.

It’s less like reading a resume and more like having a backstage pass to their subconscious.

It looks like we’re trying to steal your soul… but politely.

We’ll ask things like: “What’s the guilty secret your product lets people keep?” or “If your brand were a justification for a bad decision, what would it be?”

We’ll dissect your last awkward sales call not for the pricing objection, but for the micro-moment of social pressure the prospect felt. Standard briefs ask “what do you do?” Ours ask, “What do you help people get away with?”

Bring coffee. It gets weird.

We treat data as the fossil record of past behavior… and creativity as the asteroid that changes the ecosystem forever.

Data tells us what people did. Intuition, trained on psychology, asks why the hell they did it.

Then we design for the why. So we might see data that “video outperforms static images.” Our psych-brain asks: “Is it the motion… or the implied human attention in the footage?” Then we create a static image that feels like it’s watching you back. Checkmate.

We use data to find the rules… so we can break the right ones.

Constantly. It is literally our full time job to fix client problem.

It’s our favorite awkward gift to give. We once told a “premium” fintech client their sleek, cold, silver logo was triggering subconscious associations with surgical instruments and emotional distance… not “your money is safe here.”

They cried.

Then they paid us triple to fix it. If we don’t tell you, we’re frauds. Our job isn’t to decorate your ego… it’s to architect a psychic bridge between you and your customer.

Sometimes that means burning your existing rope swing that you think is fun to show off to your friend… and you came to us to find out why no one wants to come to your swing party.

Is a carpet cleaner boring? Not if you position it as “The Liberation from Your Host’s Silent Judgment” and design the bottle to look like a sober, authoritative chemist who has arrived to handle the evidence of your lived-in life.

Is industrial pipe insulation boring? Not when you sell it with the tagline “Prevent Regret Before It Condenses” and use thermal imaging photography that looks like abstract, threatening art. Boring is a failure of imagination.

We don’t sell features… we sell permission slips for a better narrative about your boring product. Give us your driest product… we’ll find the latent drama and weaponize it.

Because sometimes it’s not your customer… it’s you.

The smiling stock photo hero. That generic, toothy grin plastered across every corporate website. It’s not just lazy… it’s creepy.

The brain distrusts uniform, unwavering happiness in strangers—it reads as a threat display or dishonesty. We call it the “Joker Problem.” You’re not building warmth, you’re triggering uncanny valley alarms. Give us a subtle smirk, a focused frown, a look of concentration… anything with a human flicker of context. Or better yet, no face at all. Let the product be the hero. Stop grinning at me.

I don’t know you.

A graphic design mindset we have is being able to present you without it looking like a wanted poster… which makes you not trustworthy and look like a criminal. Let’s avoid that if we can.

Unless we are marketing your amazing bank robbing company, then we will stay on brand.

Default Pure Blue. The safe, corporate, “trust us” blue of a thousand forgettable logos. It’s the color of psychological surrender. It says “we had no point of view, so we chose the color of a clear sky we never look at.”

We’re not opposed to blue… we’re opposed to lazy. Give us a bruised twilight blue, a toxic cyan, a deep oceanic navy that feels like pressure. But the stock photo blue? Using it is an admission that you have nothing to say. We’d rather paint a brand hot pink and risk hatred than bore a brain into submission.

Clients are often shocked at learning that we could care less about what they like, it is waaaaaayyyyy more important to know what your customers like… and sometimes, those likes and dislikes are not the same. Weird how people are different like that.

“Solutions.” It is the linguistic equivalent of wet cardboard. It means nothing, which is why every nervous company uses it.

The brain sees it and just… skips over. Our unofficial agency motto at the water cooler is “Ban ‘Solutions,’ Find the Friction.” Tell us the problem you actually solve. Is it rage? Inefficiency? Infertility? Social embarrassment? Name the dragon. We’ll help you sell the sword.

“Solutions” just says “we have a warehouse full of vaguely pointy objects.” Be specific or be silent.

