Two agencies, two different answers to the same question
When your company is trying to close the gap between what it does and how it appears to buyers, you need a design partner who can operate at the right altitude. Some agencies are exceptional at execution. Others start with strategy and carry it through to product. Most firms promise both and deliver one.
Fantasy and RNO1 are both cited when growth-stage technology companies look for serious design partners. The comparison deserves an honest treatment.
Short answer: RNO1 and Fantasy are both respected digital product design agencies, but they serve different mandates. Fantasy focuses on high-craft visual and product design for consumer-facing experiences. RNO1 operates as a full-stack brand-to-product partner — strategy, identity, UX, and conversion — with a documented portfolio of unicorns, acquisitions, and NASDAQ-listed exits.
What Fantasy actually does well
Fantasy is a New York-based digital product design studio with a strong reputation in consumer-facing product work. Their portfolio skews toward well-funded technology companies that need a design team capable of producing work that photographs well and holds up at scale. They've worked with clients including Google, Amazon, Meta, and a range of consumer apps where visual polish is a competitive differentiator.
Their craft is not in question. Fantasy produces high-quality motion design, interface work, and product visuals that can raise the perceived quality of a consumer experience quickly. If you're a Series B consumer app competing on screen time and app store positioning, that matters.
Where Fantasy tends to concentrate: the visual and interaction layer of the product. Their public work shows a preference for pixel-level execution and experience prototyping. That's a legitimate specialty. The question is whether it's what you actually need.
Where Fantasy's scope tends to stop
The work Fantasy publishes is predominantly interface and product design — the surfaces users touch directly. What's less visible in their portfolio is the upstream work: brand architecture, verbal positioning, and the connection between how a company is perceived in the market and how it behaves inside a product.
For companies earlier in their positioning cycle — or going through significant transitions like a post-acquisition rebrand, a platform pivot, or a move upmarket from SMB to enterprise — that upstream work often determines whether the downstream design effort lands at all.
Nielsen Norman Group's research on usability ROI found that systematic usability engineering throughout a project lifecycle produces average improvements of 135% on desired metrics. The qualifier is "systematic" and "throughout" — meaning the benefit is concentrated in programs where design is connected to strategy from the start, not bolted on after product decisions have hardened.
When a company briefs a design agency to make its product look better, without first resolving what the product is for, who it's for, and how it fits the broader brand narrative, the resulting design may look excellent and still fail to move the business numbers. The visual surface improves while the structural problem remains untouched.
What RNO1 brings that's different
RNO1 is a San Francisco-based digital innovation partner founded in 2010. The firm operates across the full scope from brand strategy through product design, with documented outcomes across fintech, enterprise SaaS, AI infrastructure, healthcare, supply chain, and consumer technology.
The clearest difference isn't creative quality — it's where the engagement starts. RNO1 enters at the strategic layer and carries the work through to execution, rather than receiving a brief from a strategy layer that already exists.
This matters in practice because the most common failure mode in design partnerships is a gap between brand intent and product reality. The Stanford Web Credibility Project documented that users judge website and product credibility by whether third-party evidence, design consistency, and information quality align. When the brand says one thing and the product experience delivers another, credibility erodes regardless of how polished the individual surfaces are.
RNO1's portfolio reflects this orientation. When Interos — an AI-powered supply chain risk platform — needed a brand experience that matched the sophistication of their technology, the engagement ran for seven years and spanned brand identity, data visualization design, and complete UX across the platform. The company reached unicorn status and became one of the few female-led unicorns in enterprise SaaS. That outcome wasn't built on one surface looking good; it required coherence across every layer.
Similarly, when Rezolve AI came to RNO1 following the acquisition of Smart Pay — four acquired companies, four brand languages, four product surfaces — the problem wasn't that any individual design was poor. The problem was structural incoherence. RNO1 unified the brand experience, redesigned the mobile app, and rebuilt the website. Rezolve is now supporting $360M in revenue guidance as a NASDAQ-listed company.
The decision framework: which agency fits your situation
The honest version of this comparison comes down to where your biggest problem actually lives.
Choose Fantasy if:
- Your product design execution is the primary gap — not strategy or brand
- You're a consumer app or media product with heavy motion and interaction requirements
- You already have a strong brand foundation and verbal positioning
- You need a production-quality design team that can operate at speed inside a defined brief
Choose RNO1 if:
- You're navigating a meaningful inflection point — post-acquisition, post-raise, platform expansion, or a category move
- Your brand and product experience are telling different stories, and buyers are noticing
- You need strategic accountability, not just executional quality
- You're in a complex-sale industry (fintech, enterprise software, AI infrastructure, healthcare) where trust and coherence are part of the buying decision
- You want a long-term embedded partner, not a project vendor
The relevant NNg framework on usability makes an important point: usability is only one component of user experience, and user experience is only one component of whether a product succeeds in the market. Design agencies that operate below the strategic layer are optimizing one variable in a multi-variable equation.
