For office workers, the final stretch of the weekend is a space for freedom, pleasure and dreaming. For working artists, it can also be a chance to clock out of everything else and reconnect with the work that matters.

In 2016, when photographer Ahmed Klink and typographer Juan Carlos Pagan founded Sunday Afternoon, their New York–based hybrid brand studio and talent agency, they envisioned a place where artists could be untethered from the rigidity of corporate life and make a living doing the kind of work they’d gladly choose to do on a day off—not because they had to, but because it felt meaningful.

“We tend to do the things we love the most on Sunday afternoons, and that was a reflection of the ethos we wanted the Sunday Afternoon team to have,” says Klink. “If we were to work on a Sunday afternoon, it would have to be on things we genuinely care about. It shouldn’t fill us with dread. That’s what we strive for.”

Sunday Afternoon “came from a place of building what you kind of want to see in the world,” adds Klink. He and Pagan envisioned a model created for artists, by artists: part talent roster, part branding studio, with both branches often feeding into one another. Repped artists are free to pursue their own creative paths, but they also have the option to collaborate on the studio’s client projects—like campaigns or rebrands—if the fit is right for their interests, goals and skills.

In those early conversations, Pagan imagined a studio that would liberate artists with rare talent and singular vision who had been constrained by the traditional agency model (and the demands of a corporate 9-to-5). “I always thought about that person, that untapped artist who could be pursuing their own artistic career being represented somewhere, but also getting looped into agency work when it was appropriate,” says Pagan. “I like the idea of having access to these people but not making them feel handcuffed to anything, giving them a way to pursue that dream that they have but also tap in if an interesting agency project comes up.”

In addition to freeing would-be artists from corporate cubicles, this setup also enables the brand-studio side of Sunday Afternoon to pull from a small but deep bench of world-class talent when clients come calling. When Nike hired Sunday Afternoon to support the Training Plans feature inside its Nike Run Club app, Pagan and Klink managed the design while bringing in Geoff Levy, an award-winning director on their roster, to write treatments and direct the video. “We get a handful of RFPs or projects that require a lot of creative firepower,” says Pagan, “and having access to some of these brilliant artists on our roster really allows us some leverage.”

The roster currently includes seventeen artists, a relatively small and highly curated list by Sunday Afternoon managed by partner and executive producer Audrie Poole. Pagan says they handpick each artist to reflect “the kind of work we want to see in the world.” Right now, that work looks like Marta Cerdà Alimbau’s illustrative typography, Valheria Rocha’s dreamy mixed-media photography and Tommy Perez’s stop-motion animations, among others. (When I ask Pagan if he feels like Sunday Afternoon has assembled a dream team, he laughs and compares it to Voltron.)

Together, Pagan, Klink and Rich Tu, who was one of Sunday Afternoon’s first repped artists and later joined the studio as an executive creative director and partner, steer the studio’s creative along with a small team of designers. The team’s collective output ranges from intriguing to unfamiliar to polarizing, but never formulaic or without intention. “That is important to us—not because being different or contrarian is always the right thing, but because having a breadth and variety of work is fun,” says Pagan. “There’s a lot of really great design in the world, but there’s also a sea of sameness within the design community. And I think that’s something we find a bit boring.”

Whether it’s a visually challenging logo for a Bitcoin brand like Zeus or a shapeshifting logotype for a SaaS client such as Daydream, the studio fearlessly breaks conventions and takes risks that more traditional designers and clients might shy away from. Its creative criteria for walking this fine line is mostly instinctive and typically arises from dialogues among the team as they ask: “Is it appropriate? Is it familiar?” And crucially: “Is it boring?” Pagan enjoys the uncanny moments in art and design when you see something that technically shouldn’t work—or maybe feels a little off-putting—yet resonates in spite of (or because of) that discomfort. “You’re kind of like, ‘Oof… But I kind of like that,’” he says. As designers, he adds, “We have to create space for [those moments of] ‘I don’t know why this works, but it does.’”

Those instincts run wild in the studio’s self-published annual broadsheet CANAL, where Klink says the team “lets our weirdness go to 100 percent” with a sensory assault of clashing typography, jarring layouts and an uninhibited spirit of playfulness. “We’re doing a lot of things in that magazine that maybe shouldn’t be done, but purposefully,” says Pagan, “not just to be kids playing, although that’s a part of it, but also to capture the frenetic energy of Canal Street here in New York City.”

