Ben Pieratt, Designer I help founders compress big ideas into striking brands and interfaces.

Notable*

Designed a social network for The Atlantic.56 The Times had people “clamoring for an invite.”57 This. didn't make it.58

Designed the symbol on a currency with billions in circulation. DAI, 2020. Mark for the stablecoin.44

Downloadable toys you print at home. Readymech, 2005. Designer toys as PDFs, cut and fold. 3 Named in the paper-toy scene's own history, 2011, as where “a good many” of its designers started.4

A museum of book covers. Book Cover Archive, January 2009,6 with Eric Jacobsen.8 The New Yorker said “its creators have a discerning palate, and feast exclusively on beautiful covers.”7 Still up.9

Named a health insurer that went public. Oscar, 2013, with Eli Rousso; a founder's great-grandfather.28 IPO 2021, $7.9B.29

Named a book startup bought by Macmillan. Pronoun.com, 2015. Acquired May 2016.38

A brand at seed for a company soon valued at $100M. Mirror, 2021. Pre-Brand. USV round at a $100M valuation, June 2021.41

Picked as one of twenty young designers to watch. Print, New Visual Artists, 2008; twenty under thirty, as Fwis.1

Social shopping before Pinterest, sold to eBay. Svpply, September 2009. Visual bookmarking for products. Founder, CEO, designer. Spark Capital $550K seed.11 Pinterest beta opened six months later.13 Acquired by eBay, September 2012.12 Shut down 2014.14

Local news, in 38 cities. Co-founded The Egotist Network. Adweek called The Denver Egotist “the premier locally focused ad blog in the U.S.”53 38 city sites, New York through London and Dubai.54

A brand sold off the shelf, no company attached. Hessian, 2013. Complete brand — name, mark, patterns, site, brand book — listed at $18,000 before any product existed. Sold.18 Wired,15 Adweek,16 FastCo.17 It's Nice That says it's a forerunner of prefab branding.19

A market for the work behind the work. Folder.Market, 2018, with Cameron Koczon.22 Sell a dropbox folder as is. AIGA's Eye on Design called it a “marketplace for digital information — an idea that's potentially as big as the app store itself.”21

A logo drawn live on stream, with the client's community helping. Zora, 2021. Hired at seed. Drawn on Twitch, Zora's community in the Figma file; three hours on YouTube.39 $600M valuation, May 2022.40

Rebuilt sunset startup, users paid for it. Very Goods, June 2014. Svpply replacement, on Kickstarter forty hours after eBay announced the shutdown.36 1,321 backers, $62,906.35 A Note on Smallness.37

A screen for art, funded thirty times over. Electric Objects, 2013. Name, identity, design for Kickstarter campaign. $787K raised on a $25K goal.30 $1.7M seed.31 App acquired by Giphy, 2017.32

How to hire

If you're a founder or small team who needs help bringing your vision to life – send me an email or DM. I love hearing about new tech and I'll let you know if I think I can help.

Names, logos, and startups are delivered in units of 3-5 ideas, 1 PDF and a presentation. Sometimes we get it on the first round, others take a few. I try to bill in units of $5k USD, so estimate 1-4 weeks and $5k-$20k.

Hire instead

If my work isn't hitting the right notes for you, consider these exceptional talents.

Thank you!

I very much appreciate your time.
Find me elsewhere:


— BP

Essays

A 3-step process for naming a product, and some links. Naming a project is always an awful experience. An earworm that won't stop tapping your skull from the inside. blog.pieratt.com/a-3-step-process-for-naming-a-project-product 2014

Crashing out on AI. I left my home and went on a journey, met a wizard, faced the dragon, I was and am defeated - the end. Whether or not I've made it back with any treasure has yet to be seen. @pieratt 2026

Digital Spiritual Futurism. Tech speeding up, wealth disparity speeding up, fear of the future on the rise. The landscape is accelerating. Everything but the human spirit. docs.google.com 2022

ffffound — A few words for the nearly departed. Hello everyone, thanks for coming. It's raining and the sun is going down. It's getting cold out here so I won't say much. medium.com/ffffound-a-few-words-for-the-nearly-departed 2017

I still love Kanye West. I haven't organized any riots in light of Trump's pending inauguration. I haven't protested in the street or started a hunger strike. I'm worried about the next four years. medium.com/i-still-love-kanye-west 2016

A Note on Smallness. There's this pattern in internet communities called The 1% Rule. 1% create all the content, 9% edit and organize, 90% make up the viewing audience. verygoods.co/smallness 2014