The Mad Scientist… with peer-reviewed journals.

We have the deep, systematic knowledge of the Sage, but we apply it with the fearless experimentation of the Creator. Our lab coats might be stained with ink, paint, eraser dust, and black tea with no cream, but our methodologies are precise. We aren’t afraid to Frankenstein a new approach from disparate parts of behavioral science and art, all to provoke a specific, measurable reaction.

We’re driven by “what if?” and back it up with “ah, here’s how.”

Constantly. It’s a hall of mirrors in here, and we love it.

We run split tests on our own copy all the time to see which version of our personality converts better. We track where people hesitate on our portfolio page… it’s like a silent focus group judging our soul. The meta-cognition is the point. It keeps us honest. If we’re preaching psychological principles but our site triggers boredom or confusion… we’re hypocrites. And the brain sniffs out hypocrisy faster than anything. So yes, we’re our own lab rats.

The data is delicious.

We run experiments on ourselves so we know what works on our customer’s cusomers.

We don’t measure the feeling… we measure the symptom. The tear, the click, the shared rage-post, the credit card number typed with conviction. We track the behavioral residue that emotion leaves behind.

Using psychographic segmentation and A/B testing, we create two parallel realities: one with our psychological “spell” applied, and one without. We then measure which universe performed better on the metrics that actually matter—not just clicks, but commitment, retention, and perceived value.

The data is our lab report. Increased conversion is the feeling, quantified.

In the end we ask, “did it effect the bottom line by increasing profits or engagement.”

Gladly. A client selling high-end bedding was struggling with cart abandonment. We changed one thing: the product image on the checkout page.

Instead of the sterile, folded duvet, we swapped it for a wildly intimate, slightly disheveled photo of the sheets in use… a human-shaped depression on the pillow, a hand resting on the crumpled linen. The suggestion of rest, of ownership, of a story already begun.

art completions jumped 31%. The tweak wasn’t visual… it was proprioceptive. We didn’t show a product; we implanted a ghost memory of already owning it.

We did the same thing with our soda machine project in our case studies page.

A pretty logo is a nice artifact. We build psychic real estate.

We ask: what does this logo do? Does its shape imply stability or movement? Do its colors trigger appetite or anxiety? Does it feel familiar enough to be trusted, but distinct enough to be remembered?

We’re not decorating your letterhead… we’re encoding a set of triggers and promises into a visual sigil. Think of us as the difference between a talented painter and a master forger. One makes a beautiful picture. The other makes a document so convincing, it rewrites reality.

“Know your customer” is the destination.

We sell the interdimensional warp drive to get you there. Everyone wants to know their customer. We give you the operating manual for their subconscious. It’s the difference between knowing someone’s name and knowing the exact tone of voice that will make them confess a secret. We provide the X-ray, not the portrait.

So yes, but also… you have no idea the information we can gather from studying your customers in their daily lives.

Basic instincts don’t go out of style. Fear of loss, desire for status, craving for belonging, the pull of narrative… these are older than fire.

Our work is built on these bedrock principles, not on TikTok dances. The applications evolve (we won’t make you a Myspace page), but the foundational psychology is timeless. We give you an evergreen strategic engine, not a disposable costume. The platform may change, but the pulse point we target does not.

That being said, you should constantly work on your brand to continue to tweek your marketing and brand. Even coke in their 130 plus years in business, has changed their logo more than 10 times and their message thousands. It’s the way of the beast.

The “Illusion of Progress” Bar. You know, the “Complete your profile: 20%” bar on sign-up forms. People will input absurd amounts of personal data just to watch a rectangle fill up. It triggers a tiny dopamine hit for achieving nothing of value yet. We ethically weaponize this by breaking big asks into tiny, satisfying steps.

It’s not a trick… it’s a pacemaker for motivation. We turn friction into a game where the prize is their own commitment.

It is Beautiful, really.

True “subliminal messages” are a pop-psych myth.

