NY UX Agencies

Media, publishing and culture UX agencies in New York

Editorial products have a second user nobody accounts for. Readers matter, but so do the editors, producers, and curators publishing into the thing forty times a day, and a redesign that delights the audience while making the CMS unusable will be quietly abandoned within a year.

See the agencies Read the FAQ

A category of its own

Advertising formats that shape the layout, archives going back decades, and accessibility obligations that are legal rather than optional for public institutions.

New York is the right place to hire for it. The newsrooms, broadcasters, and museums are all here, and the agencies below have worked inside them.

At a glance

Seven studios, side by side

Facts only, no scores or rankings. What each team is built for, and where it sits.

Studio Media focus Presence
Code and TheoryNewsrooms, editorial hierarchyOne WTC, Manhattan; global, 400+
AREA 17Editorial tooling and CMS (Twill)New York and Paris
Local ProjectsMuseums and exhibitions, spatial123 William St, Manhattan
FantasyStreaming discovery and playbackSan Francisco and New York
Clay GlobalEntertainment and social, brand plus productSoHo, Manhattan; remote-first, SF HQ
UtilityLive sports and broadcast, mobileNew York
Big HumanConsumer media launches51 E 12th St, Manhattan

The agencies

Seven for publishers and institutions

The read, signature strengths, work to know, presence, and who each one suits.

Code and Theory logo

The firm publishers call first, and have for two decades.

The read:
Code and Theory has been designing for publishers since 2001 and claims embedding in more than 135 newsrooms, which is a different kind of experience from having designed a media site once. Its reputation rests on editorial hierarchy, the craft of making a page feel like a publication rather than a feed, and on understanding how content actually gets made. Worth knowing it's a large agency inside the Stagwell group rather than a boutique studio, so ask who is on your team.
Signature strengths:
Editorial and publishing UX, content strategy, product design, design systems, brand experience.
Work to know:
Bloomberg, Vogue, the Los Angeles Times, Hearst, The Daily Beast, The Verge, Mashable, Bustle, CNN, and NBC News.
Presence:
One World Trade Center, Manhattan, with offices in San Francisco, London, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Manila. Over 400 people.
Suits you if:
You're a publisher or broadcaster and you want a team that has already solved your problem several times.
AREA 17 logo

The publishing tooling, not just the reading experience.

The read:
AREA 17 builds and maintains Twill, an open-source CMS now used by The New York Times and Nike, which tells you where its attention goes. Editorial workflow, taxonomy, and the interfaces editors work in every day get treated as design problems in their own right. That focus makes it a natural fit for institutions with deep archives and small digital teams who will maintain the thing themselves afterwards.
Signature strengths:
Information architecture, editorial platform UX, CMS and publishing tools, design systems.
Work to know:
Platforms for the Art Institute of Chicago and the International Energy Agency, plus a replatform for Pentagram.
Presence:
New York and Paris teams.
Suits you if:
Your editors hate the CMS and your archive is impossible to navigate.
Website:
area17.com
Local Projects logo

Cultural storytelling, where the interface is sometimes a room.

The read:
An experience design studio founded in 2001 that works almost entirely with museums, memorials, and public spaces, with a body of work that includes some of the most visited cultural experiences in the country. Its instinct is to build narrative from first-person material rather than curatorial voice, which is why the 9/11 Memorial Museum works as an oral history platform. Not the studio to hire for a subscription flow, and the right one if the experience is spatial.
Signature strengths:
Experience design, interactive installation, exhibition UX, cultural storytelling, creative technology.
Work to know:
The 9/11 Memorial Museum, Cooper Hewitt's Pen, the Museum of the City of New York, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Cleveland Museum of Art, StoryCorps, and The New York Times.
Presence:
123 William Street, Manhattan.
Suits you if:
You're a museum or cultural institution and the experience has to work in a physical space, not only a browser.
Fantasy logo

Content discovery at streaming scale.

The read:
Fantasy's media work sits with the platforms people open every evening, where the design problem is helping someone decide what to watch or listen to from an unhelpfully large library. Recommendation surfaces, browse states, and playback are its territory. The house style leans visually assertive, which suits entertainment brands and would overwhelm a serious news product.
Signature strengths:
UX, interaction design, content discovery, AI experience design, product design.
Work to know:
Product work for Netflix, Spotify, X, Google, Samsung, and 23andMe.
Presence:
San Francisco and New York.
Suits you if:
You're an entertainment or streaming platform and discovery is where you're losing people.
Website:
fantasy.co
Clay Global logo

Entertainment and social products, designed to be looked at.

