I didn't grow up around design. I grew up in Salvador, Brasil, in a neighbourhood where the career paths were visible and limited. Design wasn't one of them.
At 11, my family moved to Cronulla, Australia. New country, new language, no real blueprint. That kind of environment forces independence early. You either wait for permission or you move without it.
I started designing at 14. No formal training, no mentor. Just software, repetition, and a growing gap between what I could do and what most people around me understood. I didn’t overthink it. I kept building.
University didn’t happen straight away. Financial pressure meant waiting 18 months. I used that time to sharpen my work and start operating like I already had a practice.
When I eventually studied design, I moved beyond execution into brand strategy and advertising. That’s where the leverage is. Not in how something looks, but in how it positions a business in the mind of a buyer.
I graduated, went in-house at a Sydney company, and quickly found myself doing the workload of an entire team. It clarified two things. What I was capable of, and that I wasn’t interested in building someone else’s business long term.
So I left.
Hyperion Studio launched shortly after.
On what I actually believe about branding
Most people in my industry optimise for admiration. They want the brand to look good, feel distinctive, win awards. I understand that impulse, I have it too.
But I optimise for trust. Specifically, the kind of trust that makes a prospective client's decision feel safer than it would have been without the brand.
That's the real job. Not aesthetics. Not creativity for its own sake. Risk reduction, perceived competence, decision psychology, the mechanisms that determine whether someone chooses you or your competitor before a single conversation has taken place.
Decisions are being made about your business right now, by people who haven't spoken to you, based entirely on how your brand makes them feel. Most businesses have no idea this is happening. The ones who do, and act on it, are the ones who stop competing on price.
That's what Hyperion exists to do.
The work
Hyperion has worked with Colgate Australia, Freestyle MMA (the training facility of UFC Featherweight Champion Alexander Volkanovski), the NSW Government, and a growing number of professional services firms across Australia who were ready to move upmarket and needed their brand to reflect where they were actually operating, not where they started.
The focus is brand identity, strategic positioning, and digital presence. Not as surface-level design, but as commercial infrastructure.
What Hyperion is building toward
We're three years in. Still early by any meaningful measure.
The goal isn't to be the biggest branding studio in Sydney. It's to be the one that serious businesses, the ones who've outgrown their current brand and know it, come to when they're ready to be taken seriously.
That's a narrower ambition than it sounds. And a harder one.
