About Samas
Samas began as a question.
For ten years, we built GDD Experience Design around a simple conviction — that design, taken seriously, could change the trajectory of a company. We worked with founders who were building things that did not yet exist, and with established companies trying to remember what they once stood for. We helped Magicpin find its first form. Shaped Tata Cliq's early identity. Designed B2B interfaces for Flipkart and SirionLabs. Simplified Adobe Exchange. Gave Tata Neu's travel section a clearer language. Levelled up the Havells One app. Helped Scripbox and TripMoney rethink how families and travellers make decisions about money.
Across that decade, we watched the industry change around us. Design moved from the margins to the centre of how companies are built. The craft we once had to argue for became a category everyone now claims to value. New tools collapsed the time required to make almost anything. Generative systems learned to imitate, in seconds, work that had taken us weeks.
We could have kept doing what we were doing, more efficiently, for a little while longer. Instead, we asked a harder question.
If making is no longer the scarce thing, what is?
The answer, we believe, is judgment. Context. The discipline of deciding what is worth building, and what is not. The willingness to push leaders past their comfort zone toward work that genuinely matters. The taste to know when the obvious answer is wrong. These are the things machines cannot reach for. They are also the things that have always made the best design work the best.
Samas is the practice we have built around that conviction.
The name comes from the Sanskrit samāsa, meaning compound or synthesis. It points to what we do: bring together strategy, brand, experience, and the systems beneath them into a single, considered whole. We work across disciplines because defining moments rarely respect their boundaries. A product launch is also a brand decision. A repositioning is also an experience decision. A market entry is all of them at once.
We are smaller than the firms we are sometimes compared to, and that is intentional. We are senior throughout, embedded with our clients, and accountable for outcomes rather than effort.
GDD taught us what design can do. Samas is what we believe design must become.
Samas is led by a small partnership. Each of us brings a distinct lens to the work — strategy, experience, brand, or production — and we operate as a single team across engagements rather than as separate departments. The partnership is the level at which our clients work with us, and the level at which we are accountable for outcomes.
Awwwards
The partners work with a small group of senior practitioners across experience design, brand and communication design, research, and production. Each is hands-on across engagements rather than allocated to a single account or category. Where a project calls for specialist craft — motion, spatial, content strategy, engineering, research at scale — we bring in collaborators from a vetted bench we have built over years of working together.
We have chosen to stay small because the alternative compromises the work we are willing to put our name to. Capacity comes from how we operate, not from how many people we employ.
Samas is the next chapter of a practice that began in 2015.
For ten years, we worked as GDD Experience Design a studio built around a single conviction, that putting design first could shape what companies became. In that decade, we worked across product launches, brand evolutions, and complex multi-surface platforms, with clients including:
Magicpin · Tata Cliq · Flipkart · SirionLabs · Adobe ·Tata Neu · Havells · Scripbox · TripMoney
The work taught us what design can do, and what it cannot. It also taught us — slowly, then quickly — that the practice itself had to change. The shift from GDD to Samas is not a rebrand. It is the structural reinvention of a ten-year practice for a decade in which design will be valued differently than it ever has been before.
The team is the same team. The clients we have worked with continue to be part of the work we are proud of. The capabilities we built at GDD are intact, but they now sit inside a larger practice — one that adds strategy and consulting, brand and communication design, and AI-enabled creative production to the foundation that GDD built.
If you worked with us as GDD, you are working with the same people. The shape of the engagement has changed; the people have not.
Samas hires rarely, and when we do, we hire deliberately.
We are a small partnership with a small team. Most of our growth comes through partner-level engagements with people we have worked with for years, and through a vetted bench of specialists we bring in for specific projects. When we do open a permanent role, it is because the practice has reached the limits of what its current shape can do well.
The roles we hire for are senior. We do not have a junior pipeline. The people we work best with are practitioners who have spent enough years in the work to have developed real judgment — designers, strategists, researchers, brand thinkers, production leads — and who are looking for a practice where that judgment is the point of the role, rather than something they exercise around the edges of execution.
If that describes you, and you have looked at the work and the writing and recognised something of how you think, we would be glad to hear from you.