SELECTED WORK — 02
Materia Ultima
Onde as histórias ganham forma.
BRAND · DIGITAL
PORTO, PORTUGAL
2026
OVERVIEW
THE BRIEF
Materia Ultima is a shop, studio and gathering place on Rua das Flores — tabletop RPGs, hand-painted miniatures, dungeon-synth vinyl and medieval printmaking under one roof. Rich in ritual, invisible online: no identity system, no digital presence, and a story that only worked if you happened to walk through the door.
THE RESPONSE
We positioned the store as a cult of craft — eight territories, one doctrine — and built the identity around numbered chapters, engraved typography and museum-grade object photography. The digital flagship turned every product into a relic: bilingual, cinematic, and wired to the weekly table sessions that make the place a community, not a checkout.
PROJECT DATA
YEAR
2026
CLIENT
Materia Ultima
LOCATION
Porto, Portugal
SECTOR
Retail · Culture
SCOPE
Identity · Digital flagship · Content
AGENCY
Thinkers®
CREATIVE DIRECTION
António Conceição
STRATEGY & ANALYTICS
Patrícia Alves
01 — DESIGN ANALYSIS
Four decisions that carry the brand.
COLOUR
A single flame in a black room. Void black almost everywhere, one tungsten ember as the only warm light, ivory bone for text. That is the entire strategy — and it is enough. It reads as a gallery after hours, not a toy shop at noon. Colour here is rationing: the less ember you spend, the more each use is worth.
TYPE
Fraunces at a high optical size does the serious, editorial talking — it has enough quirk to feel crafted, enough spine to feel expensive. Then the wildcard: Pirata One for numerals and section marks. It is the guild-hall, hand-inked voice that stops a luxe dark theme from feeling like a corporate bank.
LAYOUT & MOTION
Slow, heavy motion — imagery scales up over more than a second, on a deliberately luxurious easing curve. Nothing snaps; everything is poured. The information architecture is unusually rich for a shop: collections, a made-to-measure workshop, an events agenda, a members’ guild. It is built as a place, not a checkout.
THE VERDICT
This is the hardest trick in the deck — making commerce feel collected rather than sold. The dark-luxe-plus-rune combination is genuinely distinctive and hard to copy. Watch-out: dark + ember + slow motion can tip into gloom on a badly-lit phone. The bone type and generous space are the pressure valve keeping it breathable.
01·B — IDENTITY IN THE WILD
Logo studies & applications.
Placeholder tiles — drag to browse, replace each fill with real artwork in Framer.
02 — THE WORK
Every object, treated like a relic.
«Trilhas & Atmosferas» LP
SOUND CRYPT
Custom miniature
STUDIO
Stone dice set
CHAMBER
03 — DESIGN SYSTEM
One ember, bone type, rune numerals.
PALETTE
Void
#0A0908
Primary ground
Coal
#12100E
Elevated surface
Ash
#1B1815
Media base
Smoke
#26221E
Lines & edges
Bone
#E9E3D5
Primary type
Bone dim
#A39B8D
Secondary
Bone faint
#6D675D
Meta / labels
Ember
#D9974F
Accent — tungsten ember
Ember deep
#A86A2E
Accent shadow
Brass
#B08D45
Metal detail
TYPOGRAPHY
DISPLAY — FRAUNCES
RUNE — PIRATA ONE
I · II · III — as histórias ganham forma
BODY / UI — SPACE GROTESK
Livros, miniaturas por medida, dados, vinil.
PRINCIPLES
01
Ration the ember. One warm accent, spent sparingly, so every use reads as ritual.
02
The rune voice. Pirata One numerals give the system its hand-inked, guild-hall character.
03
Pour, don’t snap. Slow luxe easing on every hover — motion as a sign of value.
04
A place, not a cart. Collections, workshop, agenda, guild — commerce disguised as a world.
04 — IMPACT · 12 MONTHS AFTER LAUNCH
The numbers behind the mythology.
Working figures — to be finalised with the client’s analytics.
▲ +129% VS. BEFORE
MONTHLY STORE VISITS
▲ FROM 8% OF REVENUE
ONLINE REVENUE SHARE
▲ FROM 54% OCCUPANCY
WEEKLY TABLE OCCUPANCY
▲ +367% SUBSCRIBERS
GUILD NEWSLETTER
Before / after the rebrand
Indexed growth — twelve months pre-launch = 100. Real values labelled on each bar.
BEFORE
AFTER
Monthly store visits
2,100 → 4,800
4,800
Online revenue share
8% → 31%
31%
Weekly table occupancy
54% → 92%
92%
Newsletter subscribers
900 → 4,200
4,200
Avg. order value
€23 → €41
€41
Monthly website sessions
Twelve months across the engagement — flagship launched in month four.
ANALYSIS · 01
The shop became a destination
Numbered territories and the weekly table programme gave people a reason to return without buying — and they bought anyway. Repeat visits doubled inside six months.
ANALYSIS · 02
Objects sell when they rotate
Museum-grade spin films replaced flat product shots. Product pages with motion converted 2.4× better than the static originals they replaced.
ANALYSIS · 03
The Guild compounds
Newsletter, sessions and drops run as one calendar. Every limited edition now sells through to the Guild list before it reaches the window display.
05 — IN CONVERSATION
On lighting a whole brand with a single ember.
And why a games shop should feel like a gallery at midnight — the founders on the calls behind the work.
Almost the entire brand is black. Bold, or did the budget run out at «paint»?
António
CREATIVE
A games shop lit like a supermarket kills the spell. One candle in a dark room and everyone leans in. We just made the candle a colour and called it ember. Black is also the cheapest way to look expensive. It hides everything you don’t want seen and frames the one thing you do — the object.
Explain the ember to an accountant.
Patrícia
STRATEGY & ANALYTICS
It is scarcity. If everything glows, nothing does. We use the warm colour on maybe five percent of the page, so the eye treats it like gold — it goes straight to the thing we want you to buy. It is the smell of dice hitting the table. You can’t photograph that, so we lit the whole brand with it instead.
There is a medieval-pirate font in a luxury layout. Justify yourself.
António
CREATIVE
Pure luxe would have been beautiful and dead — a perfume ad for goblins. The rune font is the wink. It says the people who made this actually play the games. We keep it on a leash — numbers and section marks only. It is seasoning, not the meal.
Everything moves so slowly. My cursor got bored.
Patrícia
STRATEGY & ANALYTICS
Slow is the signal. Fast animation feels like software; slow feels like someone lifting a rare book off a shelf for you. It quietly tells you the objects are worth the wait.
Give me the one-liner.
António
CREATIVE
Make people feel like collectors, not customers. Nobody frames a receipt; people frame the thing they were proud to find.
NEXT PROJECT
© 2026 THINKERS®. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PORTO, FOR EVERYWHERE