We design brands that help experts inform, influence, and innovate.
Abe Garcia and Tj Cichecki opened Workhorse in 2014, in a 1902 carriage house on Capitol Hill. We left the carriage house in 2026. The studio now works remotely, with partners in Washington, DC and Charleston, SC.
- Founded
- 2014
- Partners
- Abe Garcia, Tj Cichecki
- Studio
- Remote
- Partners in
- Washington, DC; Charleston, SC
- Carriage house
- Capitol Hill, 2014 to 2026
- Legal
- Workhorse Collective LLC
Brand knowledge, carried into the work.
Workhorse brings strategy and execution together. We design brands and the websites, campaigns and environments where people encounter them.
Our clients include cultural institutions and commercial brands, with work ranging from an exhibition at the MLK Library to the proposed curriculum site for Demme Learning. Each project begins with the organization’s knowledge of its audience.
We are building the platform around that practice. Brand standards and the decisions behind them sit alongside the work, so the next project can draw on what the team already knows.
Clients can work with us through an ongoing partnership or a defined project. We agree on priorities and the work included before starting.
Leaving the carriage houseIn 2026 we gave up the carriage house on Capitol Hill, twelve years after we opened there. It had been our workshop, our broadcast room in 2020 and the venue for our talks and parties. Abe has worked from Charleston since 2016, and the studio had worked remotely since the pandemic, so the practice carried on from Washington and Charleston.
We started using AI across the studio.
By 2024, AI was integrated into the design process and the delivery system, not bolted onto either. To make that work at studio scale, we moved the design system out of Figma and into code, so the brand could be data the agents read from.
AI across the studioAI use spread from one designer’s tools into the whole practice: drafting, image generation, structured output, agent workflows for review and publish. The pattern from two years of experiments held. The brand had to be at the root of every agent, or the work drifted.
Brand as data on diskFor the brand to sit at the root, it had to be data the agents could read. Tokens live in Style Dictionary, in DTCG format on disk: color, typography, spacing, radius, motion, voice. Every component in the shared shadcn-based library inherits them. The same library, with different tokens, renders a different brand.
Growth-based designA strict design system, even one extended by AI, can hold a brand back. If we focus more on the system than on the brand it serves, the work goes generic. Our discipline now is growth-based design: the system extends as the brand expands. New colors when the work earns them. New formats when the audience asks. The system is built to grow, not to lock.
Stable Diffusion arrived, then ChatGPT.
Stable Diffusion shipped in August. ChatGPT shipped in November. We started running both through real client work the week each one arrived, the way the studio has tested every new tool since 2014.
We have always been tinkerers, and in the two years that followed we ran nearly every model, framework, and integration that mattered through real client work. The pattern that kept landing: AI produces fluently and produces nothing in particular. The brand is what keeps the output honest. An agent without a brand at the root drifts. It writes copy that is technically competent and emotionally flat.
What we kept from that run was a conviction: AI has to be integrated into the design process, not bolted onto it. The brand has to live as data the agents can read. Voice, tokens, components, archive, all in one place. We started building toward that.
Designing through the pandemic.
The pandemic emptied the world’s offices in March. The studio was on Capitol Hill in Washington then, a few miles from the central library where we were finishing a permanent exhibition on Dr. King.
We had been remote since 2016, when Abe moved to Charleston, so the systems were already in place. The carriage house emptied for the year. We retrofitted the studio’s production gear into a broadcast station and kept shooting, recording, and presenting from wherever we were. The Notes archive grew through the year. We thought the dust would settle into a permanent work-from-home for the studio. It did.
The studio’s largest project at that point opened the same year. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library reopened after a decades-long renovation, and the permanent exhibition we designed, Up from the People: Protest and Change in DC, traces Dr. King’s local organizing alongside the broader activist landscape that has shaped Washington. We had been working on it since 2019; the work finished through the early months of the pandemic.
Programs that used to fill a hotel ballroom moved into a browser. We used our brand-forward method to help institutions like Giffords and the ADL create cohesive online event experiences.
MLK Memorial Library, Washington, DC · 2020
Workhorse + Decent Workshop
In 2017 we solidified our yearslong collaboration with Decent Workshop and merged our practices. We focused on brand design and identity alongside digital marketing and influencer marketing.
The work moved across every channel and surface stayed coherent on each one. Identity, social, paid media, email, environments. We treated the digital channels with the same discipline and craft that we had brought to print.
The carriage house pulled double duty as workshop and venue. We launched Cocktails & Creators. We hosted Dalton Maag for a talk on the state of typography. The events were the studio’s second product.
Growing the practice.
2016 was the year the studio expanded. We brought on collaborators full time, took the entire first floor of the carriage house, and opened a second outpost in Charleston, SC.
We took the first floor.
We had opened in 2014 inside a single studio room on Capitol Hill. In 2016 we took the entire first floor of the carriage house. The freight doors stayed.
A ghost sign, drawn from LOC archives.
Typography for the studio’s signage came from research at the Library of Congress. We drew a Wm. Walter and Son ghost sign and painted it on the back wall, after the carriage maker the building was built for in 1902.
A second outpost, in Charleston.
We opened a second outpost in Charleston, SC, and started a content partnership in DC that became a merger the following year. One practice, two cities. The studio does brand, identity, content, environments, and the software that carries them, wherever the work sits.
1902 carriage house, Capitol Hill · 2016
We opened between a carriage house and a farm.
Abe Garcia and Tj Cichecki opened Workhorse in 2014, in a 1902 carriage house on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The building once housed Wm. Walter and Son, a coach maker who built horse carriages by hand on that floor. The studio’s other end was a working farm in Casanova, Virginia.
We started with a belief that has carried every project since: brands are not a facade, they’re the foundation. The DC carriage house was the workshop; the Casanova farm gave the studio its name. Strategic design partners for experts, entrepreneurs, and enterprise was the practice we set out to build. Brands that help experts execute.
Capitol Hill, DC + Casanova, VA · 2014
Twelve years of our own front door.
Five versions of the studio’s site, in service across twelve years. Captures from the Wayback Machine, played back at original viewport. The current one is built on Workbench.
./v12014–2017 2014Yellow ground, with the first tagline: WORK is our favorite four-letter word. ./v1·b2014–2017 
2016Still the v1 site, after the carriage-house renovation. ./v22018 
2018Post-merger relaunch with a new gradient mark. ./v32019–2023 
2020Serif redesign, with the studio in frame. ./v42024 
2024The Office of Culture & Commerce era, dark room with a video hero. ./v52026 → now 
2026The current site, built on Workbench.
Sources · web.archive.org/web/*/wrkhrs.co · Captured at 1440 viewport.
Abe Garcia and Tj Cichecki.
Roles, prior work, and what each leads now.
Abe Garcia
Abe studied Human Biology at the University of Texas and finished an MFA in Graphic Design at MICA in 2012. Before the studio opened he ran design at early DC technology companies including Rap Genius, Social Tables, Transit Labs, Event Kloud, and Bloompop. He leads the studio’s software and platform work.
Tj Cichecki
Tj studied Visual Communications at Northern Illinois University and was Senior Creative Lead at PBS before Workhorse, with prior stints at Edelman, APCO Worldwide, Ketchum, and Redpeg. He leads brand strategy, identity, and content.
Who we’ve worked with.
A partial roster, from 2014 to now.