Calumma is a creative and design practice run by rebellious optimists, dedicated to sharing, uplifting, and enhancing the best efforts to build an ethically just, healthy, and cooperative world.
In technical terms, you can think of us as a brand and design studio—providing services in graphic design, branding, art direction, writing, print design, storytelling, and more—for those working to inspire and uplift local communities or society at large.
Calumma was founded by the multidisciplinary designer Emīl Blūm and his life partner, Ieva Kontrimaite, to create an alternative to the age-old design and advertising agency standard of utilising brilliant minds in service of businesses with deep pockets creating harmful products, mind-numbing entertainment and expanding destructive initiatives.
So instead, together with a team of interdisciplinary makers and compassionate thinkers, we embrace complex systemic and communicational challenges by supporting projects that drive innovation in education, improve health and wellbeing, regenerate ecosystems, strengthen industrious communities, and develop humane technology.
In short–we actively help tackle challenges most avoid.
Calumma operates as a remote-first company, with team members based across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Scotland, England, San Francisco, and New York.
Why Calumma?
Our name comes from a genus of chameleons native to Madagascar. These remarkable creatures use their colour-changing abilities for social communication and emotional signalling—similar to what designers do.
Our expertise
We help develop cohesive brand identities that authentically reflect your organisations values and help achive the key business objectives. From crafting bold visual languages to defining compelling verbal narratives, we ensure your brand resonates with its audience.
We research, discover, write, design, illustrate, animate and craft visual narratives to bring your work to life and help elevate awareness of the products and services you provide to increase your impact.
We help your work communicate and connect with intended communities through intuitive, modern, flexible and reliable digital & physical experiences, ensuring your online and offline presence amplifies your impact.
We are deeply committed to understanding your challenges and goals, tailoring our creative services and team according to each project to maximise the impact we can collaboratively achieve.
We have a proven track record of providing expertise in Visual and Verbal Identity, Art Direction, Editorial Design, Packaging Design, User Experience Design, Website & Application Development, UI Design, 3D Animation, Motion Design, Illustration, Print Design, Film and Photography, Typography Design and Generative AI.
Our work is rooted in the admiration of the expression of life and the moments of beauty and play it provides.
For us, the purpose of life is life itself, so when we're not actively helping our partners achieve their mission, we're out there in the everyday, seeking out and collecting moments of joy and beauty.
Our offerings
We harness your organisation's unique attributes and channel them into bespoke strategies, products, and brand experiences. With an eye on the shifting market landscape, we build solutions that not only reflect your brand's essence but also accelerate you closer to achieving your mission.
This can involve devising a transformative brand strategy, co-creating compelling products, or designing immersive experiences that resonate deeply with your audience in both digital and real-world environments.
We revitalise key elements of your organisation’s brand to enhance its relevance, differentiation, and competitiveness in the current market. During this process, we analyise the existing tools and assets in your desposal and then carefully craft each new detail to ensure that while critical elements are updated, the essence of your organisation's voice—what makes it uniquely "you"—remains authentic to you and recognisable.
This can include a brand asset updates, refining the brand's tone of voice, or upgrading the visual aesthetic across print and digital. The objective of "refresh" is to strengthen your existing audience connections while capturing the attention of new supporters.
We help unveil your product, service or campaign in a manner that leaves a lasting impression. Our team will employ the right blend of rebellious ideas and technical expertise to help your organisation achieve its intended goals.
With the help of graphic design, cinematography, photography and clever copywriting, we can ensure that our creative solutions position your brand favourably, spark interest, encourage engagement, and establish a strong foundation for continuous support from your community or audience.
This is when we come in and help you dream of new possibilities. Whenever you feel stuck or unsure how to move forward or maybe just need extra brain power to figure out the next step, our team is ready to assist and can provide one-on-one consultation, organise a workshop or sit down and write 100 rebelliously optimistic ideas (without the help of AI) on how to get going.