Skip to content

Available for new engagements

Designed to be wanted.Engineered to survive production.

Netraa is a two-person studio. Peyton designs the part people actually touch — identity, interface, experience. Andrew builds the systems underneath — AI, software, infrastructure. Same table, same brief, and no handoff in the middle where good work usually goes to die.

Start a conversationWhat we do
  • Brand identity
  • Product design
  • Web design
  • AI applications
  • Custom software
  • Experience design

The studio

Two people, and you get both of them.

Most studios sell you a pitch team and staff the work with someone else. There is nobody else here. You work with the two people whose names are on the door — no account manager, no bench, no quiet handoff to a junior after the sales call.

That caps how much we can take on, which is the point. We only accept engagements we can genuinely do well, and we would rather turn one down than staff it badly.

Design

Peyton Ropas

Design & brand

Identity, interface, and the experience around both.

Peyton designs identity systems and everything they have to live on — marks, type and color, packaging, menus, signage, decks, and the sites that carry them.

She built Peyton Pours from the name outward: the mark, the palette, the menu cards, the styling, the way a bar reads across a room. That is the part worth hiring. She has run a brand end to end as its owner rather than as a vendor handed a style guide, so every design decision arrives with a reason attached to it.

  • Brand identity
  • Visual systems
  • Product & UI
  • Web design
  • Print & packaging
  • Experience design
Engineering

Andrew Gunn

AI & software engineering

The systems underneath, and keeping them standing.

Andrew is a senior full-stack and applied AI engineer with a decade of enterprise delivery behind him — .NET, React, TypeScript, SQL Server, Azure, and the CI/CD that holds it all together.

Most AI advice on the market comes from people who have never had to keep a production system up on a Monday morning. The interesting problems in this field are not model problems. They are integration problems, data problems, and organizational problems wearing a model-shaped costume.

  • LLM applications
  • Retrieval & RAG
  • TypeScript & .NET
  • Cloud & CI/CD
  • Architecture review
  • Due diligence

Services

Six ways this studio is usually put to work.

Take one of them or take the whole line, from the first sketch to the deploy. Engagements are scoped to a decision or a deliverable, never to a headcount slot — and if the honest answer is that you do not need any of this, that is a fine outcome for a first call.

01

Brand & identity

Design

The name, the mark, and every place it has to hold up.

Naming support, logo and wordmark, type and color systems, packaging, print, social, and collateral — delivered as a system with rules attached. The test of an identity is not the launch. It is whether the brand still looks like itself six months later, when someone who is not a designer has to make a flyer.

  • Logo & wordmark
  • Type & color systems
  • Print & packaging
  • Brand guidelines
02

Product & web design

Design

Interfaces people can use without being told how.

Application and marketing interfaces, design systems, component libraries, and prototypes you can click. Designed in the browser as often as in Figma, because the two of us are working in the same file — a layout that cannot be built is not a design, it is a picture of one.

  • UI & interaction design
  • Design systems
  • Marketing sites
  • Prototypes
03

Experience design

Design

The parts of a brand that happen in a room instead of on a screen.

Menus, signage, table and bar styling, materials, and the sequence a guest actually moves through. Drawn from years of running live events, where the distance between fine and memorable is a dozen small decisions nobody is supposed to consciously notice.

  • Event identity
  • Menus & signage
  • Styling direction
  • Photography direction
04

AI product engineering

Engineering

From a prototype that impresses to a system you can put a customer on.

Chat and copilot interfaces, structured extraction, document pipelines, retrieval, and evaluation harnesses. The model is the easy part — the work is everything around it: prompt versioning, fallbacks, cost ceilings, latency budgets, and knowing what to do when the model is confidently wrong.

  • LLM applications
  • Retrieval & RAG
  • Evals & regression testing
  • Cost & latency
05

Custom software

Engineering

The application, the API, and the pipeline that ships it.

Full-stack product work in TypeScript and .NET. Greenfield builds, legacy systems that need a second act, and the integration layer between the two. Typed end to end, tested where it matters, deployed on infrastructure your team can actually operate.