What actually works is PWA (Perception Without Awareness). It’s the obvious thing in your environment that influences you precisely because it seems normal. So, we wouldn’t hide a message. We’d make the wall itself a signal. A perfectly calibrated, slightly uncommon shade of green proven to induce calm focus. A fractal pattern at a specific scale to subconsciously engage problem-solving. And the scent of a fragrant, unfamiliar tea wafting in… creating a unique olfactory anchor for creative breakthroughs.

The message isn’t hidden… it’s the entire atmosphere. You notice it; you just don’t notice it changing you. That’s the magic.

Blockbuster Video. The smell of popcorn and plastic, the anxiety of late fees, the shared ritual of the “Friday Night Hunt.”

We wouldn’t just diagnose the failure to pivot to digital… we’d dissect the lost social ecosystem. What deep-seated need did that fluorescent-lit browsing truly fulfill? How could that need have been migrated? We see a corpse. We see a ghost. We want to build it a new, immortal body.

Pass the scalpel Nurse, we’re going in.

Yes, and they’re considered HR-sanctioned bloodsport.

• Helvetica: Is it the timeless voice of God, or the resignation of all creative ambition? No middle ground.

• The True Perfect Circle: An impossible ideal we all chase. Is the “O” in that logo smugly round or weakly oval? Careers have nearly ended.

• Drop Shadows: Generally viewed as the typographic equivalent of a comb-over. Any use must be justified before a tribunal.
  These aren’t aesthetic quibbles. They’re theological debates about how form imposes feeling. It gets loud.

You can change someone’s memory of a past experience by changing the ending of the story you tell them about it.

This is the Peak-End Rule. A brand interaction that is largely mediocre but ends on a spectacularly positive note will be remembered as a good overall experience. Conversely, a long, pleasant service call that ends in frustration will be recalled as a bad call. We’re not just crafting experiences… we’re writing the memory of them in real-time.

The last scene is everything.

Now you’ll never un-notice bad endings.

Now Smile. <—- that’s how it works.

Our lab is headquartered in the heart of Downtown Clinton, Iowa (515 S 3rd St).

You’re welcome to drop in (we are located in the back of a cool art gallery) for a surprise hello, but be warned: we might be deep in a behavioral experiment or arguing about the emotional weight of a semicolon.

Scheduling an appointment is the guaranteed way to get our full, undistracted genius. [Let’s schedule a chat.]

Absolutely, but with a caveat worthy of our paranoid profession. We have social channels where we share thoughts, oddities, and public-facing work.

However, a significant portion of our craft is ghost work under NDAs. We treat client confidentiality like a state secret. So, what you see online is the tip of the iceberg… the publicly released outcomes of deeper, often invisible, psychological strategy.

For the full picture, you need a direct line. [Follow us here or contact us for the deep dive.]

We measure our projects in psychological complexity, not just budget size.

We’ve built campaigns for national brands and engineered the entire personality for local startups. If you have a meaningful audience (even an audience of one that you need to convince), a business problem that lives in the human mind, and the ambition to solve it interestingly, we’re equipped.

Our process scales; our obsession with behavioral nuance does not.

It starts with a conversation about the problem, not a solution.

We begin with a diagnostic consult to see if we’re the right mad scientists for your experiment. If we are, we craft a custom proposal. Because our work is bespoke… mixing strategy, psychology, and creative… investments vary. They are structured to match scope, from focused brand surgeries to full-scale, multi-channel campaigns.

Transparency is a core principle; we’ll define the map and the milestones before we take a single step together.

It starts with a conversation about the problem, not a solution.

We begin with a diagnostic consult to see if we’re the right mad scientists for your experiment. If we are, we craft a custom proposal. Because our work is bespoke… mixing strategy, psychology, and creative… investments vary. They are structured to match scope, from focused brand surgeries to full-scale, multi-channel campaigns.

Transparency is a core principle; we’ll define the map and the milestones before we take a single step together.