Small by design. Three people who've spent a combined 28 years making brands that work.
Rae has 12 years in brand and identity design. Before founding Debut in 2021, she was a senior designer at Wieden+Kennedy Portland, where she worked on brand systems for Nike, Tourism New Zealand, and a handful of early-stage clients she convinced them to take on. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
Her work centers on the idea that a great visual identity isn't decoration — it's argument. She's particularly obsessive about typography and the way a logo behaves at small sizes.
Omar came to design through motion — he spent four years making title sequences and broadcast graphics before realizing he cared more about what happened before someone pressed play. He joined Debut in 2022 after a stint at a Portland interactive studio, bringing his love of type-driven layouts and a near-unhealthy enthusiasm for Webflow.
He leads all web design and development projects, and takes the digital campaign work when it's interesting enough. He's also the one who makes sure files are actually organized when we hand off.
Simone spent nine years doing brand strategy and marketing consultancy — four of them as lead strategist at a mid-size Portland agency — before joining Debut in 2023. She came because she was tired of strategy being handed over to a creative team and promptly ignored.
At Debut, she runs discovery and shapes every brief. If you've had a call with us, you've probably spent time with Simone. She's the one who asks the questions that make clients realize they didn't actually know what they were trying to say.
Debut was founded in 2021 in Portland's Pearl District. We work with brands at the moments that matter — launches, repositionings, and pivots where identity needs to do real work.
We're deliberately small. We don't subcontract, we don't run projects in parallel we can't give proper attention to, and we don't pitch against agencies three times our size. We take on 4–5 projects per quarter and we mean it when we say we're invested in your outcome.
Our studio is at 412 NW 11th Ave, Studio 3B. We work with clients remotely or in-person — Portland-based clients are welcome to come to the space for workshops and reviews.