The Studio
Karoshi is a creative direction and animation practice with over two decades of work spanning advertising, entertainment, and technology. The name. Japanese for "death by overwork", is delivered with a wink. The tagline: "Ticking away for timeless ads."
Where it comes from
Twenty-plus years of motion design and art direction, most of it for ads. The name is the joke I made about the job. Karoshi, death by overwork, the always-on grind of deadlines that never really end. It is also where the craft got built. Every instinct the AI and hardware work on this site runs on, the timing, the taste, the storytelling, was forged here first. Karoshi is the root. Everything else grew out of it.
The Work
The practice encompasses campaign concepting, motion design, brand identity systems, and creative direction across every major advertising format. Animated advertisements, product launches, brand films, social content, broadcast graphics, interactive experiences, and AI-augmented creative production. The client roster spans agencies, direct brands, entertainment properties, and technology companies.
The Voice
The brand identity leans into dark humor and supernatural creative metaphors. "Summoning the dark arts of AI, Ken crafts reels and websites with the swift precision of a digital necromancer." The aesthetic is gothic-digital, dark themes, occult visual language, clock and time motifs, monospace typography (Inconsolata, Staatliches, Cormorant), and animated GIFs as primary visuals. It's a deliberate contrast to the corporate polish of typical agency portfolios.
The Site
The Karoshi website is built on Webflow with a custom dark theme. The design system uses five typefaces for different purposes: monospace for code-like elements, sans-serif for body text, display faces for headlines, and serif accents for editorial moments. The visual language centers on time, clocks, ticking, deadlines becoming "un-deadlines", threading the Karoshi concept through every touchpoint.
The Evolution
What started as a traditional animation portfolio has evolved into something more hybrid. The practice now integrates AI tools (ComfyUI, ElevenLabs, Claude) alongside traditional After Effects and Cinema 4D workflows. The same creative direction sensibility that built broadcast campaigns now applies to interactive experiences, game design, and AI-augmented production pipelines. Karoshi represents the creative foundation that all the technical projects on this site grew out of.