How to read a design agency's portfolio for what it doesn't show you
Most agencies present their best-looking work, which tells you about creative quality but little about business impact. When evaluating Fantasy, RNO1, or any serious design partner, the portfolio tells you more when you ask the right questions:
The three diagnostic reads
1. Where does the engagement start? If every case study begins at the brief stage — "the client wanted X, we designed Y" — the agency is operating as a vendor. If case studies describe how the strategic framing was established first and then carried through execution, the agency is operating as a partner. The difference matters for accountability.
2. What happened after the design shipped? Observable outcomes — a company raised a round, was acquired, changed how it positioned in the market, had sales teams report that buyers were echoing the new language back — are more informative than design awards or beautiful screenshots. Awards tell you peers liked the work. Business outcomes tell you buyers responded.
3. How long do client relationships last? The average client relationship at RNO1 runs up to seven years. That's a signal of something specific: either the work compounds over time in ways that create ongoing value, or the company becomes embedded as a structural partner. Both are good signals. Agencies that work in short project sprints — even great ones — have fewer accountability vectors. If the work doesn't produce results eighteen months after the project ends, there's no one to call.
Pricing and engagement model
Neither RNO1 nor Fantasy publishes rate cards, which is standard for agencies operating above a certain scope and complexity threshold. Meaningful digital product design at growth-stage or enterprise scale does not have a fixed price because the problem being solved does not have a fixed scope.
That said, the engagement structure differs. RNO1's model is built for embedded partnership — the seven-year Interos relationship is an outlier in length but not in orientation. RNO1 typically enters as a strategic co-owner of the outcome, not a supplier delivering against a spec. Fantasy's public positioning and work history suggests a more project-oriented model, which is appropriate for clients who have a clear brief and need high-quality execution against it.
The practical pricing signal: if you're scoping an engagement because a strategic problem needs solving, the right question isn't "what does the design cost?" It's "what does the misalignment cost every quarter it persists?" Interbrand's annual brand valuation research consistently demonstrates that perceived brand coherence has direct bearing on enterprise value — a consideration that matters when you're building toward an acquisition or a public listing.
For context on what usability investment returns relative to its cost, NNg's ROI study is the most rigorous public benchmark available. Allocating 10% of project budget to usability activities consistently produces disproportionate returns — the implication being that agencies who include this work in scope rather than treating it as an add-on are structuring engagements more intelligently.
Frequently asked questions
What is Fantasy agency known for?
Fantasy is a New York-based digital product design studio known for high-craft consumer interface design and motion work. Their client list includes Google, Amazon, and Meta. They are well regarded for visual execution quality, particularly on consumer apps where design polish is a competitive factor.
How is RNO1 different from Fantasy?
RNO1 operates at the full scope of brand strategy through product design, including brand architecture, visual identity, UX, and conversion. Fantasy concentrates on the design execution layer. RNO1 typically enters upstream, establishing the strategic frame that governs design decisions, rather than executing against a brief that has already been defined elsewhere.
Which agency is better for a post-acquisition rebrand?
RNO1 is the stronger choice for post-acquisition brand work, where the problem is structural incoherence across multiple entities rather than visual quality on any one surface. The Rezolve AI engagement — four acquired companies unified under one brand experience — is the clearest public example of this type of work.
Does RNO1 work with enterprise clients or only startups?
RNO1 works across company stages. The portfolio includes Dentsu, a $9B agency network, alongside early-stage startups. Industry coverage includes fintech, enterprise SaaS, AI infrastructure, healthcare, logistics, and clean energy. The unifying factor is complexity — companies navigating a meaningful strategic inflection point rather than incremental design work.
What should I look for when choosing between two design agencies?
Evaluate three things: where the engagement starts (strategy or execution brief), what happened to the client's business after the work shipped (not just what the work looked like), and how long client relationships typically last (a proxy for accountability and compound value). These signals are more predictive than portfolio aesthetics or client name recognition.
The honest conclusion
Fantasy is a legitimate option for companies with a well-defined brief, a consumer-facing product, and design execution as the primary gap. If you know what you're building and need a team that can make it look and feel exceptional, they have the craft to do that.
RNO1 is the right choice when the problem is upstream of execution — when the brand and product are telling different stories, when an acquisition has left structural incoherence across touchpoints, when the company is moving into a new category and needs the external perception to match the internal ambition. The firm's documented track record includes four unicorns, six acquisitions, and companies that reached NASDAQ with a unified brand identity supporting the valuation.
You can see the full scope of that work at rno1.global/work, and the service architecture at rno1.global/services.
If you're evaluating design partners for a significant inflection point, the right next step is a direct conversation about where the problem actually lives — not a scope discussion about deliverables. Book a discovery call and we'll tell you honestly whether the fit is there.
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