Michael is the creative director and co-founder of Franklyn, an independent brand studio based in New York. As a design leader, he guides multidisciplinary teams in crafting strategic, inspired creative work for influential companies across all platforms.
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Michael Freimuth is an award-winning creative director amplifying the power of brand through exceptional design. For nearly two decades he’s had the privilege of building, launching and scaling brands that value design as core to their products, services and culture. His work drives deep emotional resonance with audiences and empowers the brands he touches to make an impact on the world.
Known for fostering creativity within teams, his approach champions a culture of experimentation, inspiring his designers to push boundaries while building a focused creative vision. He blends strategic insight with a genuine passion for nurturing talent, resulting in meaningful experiences for his team and consistently influential work for his clients across all platforms and channels.
A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Michael keeps it interesting as a practicing editorial illustrator with long time clients in The New York Times, The Atlantic and Barron's. An educator, speaker and active member of the international design community, he presents on the topics of play, experimentation and emotion in design systems. He'd also love to hear from you.
Known for fostering creativity within teams, his approach champions a culture of experimentation, inspiring his designers to push boundaries while building a focused creative vision. He blends strategic insight with a genuine passion for nurturing talent, resulting in meaningful experiences for his team and consistently influential work for his clients across all platforms and channels.
A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Michael keeps it interesting as a practicing editorial illustrator with long time clients in The New York Times, The Atlantic and Barron's. An educator, speaker and active member of the international design community, he presents on the topics of play, experimentation and emotion in design systems. He'd also love to hear from you.
Speaking
Creative Boom Podcast
Creative Mornings
Hyperakt Lunch Talks
MICA Flex Lecture
Press
2025 Design Trends — Creative Boom
WeWorkHorse — The Brand Identity
Vroom Vroom — Engine Rebrand
Framework — Brand New
Zagat — Creative Boom
ReWeWork — It’s Nice That
Complementary Colors — Under Consideration
Marlow — Under Consideration
Art Directors Club Young Guns
Print New Visual Artists
Teaching
School of Visual Arts, New York
Education
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Washington University, St. Louis
Creative Boom Podcast
Creative Mornings
Hyperakt Lunch Talks
MICA Flex Lecture
Press
2025 Design Trends — Creative Boom
WeWorkHorse — The Brand Identity
Vroom Vroom — Engine Rebrand
Framework — Brand New
Zagat — Creative Boom
ReWeWork — It’s Nice That
Complementary Colors — Under Consideration
Marlow — Under Consideration
Art Directors Club Young Guns
Print New Visual Artists
Teaching
School of Visual Arts, New York
Education
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Washington University, St. Louis
WeWork
Made For You
WeWork’s highly chronicled history hit an inflection point post-pandemic and after its controversial founder’s exit. In order to refocus the leader in co-working’s position, Michael’s team at Franklyn partnered with the global organization to redefine it’s brand strategy and identity.
Built on the exceptional level of care WeWork and it’s staff put into their members’ spaces and communities, the brand was reimagined under the banner of “Taking care of all the ways you work.” Built on a layered series of illustrations, symbols and language, the design system creates a sophisticated yet warm brand expression. The classic wordmark and a custom typeface was also redesigned to better match the company’s design-driven DNA, collectively allowing the in-house and external teams to communicate across all channels with a distinct WeWork voice.
Scope
- Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Digital
- Campaign
- Photography
- Illustration
- Guidelines
Humanscale
Sustainable Seating
Unmatched in environmental stewardship, Humanscale built a chair to articulate that ambition — the Path chair, designed by Todd Bracher. Imagined as the most sustainable task chair on the planet and flexibly designed to adjust for every body, the introduction of Path provided a unique opportunity for expanding on parent and product brands alike.
The platform and messaging for the brand, ‘Planet Positive,’ is core to the company’s mission and means each chair is a net positive product from supply chain through production and use. The environmental lens served as brand entry point, but also allowed for rich storytelling around Path’s functionality, flexibility and approachability for all consumers. Like the chair itself, wrapping a complex system in simplicity of execution was key to success.
Taking cues from Humanscale’s minimal modernist identity system, we developed a mark alongside a more emphatic layer of typography, distinct palette, novel blend of warm lifestyle imagery and environmental textures with diagrammatic, tech-forward renders. Our brand system rode on Humanscale’s rails while stepping outside of the bounds of the brand to establish a new path for both.
Scope
- Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Digital
- Campaign
- Photography
- Illustration
- Guidelines
Engine
Modern Travel Management
Expanding beyond hotels to handle all aspects of business travel, B2B powerhouse Hotel Engine needed a rebrand to mark this new chapter in their growth. It started with a name change, Engine, and ended with Michael's team building a bold new identity worthy of their recent $2.1B valuation.
Undergirding the identity system is the thesis that brand and product are one and the same. To make a modern travel brand, the Engine digital experience is necessarily exceptional – so the mandate for the brand was to be equally seamless and systematic. From dynamic, shape-based modules to typographic hierarchies, icons and AI-driven illustration – each element functions equally well in app, online, offline and in campaign and advertising.
Scope
- Naming
- Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Product
- Campaign
- Photography
- Illustration
- Guidelines
Away
Outsider Perspective
To develop a brand system for their new outdoor collection, travel darlings Away came to Michael's team for an outsider’s perspective. Although best known for its now ubiquitous, rigid rectangular suitcases, this brand extension, dubbed F.A.R., would focus on flexibility.
Applying this trait to the launch campaign, we stretched the Away mark into a searchlight-like form that speaks to movement, exploration and serves as a dynamic form for product and lifestyle imagery across all channels. We similarly flexed into the physical product and packaging by reimagining Away's existing brand across these elements in a more expressive way. The result was a novel but seamless outdoor product brand, launch and campaign that still feels at home with the highly successful brand it’s built upon.
Scope
- Naming
- Brand Identity
- Product
- Packaging
- Campaign
- Photography
- Illustration
- Guidelines
Oscar
Care Everywhere
With playful branding and a user-centered approach, Oscar was a pioneer in the modern healthcare movement when it first hit the scene in the mid-2010's. However, the rise of countless copycat brands since then had left this originator feeling stale. In anticipation of its IPO paralleling a national expansion and extensive new product offerings, Oscar’s growing internal team needed to reimagine the brand from scratch.
Across 18 months of close collaboration Michael's team developed a brand toolkit whose sophisticatedly whimsical look and feel's breadth is only matched by its depth across every possible channel, sub-brand, ad campaign, animation and design detail. The expansive, user-friendly toolkit continues to guide this now national, public brand as it makes healthcare accessible to everyone, everywhere in the country.
Scope
- Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Digital
- Illustration
- Photography
- Campaign
- Guidelines
Marz Community Brewing
Cult Classic CPG
Founded in 2014 by Windy City Wunderkind Ed Marszewski, Marz began as a Chicago-based brewery founded by a collective of art misfits and beer nerds. Over the past decade however, the brand has grown a cult following by expanding well beyond brewing best-selling CPG and into a cultural and community mecca.
Focused on the common good, Marz Community Brewing Co. has always needed a flexible brand that could accommodate all partners and perspectives. The brand system includes exhaustive guidelines for the hundreds of beverages they brew, but equally importantly covers partnerships, campaigns, social, digital and co-branding from the MCA to local F&B favorites. Collectively, this ever-expanding, beautiful mess is the message, and – whether beer, food, merch or physical spaces – we've had the honor of co-creating this cult community phenomenon for a decade and counting.
Scope
- Brand Identity
- Digital
- Packaging
- Environmental
- Campaign
- Social
- Photography
- Illustration