How Little Plains builds worlds for founders

Little Plains is a creative agency that works with founders to build worlds for their brand.

Emmett Shine, its founder and executive creative director, describes the fit as a Venn diagram. "One part cultural," he says, in a studio lined with art books. "The other part is technology and being on the frontiers of what's possible."

Building brands is more than just a site and a logo: its a story and world a young company can live inside. Emmett's rule for building one comes from product people. "You want to go from a skateboard to a car versus trying to build a car right away."

From skateboard to car

FLORA is where the skateboards get made. Strategy, design, motion, interactive moments, A/B tests and alternate versions of a website all start as prototypes on the canvas, and they reach the client already looking like the real thing. "With FLORA we're able to prototype everything from strategy to design to motion to interactivity to A/B testing to website optionality in a high fidelity capacity," Emmett says. "Way cheaper, way faster and way more over communicative with clients and partners than we ever could do before."

For Sanghee Han, a senior interaction designer at the studio, the change shows up in the job itself. "All these agent tools are allowing me to become less of like a pixel pusher and become more of a thinker."

How it worked in practice

Ingredient AI synthesizes new supplement formulations, and its pitch to teams is to formulate in minutes, not months. Little Plains wanted the site to feel as alive as the chemistry.

"We envision the world where you land on the website and you're almost immersed within a macro zoom in of an actual supplement," Emmett says, "where the pieces inside of it feel kind of Fantasia, like they're alive."

A shot like that is a long take, and long takes used to lock a team in early. "Creating a long take video takes a lot of time," says Sky-Haneul Seo, the studio's creative technologist. "So usually when you nailed into one variation, you can't really move on." On the canvas the order flips. "With FLORA you can try many different variations in just a few hours. And then once we find a sweet spot, then we kind of develop it."

Handing over the workflow

With Novig, the sports prediction market, the handoff went past the deliverables. It was one of the first projects where Little Plains used FLORA Techniques, which package a workflow so someone else can run it. The studio delivered the finished work, then gave Novig the workflows behind it, built around the art direction Little Plains had set. "They could create as many different iterations and versions based on the art direction and the techniques that we put in place," Emmett says, "which they've been using."

Still building worlds

"What we do as an agency working with startups is build worlds," Emmett says. "You still need to build an immersive world." What has moved is how much a small team can carry while building one: research, content, versions, characters, intelligence. "These are things which just were not possible to smaller independent agencies or businesses ten years ago, five years ago, three years ago, two years ago, one year ago."

"I think the future is really exciting," he says, "if you stay creative minded."