  • Next.js & React
  • C#/.NET and Node services
  • Data & integrations
  • CI/CD and cloud
06

Architecture & advisory

Engineering

A senior engineer in the room when the decision is expensive to reverse.

Architecture reviews, build-versus-buy calls, AI readiness assessments, and technical due diligence. Short engagements with a written deliverable — a recommendation you can hand to a board, not a slide deck full of hedges.

  • Architecture review
  • AI readiness
  • Technical due diligence

Selected work

Things we designed, built, and had to live with afterward.

Owning a brand and running the software under it teaches you things a client engagement never will — mostly which shortcuts come back.

  1. Peyton Pours

    Identity · Web · Collateral · Experience

    In market

    White-glove bartending for private events across Lake Country, Wisconsin. Named, designed, and launched in-house — mark, palette, menu system, signage, site, and inquiry flow. The brand is most of the product here: clients book a feeling long before they taste anything.

  2. Amarna Studio

    Product design · Engineering

    In development

    An AI-native authoring tool for corporate learning. Instructional designers describe a course in plain language; Amarna generates the interactive HTML5 and packages it as a standards-compliant SCORM file the LMS they already own will accept. Designed and built by the two of us.

  3. Open-source WordPress plugins

    Engineering

    108k+ downloads

    Ten plugins published and maintained, including a WooCommerce bill-of-materials extension — more than 108,000 lifetime downloads and 8,000 active installs. Small tools, real users, and a decade of support tickets that taught more about software than any architecture diagram ever has.

Approach

Small, verifiable steps toward something real.

The failure mode in this work is not bad craft. It is spending six months building the wrong thing beautifully. Every engagement is structured so you find out early.

  1. Scope honestly

    A week of discovery before a pixel or a line of code. What is the actual failure mode you are trying to remove, what does success measure out to, and do you even need the thing you came in asking for? Sometimes the answer is a better landing page, or a SQL query and a cron job. We will tell you that.

  2. Design and build in the same file

    The usual failure is the handoff — a beautiful comp thrown over a wall to an engineer who quietly rebuilds it into something cheaper. There is no wall here. Design decisions get pressure-tested against what is actually buildable the same day they get made.

  3. Ship a thin slice

    One narrow path, end to end, in production, behind a flag. Real data, real users, real cost per request. A thin slice that works beats a broad plan that has never once been tested against reality.

  4. Harden and hand off

    Observability, evals, runbooks, brand guidelines, and documentation written for whoever inherits this after we are gone. The goal is something your team owns outright, not a standing dependency on us.

Engagements

Four shapes that tend to fit.

Assessment

1–2 weeks

A focused review of a brand, a system, a codebase, or an AI initiative, ending in a written recommendation with costed options.

Identity sprint

2–4 weeks

Naming through applied system — mark, type, color, core collateral, and the rules that keep it consistent after we hand it over.

Build

6–12 weeks

Designed and engineered delivery of a working product, shipped in slices, with your team involved from the first week so the handoff is not a cliff.

Embedded

Ongoing

Part-time senior design and engineering capacity on your team, at a defined weekly commitment.

Toolkit

Boring tools, chosen on purpose.

Nothing here is novel, and that is the point. Your team has to run this after the engagement ends.

Identity — Design
IllustratorInDesignType systemsColor systems
Interface — Design
FigmaDesign systemsPrototypingTailwind
Production — Design
PhotoshopLightroomPrint & packagingPhoto direction
Languages — Engineering
TypeScriptC#PythonSQL
Front end — Engineering
ReactNext.jsReduxTailwind
Back end — Engineering
ASP.NET CoreNodeFastAPIREST & GraphQL
Data — Engineering
SQL ServerPostgrespgvectorRedis
AI — Engineering
AnthropicOpenAIAzure AILangGraph
Platform — Engineering
AzureVercelGitHub ActionsDocker

Tell us what is broken, or what you wish existed.

A short email is enough to start. Design, engineering, or both — and if it is not a fit, we will say so quickly and point you somewhere better.

andrewgunn31@gmail.com

Lake Country, Wisconsin · Reply within one business day