Some reasoning behind Hessian. The idea of selling a brand independently of a product is somewhat new, and a bit jarring. blog.pieratt.com/some-reasoning-behind-hessian 2013

Dear Graphic and Web Designers. You have an inherent need to solve problems, visually and conceptually. There is enormous value in this, but you may be misplacing your talents. blog.pieratt.com/dear-graphic-and-web-designers-please-understand 2011

My Job Pt.1 — I have no idea what I'm doing. I am the CEO of Svpply, Inc. My company has been the recipient of over half-a-million in investor dollars, and I truly have very little understanding of what I am doing. blog.pieratt.com/my-job-pt-1-i-have-no-idea-what-im-doing 2011

In Praise of Quitting Your Job. I wrote this email to a friend a few weeks ago, and then the topic came up again last night with an old buddy who was frustrated with his work. blog.pieratt.com/in-praise-of-quitting-your-job 2010

Tweets

Thank god for type designers. A niche layer of obsession and talent that enriches the lives of practically everyone on the planet. @pieratttt 2017

This moment in time has a highly specific aesthetic, mentally and materially, that is invisible to most, short-lived, and omnipresent. @pieratt 2023

Thesis: Beauty and Knowledge are deeply connected. Proof: The more you understand something, the more beautiful it becomes. Application: Artificial Super Intelligence will find everything too exquisitely beautiful to be a threat. @pieratt 2023

America was the internet of its day. a new platform on which a set of unique systems could be installed and tested. @pieratt 2024

Sorry folks, Millennial nostalgia is canon. The internet may grow for another 10,000 years, but its aesthetic roots will always be in the 1990s. @pieratt 2022

Designers are like a mercenary class of weaponized witches, with none of the self-awareness or ethics. We're literally taught how to manipulate entire masses of people with combinations of words, colors and shapes, then lined up for service for power lords with evil agendas. @pieratt 2023

Startup and design industries, lend me your ear! I'd like to introduce .. Pre-Brand a new approach to branding for early-stage startups. @pieratttt 2019

Early startup branding can feel like living and breathing sci-fi. Everyone in joyful flow with abstractions, watching the source code of the future being written before its deployed at scale. Feels like an incredible honor to be involved and trusted in this space. @pieratt 2023

engineers are more likely to learn design than designers are to learn engineering for the same reason you never hear coders complain about having their work stolen. Hack is a high compliment in software culture, designers will clutch their pearls until they're buried in them @pieratt 2026

your body is full of useful intelligence that can only be found mechanically. this is why you gotta prototype early. you have to move thru the problem. hard problems hit staccato. good design feels like a gesture @pieratt 2026

your phone is a genie who steals a minute of your life for every wish it grants @pieratt 2025

