About
Chris Halaska has spent over twenty years designing products, from advertising at Ogilvy, to banking at CBA, to six years at Google on products like Google Photos, used by over a billion people. Chris founded Halaska Studio to do the part of that work he cares about most: deciding what’s worth building, then building it the right way.
The opportunity
AI has made building cheap. A founder can go from idea to working product in a weekend, and plenty do. What hasn’t got cheaper is knowing what’s worth saying no to, and making it stand out from the competition to earn people’s trust.
That’s the gap Halaska sees in almost every product the studio reviews. Teams rarely struggle to get things done. They struggle to get the right things designed, to a bar that holds, with someone in the room who’ll tell them when they’re wrong.
And the product is only part of it. The site, the brand, the deck and the launch all tell a story, one that you need to be cohesive and to a set bar.
How Halaska works
Halaska designs and builds across the whole digital experience: product, brand, website, pitch deck and launch. Most of the founders Halaska works with need more than one of those, and they work best when one studio designs them together.
Clients work directly with the studio’s senior team. Halaska sets the direction, makes the calls and does the work. When a project needs more hands, Halaska brings in senior designers and engineers Chris has worked with for years, and works directly with them. There’s no account manager and no hand-off, and Halaska keeps a small number of clients at a time so that stays true.
The studio’s foundations
The studio’s work focuses on Web3 and AI, where there wasn’t a best practice yet, so the studio had to establish one: how to make wallets, trading, on-chain and intelligent products feel trustworthy to people using them for the first time.
The range matters:
Advertising shaped the studio’s understanding of the creative storytelling
Banking shaped the studio’s understanding of the stakes
Google shaped the studio’s understanding of what scale demands
Startups shaped the studio’s understanding of what to leave out
It’s how the team knows which best practice fits your stage, and which one is holding you back.
Career highlights
Google
Staff Product Designer
Immutable
Consumer Products UX Lead
Ogilvy
Senior Art Director
Infinex
Design Lead
Commonwealth Bank Australia
Senior Designer
The Halaska team
Halaska is a lean studio built around a senior team, rather than a large team on payroll. Arvydas Gecas and Dominik Martin have designed alongside Chris on product, visual and brand work for years, and Arma Behnia keeps the studio running. Specialists in motion, development and AI join when a project calls for them. Every one of them is senior, and Chris directs the work.
What guides Halaska
The work should be able to continue without the studio.
The best project endings are handovers.Best practice is a starting point.
The work people remember goes further.AI makes exploration cheap.
It makes judgement more valuable.Senior judgement on every decision.
It’s the difference between work that looks right and work that holds up.If the studio thinks you’re building the wrong thing, the team will say so.
That’s what you’re paying for.Every surface is the brand.
Product, site, deck, and the emails in between.The decisions matter more than the files.
So Halaska hands over both.
$400M+ raised by founders supported by Chris Halaska’s design work
1B+ people use products Chris helped design at Google
40+ emerging tech products designed and shipped
