A studio started a rebrand with a séance — and it worked

Independent studio Mother Design took an unusual first step on its latest rebrand: before opening a design file, the team staged a séance and a chakra reading, plus an automatic drawing and writing workshop led by one of the client’s holistic practitioners. The client was Purple Garden, a mobile and online psychic services platform, and the brief was to bring the feeling of spiritual practice into the digital world.

The resulting identity reframes Purple Garden from a place you visit for a one-off reading into a home for ongoing spiritual practice, built around the idea of “A Living Practice.” The audience, in Mother Design’s framing, is seasoned seekers looking for growth and meaning rather than casual curiosity — a distinction that matters, since the studio recently rebranded Keen, another brand in the same parent portfolio, for a more mainstream, “spiritually curious” audience. Two brands, two different jobs, two different identities.

Why this matters to independent teams: the séance was not a gimmick bolted onto a normal process. Creative director Joanna Tulej says the team wanted the identity to feel spontaneous and alive, so it allowed some of that spontaneity into how it designed, stepping away from the screen and the rational design process. Some of the textures, energy and unexpectedness from the session found their way into the final identity — a wordmark with elongated serifs and curved corners, a crystal-like glyph as a symbol of guidance, a palette of six warmer purples, and “living type” inspired by cymatic patterns.

The lesson is portable even if your clients never book a chakra reading: when a brand is about something felt rather than seen, a purely rational process can sand off exactly what makes it distinctive. Build one step into the project that lets the unexpected in — an unfamiliar discipline, a hands-on exercise, a constraint that forces instinct over habit — and then do the disciplined work of turning what emerges into a system that holds up across a website, an app, advertising and social. Mother Design also moved back and forth between traditional design software and AI tools during development, iterating to generate unexpected visuals rather than to shortcut decisions.

The new identity is rolling out across Purple Garden’s website, app, advertising and social channels over the coming weeks.

Source: Creative Boom, “How Mother Design turned a séance into a new identity for Purple Garden” (published October 28, 2026).