Press & Notes*

  1. ^ “Fwis,” Print, New Visual Artists 2008. Portland, then Bushwick, with Eric Jacobsen as the third member.
  2. ^ Lukas WinklerPrins, interview with Ben Pieratt, RISD HTML Output, 2014. MassArt “supposed to have graduated” in 2004; Fwis as a three-person studio; left Svpply around the eBay sale; on running companies, “I did really badly with a lot of the things I was supposed to be good at.”
  3. ^ Phillip Torrone, Make your own Readymechs!, Make, October 30, 2005.
  4. ^ “Readymech,” Clutter Magazine, August 2, 2011. “A good many of the other paper designers working today found their inspiration from this body of work.”
  5. ^ Matt Hawkins, Urban Paper: 26 Designer Toys to Cut Out and Build, HOW Books, April 21, 2009. Publisher record. Readymech is not a chapter in the book; it is the earlier free series the paper-toy scene grew from.
  6. ^ Jason Kottke, The Book Cover Archive, kottke.org, January 8, 2009.
  7. ^ Eliza Honey, Well Covered: The Book Cover Archive, The New Yorker, February 27, 2009. “The site saves me the trip to the store, and, better yet, its creators have a discerning palate, and feast exclusively on beautiful covers.”
  8. ^ “1/3 Alligator: The Book Cover Archive Q & A,” The Casual Optimist, March 24, 2009. Names Eric Jacobsen as co-editor, and records that The Guardian and The New Yorker had already linked the site.
  9. ^ bookcoverarchive.com, still online.
  10. ^ Tina Roth Eisenberg, Lookwork RSS Reader, swissmiss, November 8, 2011. “ALL VISUAL, built for artists and designers.” $5 a month, no free trial at launch; one commenter noted it would have had far more potential before Pinterest.
  11. ^ “Svpply picks up $550K seed for social retail,” VatorNews, November 22, 2010. Spark Capital and Founder Collective led.
  12. ^ eBay Acquires Style-Focused, Social, Curated Shopping Site Svpply, TechCrunch, September 6, 2012. Identifies Zach Klein as a co-founder; restates the $550,000 raise.
  13. ^ “Pinterest,” Web Design Museum. First prototype March 6, 2010, about six months after Svpply.
  14. ^ Colleen Taylor, Social Shopping Site Svpply To Shut Down, Nearly 2 Years After Selling To eBay, TechCrunch, June 24, 2014.
  15. ^ Hessian: The Product-Less Brand Your Company Can Buy for Only $18,000, Wired, February 2013.
  16. ^ “Designer Selling Complete Brand Identity for $18,000 (Product Not Included),” Adweek, 2013.
  17. ^ “For Sale: Hessian, A Brand without A Product,” Fast Company, 2013.
  18. ^ Hessian sale page, marked SOLD, hessian.tv/forsale.html. Also listed sold at pre-brand.com/hessian.
  19. ^ Elizabeth Goodspeed, What happens when design becomes prefab?, It's Nice That, September 24, 2025. Lineage given as Zag, Hessian, Pre-Brand.
  20. ^ Ben Pieratt, Pre-Brand announcement, X (Twitter), October 2019.
  21. ^ Dust Off Your Dropbox Files and Sell Them At This Digital Flea Market, AIGA Eye on Design, 2019.
  22. ^ Cameron Koczon, on the Folder Market piece, X, January 2019. The Eye on Design article names him as co-founder.
  23. ^ “Step Inside The Dead Bookstore, Where Printed Books Are Reborn,” Fast Company, 2016.
  24. ^ John Biggs, Pronoun, A Self-Publishing Platform For Authors, TechCrunch, October 3, 2015. “The company, founded by Josh Brody and Ben Zhuk, raised $3.5 million in June.” Macmillan acquired Pronoun in May 2016; Zhuk became v-p of product. Publishers Weekly.
  25. ^ Hollie Slade, Intuit Snaps Up Docstoc, Forbes, December 4, 2013. DocStoc had bought BestVendor that August; Intuit then bought DocStoc. The Observer, February 2012, names Zhuk “co-founder and head of product at Best Vendor.” Observer.
  26. ^ Lex Sokolin, NestEgg's CEO, names Ben Zhuk as co-founder. Vanare acquired NestEgg, December 2014. PR Newswire.
  27. ^ producttherapy.studio. “Genius at the edge of comprehensibility” is Pieratt's own line. “Consistently five years ahead and one light year out on vision, technology, and culture” is Ben Zhuk, published there as a testimonial: he hired Pieratt across four companies, seed to acquisition. “Does not flinch from telling you exactly what you need to hear” is Phil M., founder and CTO, same page.
  28. ^ “Oscar Plans to Revolutionize Health Insurance,” Business Insider, October 2013. Joshua Kushner took the name from his great-grandfather.
  29. ^ Alex Wilhelm, Oscar Health prices IPO at $39 and secures a $9.5B valuation, TechCrunch, March 3, 2021. Simple IPO valuation “just over $7.92 billion”; $9.5 billion is Renaissance Capital's fully diluted figure.
  30. ^ Electric Objects, A Computer Made for Art, Kickstarter. $787,612 pledged of a $25,000 goal.
  31. ^ Anthony Ha, Aiming To Build Beautiful, Internet-Connected Displays, Electric Objects Raises $1.7M, TechCrunch, April 30, 2014.
  1. ^ Chaim Gartenberg, Electric Objects shutters digital art display business and sells app to Giphy, The Verge, June 27, 2017.
  2. ^ Ben Pieratt, A 3-Step Process for Naming a Project/Product, January 2014.
  3. ^ David Airey, Brand naming resources. The essay was added the month after it ran and is still listed.
