The Studio

Vice Alliance is the independent design and engineering studio I co-founded with senior UX designer Angelo Manzano in 2008 — and brought back to life in 2026 after eighteen years of separate-but-parallel work. Same two principals. Same operating principle. New tooling, new scale, the same refusal to staff a project with anyone the client didn’t actually hire.

The headline on the rebuilt site says it plainly: strategy that survives shipping. The promise underneath it is even shorter — two principals, one contract, we don’t split design from engineering.

Why Now

The agency model is broken in a way that’s been obvious to anyone who has watched a $250K engagement get strip-mined by producers, account managers, junior strategists, and a rotating cast of contractors who never read the brief. The work that ships looks nothing like the work that was sold. The strategy deck and the production code live in different universes.

Angelo and I shipped together for fifteen years before either of us had a child who could read. We shipped for C-SPAN, ABC News, Good Morning America, WWE, Seagate, The Daily Business Review, Tralliance, NukoToys, Cherrypal, Bright Antenna, Pangaea Lounge, and Tank Industries. We shipped without a producer, without an account layer, without a project manager who needed a status meeting to know what we were doing. When agentic tooling collapsed the cost of execution by an order of magnitude — and when I’d built OpenClaw as the harness that coordinates a working pool of frontier agents (Claude, Gemini, Codex, Higgsfield, and a rotating bench of specialized models) into a single studio workflow — the case for re-forming the partnership stopped being nostalgic and started being obvious.

So: First est. MMVIII. Returned MMXXVI. Vice Alliance is back.

What We Sell

Eight programs, organized so a buyer can map a budget to an outcome on a single page:

UX Strategy & Research — the work that decides what gets built before anyone writes a Figma frame
Brand System Design — identity, tokens, voice, and the production assets to deploy them at speed
Astro Production Sites — fast, ranked, accessible, server-rendered, deployed to the edge
Campaign Systems — landing pages, microsites, and conversion infrastructure built to be measured
Custom Engineering — booking engines, CRMs, AI agents, and the integration work that’s actually hard
AI Tooling + OpenClaw — an orchestrated pool of frontier agents (Claude, Gemini, Codex, Higgsfield, and more) coordinated through the OpenClaw harness to compress timelines from quarters to weeks
SEO / AEO Retainers — ongoing visibility work for both classic search and AI answer engines
Operate Retainers — long-running studio partnerships, like the eleven years we’ve been on Robbie’s

Floor is around $10K. Most programs start near $25K and go up from there. We don’t do cold inbound; introductions or direct outreach only.

The Operating Model

There is no producer. There is no account layer. There is no Slack channel with fifteen names in it where decisions get made by attrition. There is Angelo, Kit, and a contract that tells you exactly what’s shipping. Strategy and engineering happen in the same room — usually the same Figma file, the same Astro repo, the same Linear board — because the moment those two functions split, the brief stops surviving contact with reality.

The studio’s stated commitment: what you agree to is exactly what ships.

What Gets Built

The relaunched site features four cases by name:

Beat Saber — VR / gaming UX, ten-figure platform
Marriott Vacation Club — hospitality, enterprise-scale digital
FishIntel.ai — the AI fishing intelligence SaaS I shipped from concept to live product in a day, now a retained Vice Alliance program
TheGlobe.com (NASDAQ: TGLO) — the foundational web era, the 606% first-day IPO record, the work that produced two co-invented patents (US 6,999,458 and EP 1836591 A2)

The full archive on the site lists eighteen cases. One long-term retainer — Robbie’s of Islamorada, running since 2016 — has generated more than $7.1M in online revenue under the partnership.

The Build

The new vicealliance.com is a server-rendered Astro production site — exactly the kind of work we sell. Tailwind for the design system, Netlify for the edge, OpenClaw for the AI-assisted authoring layer that pushes typography, motion, and copy through reviewable iterations instead of one-shot prompts. The typography does the heavy lifting; the visual restraint is the point. A studio site shouldn’t look like a portfolio reel. It should look like the kind of place that’s going to make your money back.

Information architecture is five doors:

Craft — case studies
Studio — Angelo, Kit, the principle of the fixed partnership
Process — how the work actually moves
Insights — long-form essays, including Resurrecting Vice Alliance, 18 years later
Contact — hello@vicealliance.com opens a 100%-agentic-assisted Project Management gateway wired into Discord, Telegram, and email; the inquiry becomes a working project channel, not a ticket in a queue

Locations

Miami. Florida Keys. Orlando. Melbourne. Remote-friendly because the model has always been remote-friendly. In-person where it matters.

The Pitch

If you have a real budget, a real problem, and the patience to spend ninety days in a room with two principals who actually do the work — start a conversation. If you want a deck and three account people on a Zoom, we’re not the right studio, and we’ll tell you so.

Strategy that survives shipping. That’s the whole pitch.

Visit: vicealliance.com — Miami · Florida Keys · Orlando · Melbourne