Common questions

Digital Design Studio includes a 7-day risk-free trial in the first month of any retainer. If the work is not a fit within those 7 days, the engagement ends and the first month is refunded. After the trial, retainers can be cancelled at any time with no penalty.

Rafael Rodrigues does the work personally. Digital Design Studio is a one-person practice, so there are no juniors, no account managers, and no handoffs — the designer you talk to is the one who ships. Rafael has 11 years of experience designing web and mobile software and has worked with Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, TetraScience, Stratasys, and GoTo.

Yes, and the terms depend on which commitment you choose. Monthly retainers have no minimum and can be cancelled at any time. Quarterly retainers have a 3-month minimum with 30 days notice, allow up to 30 days of pause per year without terminating the contract, and carry a 50% charge on remaining months if you exit before month 3. Either can be restarted later.

Digital Design Studio runs on Figma for sitemaps, wireframes, visual design, and interactive prototypes, and a Notion kanban board for the design backlog and task flow. Front-end work is built directly in Cursor, Framer, or Figma depending on the project. Slack handles day-to-day communication and Zoom covers video meetings and recorded walkthroughs.

Onboarding takes under 24 hours on business days. Once payment is confirmed, Digital Design Studio sends a Slack invite and a shared Notion board by email, and design work begins the next business day.

A full-time senior product designer in the United States with 10+ years of experience costs approximately $180,000 per year in base salary. Adding benefits and payroll taxes typically brings that to $216,000 to $234,000, before recruiting fees of 15 to 25% of first-year salary. A Digital Design Studio retainer costs $7,500 to $12,500 per month — $90,000 to $150,000 per year — with no hiring cost, no equity, no benefits overhead, and front-end development included rather than a separate engineering hire.

A fractional product designer is a senior designer engaged on a recurring monthly retainer instead of as a full-time employee or a fixed-scope project contractor. The team gets ongoing senior design capacity and a consistent design partner without a salary, equity grant, or long-term commitment. Digital Design Studio works this way exclusively, from $7,500 per month.

Digital Design Studio retainers run from $7,500 to $12,500 per month. The Core Design Partner covers one to two active projects at $8,500 monthly or $7,500 on a quarterly term. The Fractional Product Designer covers three to four projects in parallel with 24 to 48 hour turnaround at $12,500 monthly or $11,000 quarterly. Front-end development is included in both.

Digital Design Studio designs software for life sciences and pharma teams, including a model tuning workbench for Eli Lilly, a clinical trial cohort builder for AstraZeneca, federated clinical AI controls for Rhino Federated Computing, and a scientific data platform for TetraScience. The work involves standards like OMOP, SNOMED, and FHIR.

Yes. Rafael Rodrigues designs in Figma and writes the production front-end that ships, working in React, Next.js, Astro, and Swift. Combining both roles removes the design-to-engineering handoff, which is where most interface detail is lost, and means a prototype can become the real interface rather than a spec someone else reinterprets.

A design agency staffs a project team, bills per project or per sprint, and often routes work through account managers and junior designers. A fractional product designer is one senior person on a monthly retainer working directly with the founding team. Digital Design Studio is the second model: one designer, no handoffs, cancel any month.

Yes. Digital Design Studio works with funded startups from pre-seed through Series B, with partners in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Colorado, Seattle, the United Kingdom, Estonia, and Israel. Startups that worked with Digital Design Studio on product design and investor decks have raised more than $20 million in combined funding.

A focused MVP typically takes 8 to 12 weeks from first sync to shipped interface on a Digital Design Studio retainer. The first two weeks cover flows and wireframes, weeks three through six cover visual design and an interactive prototype, and the remainder covers production front-end and iteration against real usage.

Yes. Digital Design Studio signs NDAs and works under client confidentiality and IP assignment terms as standard, which is a requirement for the pharma and clinical engagements it takes on. Details on confidentiality, intellectual property, and data handling are on the privacy page.