  4. ^ Ben Pieratt, Very Goods, the new Svpply, Kickstarter. 1,321 backers, $62,906. Campaign June 27–July 21, 2014.
  5. ^ Colleen Taylor, Svpply's Founder Is Building A New And Improved Social Shopping Site Called Very Goods, TechCrunch, June 27, 2014. “Just 40 hours after eBay announced plans to shut down Svpply.”
  6. ^ Ben Pieratt, A Note on Smallness, Very Goods, 2014.
  7. ^ Macmillan Acquires Pronoun, Formerly Known as Vook, Publishers Weekly, May 2016.
  8. ^ Pre-Brand Live: Zora, YouTube. Three-hour livestream; community in the Figma file.
  9. ^ Jacquelyn Melinek, Haun Ventures leads $50M round in NFT startup Zora Labs, TechCrunch, May 5, 2022. $600 million valuation.
  10. ^ Kate Clark, Union Square Ventures Values Crypto Publishing Tool Mirror at $100 Million, The Information, June 2021. Reported as a seed round, not Series A.
  11. ^ Ben Pieratt, In Praise of Quitting Your Job, 2010. Ownership defined as “the ability to change things for the better.”
  12. ^ Ben Pieratt, I feel blind. I hate having no relationship with the source., X, 2025.
  13. ^ “More than 1 billion DAI… has been created,” The Block, November 2020. Circulation measured in the billions.
  14. ^ okhillary.com, 2016. “It sucks that Bernie lost, but whatever it takes to stop Trump.” Shirts sold at cost; not affiliated with the campaign. Covered as Finally, An Honest Campaign Slogan, FastCo Design, 2016.
  15. ^ businessmodel.website. A Very Goods store selling the words “Business Model” on shirts, sweatshirts, and a bean bag; clothing and accessories for cofounders.
  16. ^ Ben Pieratt, on Failure, Creative Mornings, 2014.
  17. ^ It's Time To Pay Your Respects To Svpply, MTV Style, 2014.
  18. ^ Hessian, a brand in a box, kottke.org, 2013.
  19. ^ Interview on Kern and Burn, 2013.
  20. ^ This Is The Best Blog Post We've Ever Read By An Entrepreneur, Business Insider, 2011.
  21. ^ Readymech Series 002, Cool Hunting, 2007.
  22. ^ “Denver Egotist reveals plan to control world,” Adweek, January 2010. “The premier locally focused ad blog in the U.S. (and one of the better ad blogs period).”
  23. ^ The Fifty, 2012, PDF. The network's own count: 38 city sites, listed from Denver through Auckland, including New York, London, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Dubai. The book also calls it “the largest network of advertising-focused websites in the world”; that line is theirs.
  24. ^ “The Atlanta Egotist Checks In,” AgencySpy, 2010. “As part of our ongoing collaboration with The Denver Egotist.” Same arrangement for St. Louis.
  25. ^ Nicole Zhu, Andrew Golis on launching This.cm, Knight Lab, March 16, 2015. Golis: “I've been able to recruit Ben Pieratt, a friend of mine who's a beautiful designer, and a really awesome studio in Brooklyn, Fictive Kin, to build this prototype.”
  26. ^ This. Has People Clamoring for an Invite, The New York Times, January 29, 2015. Fashion piece on the invite-only launch. The headline is the clamoring line. Pieratt's name is in the Knight Lab piece, not established in this one.
  27. ^ The share-one-link-per-day platform This is shutting down, Nieman Lab, July 2016. Golis: they “struggled to raise money and just ran out of time.” Offline at the end of that month.
  28. ^ Crashing out on AI, June 19, 2026. “A midwestern kid raised overseas, connecting to geocities via compuserve in 1997 was a revelation. I built my Brazilian high school's first website soon after.”
  29. ^ Crashing out on AI, X, June 19, 2026. “Be wary of the ratio of chaos to compute in your life, if things are bad and you're also deep in tokens, you might be lost in a dream and need to wake up.”
  30. ^ Ben Pieratt, staying near my kids keeps me trapped in a place I hate, X, May 31, 2026. Reply to @keccers. The post does not name the place.

Method

*Notable section audited and written by Fable 5.1. Every factual sentence in the starred section carries a number that resolves to a source below; jokes and opinions carry none, on purpose. Sourcing ran one way: a claim went in after a link was found for it, and claims that failed were cut or downgraded rather than left standing. Downgrades in this draft: “wrote the first check” became “a co-founder”12; a Guardian piece on the Book Cover Archive could not be retrieved, so it is cited secondhand8; the HOW Books title does not include Readymech and is cited only for the genre5; Oscar's IPO is given at the $7.9B simple valuation, not the $9.5B fully diluted figure29; author bylines that had been guessed were removed. Two “first” claims were proposed and withdrawn: Hessian became “forerunner,” on a published lineage19; Svpply became “before Pinterest,” on a dated prototype.13

The subject's hand. He asked for the footnotes, asked for the audit, and accepted every downgrade, including the two he argued. His pressure was on framing, not fact: which items lead, which close, which press gets quoted, how plain the labels read. That is ordinary editorial control, disclosed here because it is invisible in the result. The voice is his, the model was given his published writing and asked to sound like it.