Lakbay
Brands built like machines.
MAKINA® — ONE-PERSON BRAND STUDIO
MNL → WORLDWIDE / EST. 2021
I’m Mars Villanueva. I design identities for startups that need to look inevitable on day one — strategy, wordmark, system and site. No decks about decks. Fixed price, fixed weeks, shipped.
01 / SELECTED IDENTITIES
Four startups,
Four startups,
four voices
Fictional clients for this concept site — each tile shows the wordmark system I’d build. On a live site these open full case studies.
hilom
Bukid
SIGLA
02 / WHAT I DO
Everything a brand
Everything a brand
needs to ship
A —
Strategy & naming
Positioning, voice, and a name that survives the trademark search. One workshop, one page, zero jargon.
B —
Identity systems
Wordmark, type stack, color, grids, motion rules — built as a system your team can actually use without me.
C —
Sites that sell
Design and front-end for the launch site. Fast, hand-coded, no page-builder residue.
03 / PACKAGES
Fixed price.
Fixed price.
Fixed weeks.
Every package starts with a strategy call and ends with files your developers won’t curse at. Half up front, half on delivery.
For pre-seed
Spark
$3,500 / 2 weeks
- Positioning one-pager
- Wordmark + logo suite
- Type & color system
- Mini brand guide (12 pp)
Most booked
For seed → A
Signal
$6,500 / 4 weeks
- Everything in Spark
- Full identity system + motion rules
- Pitch deck template
- Launch site, designed & built
- 30 days of post-launch support
For rebrands
System
$12,000 / 8 weeks
- Everything in Signal
- Naming + migration plan
- Product UI theming
- Brand film (45s) for launch
- Team handover workshop
04 / PROCESS
Weeks,
Weeks,
not quarters
WK 01
Interrogate
One 90-minute workshop. I ask the uncomfortable questions — who actually pays you, and why would they care — and write the positioning page.
WK 02
Two directions
Two sharply different identity routes shown in the wild — on the app store, a billboard, a tee — never on a blank slide.
WK 03+
Build the system
The chosen route becomes a full system: type, color, grids, motion, components. You see progress twice a week, async.
SHIP
Handover
Files, tokens, templates and a one-hour workshop so your team can run the brand without booking me again. (Most do anyway.)
05 / RECEIPTS
What founders
What founders
say after
Investors started repeating our own tagline back to us in meetings. That’s when I knew the rebrand paid for itself.
Carlo D. — founder, agritech
Four weeks, zero scope creep, and a brand guide our engineers actually read. Unheard of.
Nina T. — CEO, health startup
Mars killed our favourite logo idea in the first call and was completely right to.
Jo M. — co-founder, travel app
We hired agencies three times the price before. This was better, faster, and the fonts don’t look like everyone else’s.
Rafa L. — founder, fintech
06 / START
Scope your project
Scope your project
in 60 seconds
The scoping agent below plays out how intake works on a live Makina site — or write the brief yourself, analog style.
// scripted demo — not live, collects nothing