The magazine also functions as a testing ground for technology. In the first issue, the team wanted to explore bringing AR typography to print, so they employed a filter that lifts the type off the cover when viewed through a smartphone. This experimentation paved the way for the second issue, in which they integrated a film (directed again by Levy) along with an abundance of Easter eggs and dynamic elements inside the magazine. With Levy’s work hovering above the pages and whimsical surprises bringing the design to life, the reader’s experience is unbounded by the page and brought into, quite literally, a new dimension. Like many Sunday projects, it is the result of a many-sided collaboration: with each other, of course, but also with technology, the physical world and culture.

In building a studio for artists, by artists, Sunday Afternoon has amassed a group of design thinkers who are in constant communion with culture. “We’re artists at our core, and we’re sponges for culture, so we never sleep on that part of ourselves,” says Tu. The studio’s creatives are encouraged not just to cultivate their own treasure trove of aesthetic influences and passions but to bring them to the drawing board, resulting in a rich, delightfully unorthodox amalgam of references combined in the work. The team’s early-stage Figma boards are, by their own admission, insane—a kaleidoscopic sprawl of cultural references and ephemera that ultimately might shape the trajectory of a project, like the photo of a drunk Japanese “salaryman” that inspired the studio’s new logo for Chef Masahura Morimoto. “That’s how we sold it to the client: this is inspired by having a great time,” explains Tu. “That’s an origin point of inspiration that will resonate with a client who is open to that level of play.”

That cultural fluency brings fresh perspective to more traditional projects, too. Billy Candela, who worked with Sunday Afternoon during his time at NPR and more recently at environmental organization The Nature Conservancy, says the team’s wide lens brought invaluable perspective to
their projects. “Being able to find that outside voice and that outside thinking is really valuable, especially when it’s coming from a group that spends all of their time in that creative, artistic space versus a more corporate branding space,” Candela says. “Sunday Afternoon surrounds itself with artists who are doing really interesting work in really interesting places, so it always feels like it’s in a space of creativity.”

“The team definitely seems to have clear inspiration, but then it turns into this voice that seems uniquely theirs. I’ve always been drawn to that because I think that’s what you want from an artist,” adds Adam Larson, creative director at athletic shoe brand Hoka, who says he thinks of Sunday Afternoon more as a group of artists than a traditional agency.

Larson engaged Sunday Afternoon on recent campaigns for two hotly anticipated Hoka product releases: the Mafate 5, a long-distance trail-running shoe made to endure 100-plus-mile runs over rough terrain, and the RocketX3, its high-tech racing shoe with carbon fiber plates. The projects marked a shift for the studio, which was tasked with ideating and executing the campaigns start to finish, rather than looping in mid-stream for execution.

For the Mafate 5, the team produced a 30-second film shot in South Africa, combining ASMR-like aural textures (the crunch of gravel, the drumbeat of breath) with striking visuals of runners navigating rugged terrain. Sunday Afternoon created a line for the campaign that anchored the spot: “For the long run.” For print, the studio typeset the product’s name to resemble the contours of mountainous terrain beneath runners’ feet. “There’s a narrative to the type itself, and I think that’s valuable because that’s design doing what it does best,” says Larson.

To showcase the Rocket X3, Sunday Afternoon once again nudged the brand into new territory with a visual approach it had never taken before, shooting the shoe in action on a set against a bold, LED-lit red background. The spot has the eye-catching visuals and energy of a slick hype video, and the line carries the story: “Ahead of your time.”

“I’ve worked with a lot of agencies in my career, and the one thing I have always found is once you call yourself an agency of a certain size, you become overridden with process—with multiple layers of inputs, ideas, complications—and it’s cumbersome,” says Larson. “Sunday just seemed nimble. It always comes back to the creative.”

Keeping it that way takes vigilance and intention. With time and growth, studios like Sunday Afternoon—which is nearing its tenth anniversary—can easily become victims of their own success, ceding that creative independence to commercial viability and losing sight of what brought them all together to begin with. “It requires us to really make sure we’re always putting creativity at the forefront because that can sometimes get a little lost as projects scale,” says Pagan. “You can lose a little bit of that fun, that insight, the design—all that good stuff that made us want to work in this industry can get lost if we don’t keep that at the helm.” ca