Paper Tiger

Designing interactive experiences at Paper Tiger is fun and all, but nothing puts a pep in my step like launching a rebrand. We had the pleasure of working with the team at M13, the venture firm backing founders building through structural shifts, on a new brand system and website. The logo stayed, everything else got reimagined, and one site now speaks to founders first and LPs second. Now M13 looks like where it's headed. See the full case study: https://lnkd.in/gJCF62ZU

Paper Tiger, in partnership with Moxie Strategies, has developed a bold new identity for Hudson County, NJ. The system gives one of the country's most diverse places a brand with real swagger: vibrant, direct, accessible by design, and unafraid to take up space. It is a government identity that expects to be approached. Building for a county is a different kind of scope. Twelve municipalities, dozens of departments, and hundreds of thousands of residents who all need to recognize the same county on signage, in print, on screen, and in video. The system holds it all together while leaving room for every department and every town to sound like itself. Read the case study: https://lnkd.in/gUxP4Qqb

Holy crap, our team at Paper Tiger rebranded a county. Hudson County, New Jersey, which is basically my backyard. I played countless shows with my band at Maxwell's in Hoboken. I have taken my daughters to Liberty Science Center too many times. I've bonded with old friends in Jersey City. I got my first job as a designer in Kearny. I know these streets. The problem was real, though. One of the densest, most diverse counties in the country had an identity scattered across departments, mostly black-and-white, and built around a seal nobody could read at small sizes. County Executive Craig Guy wanted the branding to finally match the culture, and honestly, it was long overdue. Residents identify with their town first, so the county was doing critical work almost invisibly. We redrew the seal, built a new HCNJ identity for everyday service communications, and developed a typography system and color palette that let departments feel like themselves without breaking the whole. Signage, digital assets, swag, a courthouse illustration, and some light video. All accessible, all documented on a branded microsite rather than in a PDF that vanishes by March. Big thanks to Moxie Strategies for leading the research and strategy and bringing us in. It's an honor to leave a mark on a place that has been part of my life for this long. https://lnkd.in/gxbM_MPu

Paper Tiger Founding Partner Marc Debiak will be speaking at the 2026 Webflow Conference in Boston, MA. Wednesday, September 2, 1:30-2:00 pm ET Every major tech shift opens with the same fear: this one ends us. The printing press. The internet. The iPhone. It never plays out the way anyone predicts, and Marc Debiak has been through enough cycles to recognize the shape of it. His read on AI is that it's coming for the work we already commoditized. Templates, off-the-shelf components, two-week builds. We optimized ourselves into interchangeable parts. AI just put a date on it. Here's the part most people skip: clients aren't hiring you for your coding agent. Shipping faster isn't value, it's just shipping faster. Webflow already hands you the canvas and AI hands you the hours, but those hours only count for something if you spend them on the work nobody can buy off a shelf. Sitting with a client's business. Asking better questions. Real research, real creative exploration. This session is a challenge. Stop optimizing your process into obscurity and start using what Webflow and AI give back to push past what you thought you could build and deliver work your clients didn't know to ask for. https://lnkd.in/edBFJ58A #WebflowConf

We have received confirmation from the internet Gods, specifically the people at awwwards., that our site at papertiger.com won Site of the Day today. We are not making this up. This is a prestigious honor, roughly equivalent to winning an Oscar, except instead of a gold statue, you get a digital ribbon, and instead of walking a red carpet, you sit in a chair and worry about browser compatibility. We are extremely proud of this achievement, mostly because it validates the thousands of hours our team spent arguing about what the website should even look like in the first place. We were one of the worst "clients" we've ever worked with. We would like to thank the Awwwards judges, our team (we see you, Leonardo Mattar and Jason Debiak), and the coffee machine, without whom this level of high-performance web design would be physically impossible.

Our recent work with Betterment started as a website redesign and quickly became something much bigger. We delivered a product-grade design system that now supports their entire digital ecosystem. The system includes scalable components, a semantic design token strategy, and a structured content model that aligns product, content, and engineering. It reduced Figma maintenance by over 90 percent and gave their internal team a clear foundation to build on. Huge credit to our Creative Director, Mirko Santangelo, for leading this from concept to completion. The site was just one output. The system is now a benchmark for everything that follows. See the full case study: https://lnkd.in/eqXGtGXH #DesignSystems #ProductDesign #Betterment #UXDesign #WebDesign #CreativeDirection #PaperTiger

We’re excited to share that our Partner, Mirko Santangelo, has been named the Community Leader in AI by Friends of Figma. It’s a huge recognition from Figma that puts him right at the center of the global design community. Click the link below to learn more 👇 https://lnkd.in/eJGPxKDB

Exciting news to kick off 2026! 🚀 We are incredibly proud to announce that the Paper Tiger website is up for voting on awwwards. Our team poured a huge amount of creativity, technical skill, and passion into building this site. It represents who we are and where we're going, and seeing it recognized like this is the perfect way to start the new year. If you have a moment, we’d love your support. Please check out the site and cast your vote here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/eYCEw5DA Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far! #Awwwards #WebDesign #DigitalAgency #2026Goals #WebsiteDesign

In our 18th year, we relaunched Paper Tiger. For nearly two decades, we've kept our heads down and focused on our clients' work, not our own. But we just relaunched www.papertiger.com, and we're pretty damn excited about it. Clarity first, impact forever.