Best Design Agencies in Los Angeles (2026)

Introduction

Los Angeles has a design scene shaped by its industries: entertainment, music, fashion, hospitality and a long tradition of public and environmental graphics. The 12 studios below were chosen for the range and quality of their recent work, their 2025 and 2026 recognition, and the clients they keep.

The past year brought steady movement. Mouthwash Studio opened a New York office in October 2025 while keeping its base in Chinatown. Koto, which runs a Los Angeles studio, took investment from WestBridge in April 2025 and in September 2026 bought Stereo Creative to start a network of founder-led studios. Imaginary Forces picked up two of the six Emmy nominations for title design in 2026. Several large international names, Pentagram among them, still have no Los Angeles office, which leaves much of the work to local and bi-coastal studios.

Every studio here has an active office in the wider Los Angeles area in 2026. The list runs in no fixed order of merit, since the right choice depends on the brief, the budget and the kind of collaboration you want.

The best design agencies in Los Angeles

1. Mouthwash Studio

Independent · Chinatown · mouthwash.studio

Mouthwash began as a podcast and print magazine made by friends and became a design studio in 2019. It works across strategy, identity, motion, digital and verbal identity, and runs its own café, newsletter and magazine alongside client work. Creative Boom put it on its 2025 Hotlist, Dezeen featured its Chinatown office among its best interiors of 2025, and it opened a New York studio in October 2025.

Clients include Nike, Thom Browne, The North Face, Seed and Air Company. Recent projects include the Bonnie Clyde eyewear rebrand, branding for T1 Energy and a new website for Canyon Coffee. The team is around 20 people, and the studio says it takes on only holistic projects where strategy, design and technology are handled together.

2. Imaginary Forces

Independent · West Los Angeles · imaginaryforces.com

Imaginary Forces is best known for title sequences, with Emmy wins for Mad Men and Stranger Things, but it also does brand identity, graphic systems and experiential work. Creative director Ronnie Koff received two 2026 Emmy nominations for outstanding title design, for Peacock’s Ponies and Prime Video’s Young Sherlock, bringing his total to seven. The studio also won Gold and Silver at the 2025 Collision Awards.

Recent work includes titles for Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay and Netflix’s The Boroughs, along with sports packages for ESPN’s Wimbledon coverage and Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football. It suits clients who want design and motion handled by the same team.

3. Studio Number One

Independent · Echo Park · studionumberone.com

Shepard and Amanda Fairey founded Studio Number One in 2003, and Shepard Fairey remains creative director. The studio covers identity, packaging, editorial, environmental design, apparel and campaigns, with a strong poster and illustration sensibility that grew out of the OBEY GIANT project.

Its best-known civic work is the Los Angeles Tourism identity, designed with House Industries for the city’s 2021 reopening. Commercial clients include Coca-Cola, adidas, Netflix, Apple TV+ and William Grant & Sons. The studio also publishes free artwork for social causes.

4. Ludlow Kingsley

Independent · Silver Lake · ludlowkingsley.com

Ludlow Kingsley is a branding and graphic design studio on Sunset Boulevard, between Silver Lake and Echo Park, led by founding partners Clark Stiles and Roxanne Daner. The pair have worked together for about 20 years, and the studio covers strategy, naming, identity, packaging, web, e-commerce, photography and environmental design.

The client list leans towards lifestyle and consumer brands: Parachute, Groundwork, P.F. Candle Co., Arrae, Caroline Francis and Portola Paints, plus the Ovation Hollywood retail complex. It is a good fit for founder-led brands that need packaging and a website from the same studio.

5. Perron Studios

Independent · Silver Lake · perronstudios.com

Perron Studios, formerly Perron-Roettinger, was founded by Willo Perron and Brian Roettinger. It works across graphic design, interiors, furniture and live entertainment, and is known for giving music and fashion clients one visual language across stage, print and retail space.

Recent projects include stage design for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour in 2025 and Rihanna’s Super Bowl LVII halftime show, alongside Chanel fashion shows and store design for Skims and Stüssy. Other clients include Cartier, Vans, Sacai and Savage X Fenty. In April 2025 Perron introduced the Bun lounge chair for Knoll at Salone del Mobile in Milan.

6. Sussman/Prejza & Co.

Independent · Chinatown · sussmanprejza.com

Deborah Sussman and Paul Prejza founded the firm in Santa Monica in 1980. Its graphics for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, drawn from the city’s Mexican, Japanese and other cultural traditions, remain a reference point for civic design. Sussman died in 2014, and the firm continues under the Sussman/Prejza name from offices on North Broadway.

It works on identity, signage and wayfinding, public interiors, exhibitions and print. Projects include the W Hotel and Residences in Hollywood, the SC Johnson headquarters in Racine and a Maria Callas exhibition in Los Angeles. With LA28 approaching, its archive is worth knowing even if your brief is smaller.

7. Selbert Perkins Design

Independent, woman-owned · Playa del Rey · selbertperkins.com

Clifford Selbert founded Selbert Perkins more than 40 years ago, and the firm now runs studios in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Shanghai. It describes its range as “From Logos to Landmarks”: branding, signage and wayfinding, public art, environmental graphics and placemaking. It is certified as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise.

Local work includes the LAX Gateway Columns, which marked 25 years in place, and the move to digital signage at Los Angeles Union Station. The firm has also published a monograph, Landmarks: Every Place Has a Story. Every Story Has a Place.

8. Hunt Design

Independent · Pasadena · huntdesign.com

Wayne Hunt founded Hunt Design in 1977, and he has served as national president of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design. Partners John Temple and Jennifer Bressler lead much of the current work, with Temple focused on large wayfinding programmes and Bressler on exhibitions and interpretive graphics.

