Adhemas Batista Joins Special US as Chief Design Officer

​Special US has appointed acclaimed designer and artist Adhemas Batista as its first chief design officer, bringing one of the industry’s most distinctive design talents into the agency to lead and expand its design practice across Los Angeles and New York.

Adhemas joins Special after eight years as EVP, chief design officer at Deutsch LA, where he led a team of more than 30 designers and built a practice spanning brand identity, packaging, innovation and emerging technology. Over a career of 30 years, his work has crossed advertising, art, design, illustration, typography, motion and photography for some of the world’s most recognised brands, including Nike, Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Pepsi, Puma, Volkswagen and Havaianas.

At Special, Adhemas will join chief creative officers Matthew Woodhams-Roberts and Dave Horton as part of Special US’s senior creative leadership. He will lead and grow the agency’s design practice, expanding its role across existing client relationships while building design as a front door for brands looking to transform how they show up in the world.

“Design has always been fundamental to the work we make at Special, being a central part of the agency’s identity from its inception in New Zealand in 2007,” said Kelsey Hodgkin, CEO and partner at Special US,. “As we look to scale the US offering, it was important that we didn’t just hire an excellent design lead, skilled in both craft and culture, but someone who could also build out the commercial offering, to deliver world class design solutions for brands in all dimensions.”

Special has already been expanding the role design plays within its creative work. Recent projects include a complete identity and logo rebrand for Hanes and a full refresh of Audible’s global visual identity, each developed as part of broader strategic repositionings and integrated brand platforms.

Adhemas’ arrival signals a larger ambition: to build a design practice capable of solving brand problems upstream, creating identities, systems and experiences that can become the foundation for everything a brand does next.

Adhemas said, "I've spent my career building design teams inside systems that were already built. What pulled me to Special is the rare chance to build a scaled practice where design is engineered into how the work is made from the start, not adapted to it after the fact. The ambition is a practice with its own DNA: strategic, solutions-driven, with an artistic soul, that can stand next to the best design studios in the country and also make the campaigns those brands live in. Design belongs at the center of this industry, not on its sidelines."

Born in Brazil and based in Los Angeles since 2006, Adhemas is a self-taught designer and artist who began his career at just 15 as a web designer. His unmistakable, culture-driven visual style has since taken him around the world and across disciplines, from commercial design and global brand identities to personal art and cultural collaborations.

Among his best-known work, Adhemas played a leading role in building the Havaianas brand identity and was later selected as the featured artist for the brand’s first digital art collection. More recently, he led the redesign of Snapple and 7UP, rebuilding their logos and packaging systems for a couple of America’s most recognisable beverage brands.

His work has earned nine Cannes Lions, including the Grand Prix for Good for UNICEF’s Malak and the Boat, as well as an Emmy nomination for Adobe’s Dream On and multiple Clio, D&AD and One Show honours. He was named Brazilian Young Creative at Cannes Lions in 2003 and remains the only designer whose work has been featured as a default desktop theme on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Adhemas has also served as a mentor and coach for Special Academy since its inception, the agency’s annual programme in partnership with artworxLA that gives underserved and underrepresented Los Angeles students access to the craft skills of creative advertising and brand building.

His appointment follows a period of significant creative and business momentum for Special US. Over the past 12 months, the agency has won the Emmy for Outstanding Commercial, the US Grand Effie, a Cannes Lions Grand Prix and Gold, five D&AD Pencils and a Grand Clio. Special was also named Ad Age’s Independent Creative Agency of the Year and Campaign Global’s Independent Agency of the Year, while expanding its roster with new partnerships including Audible and OpenAI.

For Special, Adhemas’ appointment represents more than the addition of a new discipline. It is the next step in building an agency where strategy, creativity and design increasingly operate as one.