The read:
Clay Global's media-adjacent work sits with entertainment and social platforms rather than news, and the useful thing about it here is that interface and brand come from one studio. For consumer media products, where the visual identity and the product experience are effectively the same thing to a user, that removes a coordination problem most publishers solve badly.
Signature strengths:
Product UX and UI, design systems, UX research, brand identity, web design.
Work to know:
Product and interface work for Sony, Snapchat, Google, Amazon, and Slack.
Presence:
148 Lafayette St, SoHo, Manhattan. Remote-first, San Francisco HQ.
Suits you if:
Your media product's identity and its interface need to be designed as one thing.
Website:
clay.global
Utility logo

Live sports and broadcast, where timing is the design.

The read:
Utility's media work is in live and broadcast contexts, which impose a constraint most editorial products don't face: the content changes by the second and the interface has to keep up without becoming frantic. Its focus on interaction states and transitions matters more here than in most categories, because a scores screen that updates badly is worse than one that updates slowly.
Signature strengths:
Mobile and web UX/UI, interaction design, iOS and Android interface design.
Work to know:
Apps and products for the NBA, DirecTV, Verizon, Samsung, and Airbnb.
Presence:
New York.
Suits you if:
You're designing for live content, sports, or broadcast on mobile.
Big Human logo

Consumer media products, built to launch.

The read:
Big Human's media work runs to consumer entertainment and destination experiences rather than editorial platforms, and its background includes building its own consumer products. That gives it a good instinct for what an audience will actually engage with on a first release, and less relevance if your problem is a twenty-year archive and a newsroom of 200.
Signature strengths:
Product UX and UI, mobile app design, product strategy, branding.
Work to know:
The team behind HQ Trivia and Vine, with client work for Netflix, Rockefeller Center, Whistle, and Gemini.
Presence:
51 E 12th St, Manhattan.
Suits you if:
You're launching a consumer media product and need it in market rather than in research.
Website:
bighuman.com

FAQ

Media UX, answered

How is publishing UX different from product UX?+

You're designing two products with one budget. There's the reading experience, and there's the editorial tooling the newsroom uses to produce it, and the second one determines whether the first survives. Agencies without publishing experience tend to design a beautiful front end and inherit the CMS as it is, which works until editors start routing around the design because it's faster. Ask any agency how it handled the editorial workflow, not just the article page.

Does the agency need to know our CMS?+

Not the specific product, but it needs to have designed around one. The relevant question is whether they've worked with a newsroom, a curatorial team, or a production team as users, because publishing constraints show up as editorial habits rather than technical documentation. AREA 17's position is unusual here in that it maintains its own CMS, so the tooling is a design surface rather than a given.

What's different about designing for a cultural institution?+

Accessibility is a legal obligation rather than a nice-to-have, budgets are grant-shaped and arrive in phases, and the digital experience frequently has a physical counterpart in a gallery. Institutions also maintain their own work afterwards with very small teams, so the handover and documentation matter more than the launch. Studios used to commercial clients often underestimate all four.

What does media UX cost in New York?+

A defined product, an app or a section redesign, commonly starts in the tens of thousands. A full publication replatform with editorial tooling and a design system runs into six figures and up, and larger agencies quote from a higher floor. Cultural institutions can often phase the work across funding cycles, and most studios in this category are used to being asked.

How long does a publication redesign take?+

Six to nine months is realistic for a full replatform with editorial tooling, and shorter phases work well if you can release a section at a time. Museum and exhibition work runs to institutional timelines and is usually measured in years from commission to opening. A front-end refresh with no CMS change is far quicker and also far less likely to fix the underlying complaint.

How do I choose between two strong agencies here?+

Match the studio to what kind of media you make. A newsroom or magazine points to Code and Theory. An archive and an editorial workflow problem points to AREA 17. A museum or a physical exhibition points to Local Projects. A streaming or discovery problem points to Fantasy. Live and broadcast content points to Utility. A consumer launch points to Big Human.