Projects include the LA Arboretum, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the San Diego Zoo, the Las Vegas Convention Center, Santa Barbara’s city wayfinding and the National Mall. Choose Hunt for parks, campuses, museums and other places where people need to find their way.

9. Polymode

Independent, queer and minority-owned · Los Angeles and Raleigh · polymode.studio

Polymode is a bi-coastal studio run by partners Silas Munro and Brian Johnson, who met at the Rhode Island School of Design. It works on books, exhibitions, identities, websites, motion and type, and runs BIPOC Design History courses on Black and Latinx design.

Clients include the Getty, MoMA, Cooper Hewitt, the Orange County Museum of Art, Art + Practice and the City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office. Exhibition work includes Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 to Now, and The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience. It is a strong choice for cultural institutions and publishing.

10. Koto

Independent, with WestBridge investment · Los Angeles · koto.com

Koto was founded in London in 2015 and has a Los Angeles studio among its offices worldwide. WestBridge invested in April 2025 with the founders keeping significant stakes, and in September 2026 Koto bought Stereo Creative, taking the group to around 230 people across eight locations.

Recent work includes Amazon’s global brand transformation and Tripadvisor in 2025, Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC and Instagram in 2026. Koto works mostly with large technology companies and scale-ups that need identity and digital rolled out together.

11. ManvsMachine

Part of Landor (WPP) · Los Angeles · mvsm.com

Mike Alderson and Tim Swift founded ManvsMachine in London around 2006 and opened the Los Angeles studio in 2016, where Alderson is now based. The studio works across design, film and visual art, and Landor acquired it in 2015. Communication Arts ran a feature on the studio in its October 2026 issue.

Clients include Nike, where it has made several Air Max campaigns, Robinhood’s 2024 brand relaunch, Ford’s Mustang GTD, Moncler, Cash App and reMarkable. It suits brands that want identity and product film from one team.

12. Brand New School

Independent · Mid-City · brandnewschool.com

Jonathan Notaro founded Brand New School nearly two decades ago. It has studios on South La Brea Avenue, in New York and in London, and works across brand strategy, design, motion and creative technology, with partners Chris Dooley, Nico Casavecchia and Scott Uyeshima.

Clients include Slack, Brooks Running and Block’s Bitkey wallet, and a recent project for Vibecon explores code as a creative medium. Its work has been recognised by ADC, D&AD, TDC, AIGA and Cannes Lions.

What to look for in a Los Angeles design agency

Match the studio to the medium. Los Angeles has deep specialisms: title and motion design for entertainment, environmental graphics and wayfinding for public places, packaging for consumer brands, and editorial work for museums and publishers. A studio that excels at one may only dabble in another, so look at work in your own medium first.

Check how much of the work is made locally. Several studios on this list are bi-coastal or part of international groups, which can bring scale but also means some of your project may be run from New York or London. Ask which office leads the work and who will be in the room.

For environmental and wayfinding projects, ask about the full process. Signage programmes involve architects, fabricators, accessibility codes and often public agencies, and the best firms supervise installation as well as design. Firms such as Hunt Design and Selbert Perkins describe this as part of their standard service.

Finally, look at how the studio shares work in progress. Identity and packaging projects produce many rounds of options, guidelines and print-ready files. A clear review process, with one place for the latest version and comments tied to specific files, saves time on both sides.

How Fabric helps design agency teams

Fabric gives a design studio one workspace for its files, references and client feedback, with AI search across all of it. The brand identity setup keeps strategy decks, logo explorations, type files and final assets together for each client.

Working files live in Fabric’s cloud drive, which streams files on demand so they take no local disk space. Search works by meaning across documents, images and PDFs, and colour search finds assets by shade. When a designer needs references, similar search finds images close in composition, colour and subject to one they select.

Early stages often happen on a canvas, an infinite board that embeds Figma files and video and exports to SVG or PNG. It works well for moodboards shared with clients.

For review, clients can leave threaded comments through a shared link without signing up, and PDFs can be highlighted and annotated. Drawing directly on images is coming soon. Finished guidelines can be published as a web page that stays current as the source changes, an approach covered in brand guidelines on Fabric.

Password protection and link analytics are included on Pro and Team plans, and self-writing client docs on Team plans. See plans for teams.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best design agency in Los Angeles?

It depends on the medium. For title and motion design, Imaginary Forces received two 2026 Emmy nominations. For identity and digital, Mouthwash Studio and Koto have the most active recent portfolios. For wayfinding and environmental graphics, Hunt Design and Selbert Perkins have decades of public projects.

Does Pentagram have a Los Angeles office?

No. Pentagram lists offices in New York, London, Austin and Berlin. Los Angeles clients usually work with those offices or with local studios.

Who designed the graphics for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics?

Sussman/Prejza & Co. led the environmental graphics and look of the 1984 Games, drawing on the cultural traditions of Los Angeles. The firm still works from Los Angeles today.

What is the difference between a design agency and a branding agency?

Design agencies tend to work across many media, from packaging and books to signage and motion. Branding agencies focus more on strategy, naming and identity systems. For identity-led specialists, see our list of the best branding agencies in Los Angeles.

How much does a Los Angeles design studio cost?

Fees vary with scope and studio size. Small independent studios often quote by project, while larger firms work on project fees or retainers. Ask for a fee estimate broken down by phase before work begins.

Related lists

Design agencies in other cities: New York · London · San Francisco · Chicago · Berlin

More in Los Angeles: Creative agencies · Branding agencies · UX design agencies · Animation · Photography studios · Advertising agencies

Run your studio on Fabric: Fabric for designers · Fabric for creative teams · Best design feedback tools