Despite our ‘studio next door’ vibes, O Street has been operating as a global agency since our inception 15 years ago. Over the years this has included work with Google, Spotify, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Bacardi to name a few. We’ve run in-person brand workshops in Kenya, Italy, Denver and even Glasgow (sounds like an Abba song!).

During Covid, remote working seemed the new norm, particularly with a business like ours that was already accustomed to it. However, in the last few months, we’ve rediscovered the importance of face-to-face connections with our clients. This prompted our very own Tessa Simpson and David Freer to make a trip to the US earlier this month. It’s an expense and effort to undertake business travel of this scale, yet it’s something we greatly value, and here are a few reasons why:

Meeting over marketing

Agency marketing budgets can easily get used up on lead generation, design awards and conferences. These work for many people, but we’ve found spending our allocated budgets on building tangible relationships with existing clients/peers or being introduced to real people so much more valuable for building our business. We see the return on investment straight away.

Facetime

No matter how fast your broadband speed is, some things can’t be replicated with video chats. Since our trip, we now know what the view looks like from our client’s office window; the choice of sandwiches in TIFIN’s local deli and even the high score on the pinball machine that sits in the reception at Paralel. These are the things that make us human, and despite the professional nature of our service, in the end, we do work with humans and we appreciate the ability to understand them on that level too.

Seeing a brand exist in real life

Over in the US, it was a delight to see our logo creations on hoodies, fluorescent signs, etched office doors and meeting room murals. Talking to our clients, it was even more enlightening to see them embody the values and personalities we had helped craft at their inception. Standing inside the offices of the businesses we work with is a reminder of the impact and value of the work we do.

Understanding a place

We spent time in New York and have clients all over the US. But, our spiritual home seems to be in Colorado. As with our UK base in Glasgow, Denver is a place that balances both the cosmopolitan culture of a big city and the lifestyle of its proximity to the great outdoors. Again, like Glasgow, people living here seem to appreciate the balance of work/life alongside tech/nature. As well as our kind of folk, it also attracts brands like Crocs and VFC whose values align with our own.

Same same, but different

The UK and the US may have many similarities, but it’s understanding the unique qualities of each that allows us to communicate a brand in an authentic voice. Experiencing the positivity of every shopkeeper who wishes you a ‘wonderful day’ in the US explains the bright bold unashamed tone of voice required to engage with US audiences. In the same way that the bad weather and slightly grumpier shopkeepers in the UK explains the importance of humour in the design work we have here.

Between the lines feedback

It’s all well and good getting direct feedback from clients via email or video. However, it’s the between-the-lines information you get from those more casual conversations that often holds the real value. When discussing our work with the team at Google, we realised that what gets them the most excited are our creative side projects, like our Roadliners documentary film or the Label O’ Love book. It’s also reassuring to know that people are reading our newsletters and social media posts! If you want in, sign up here.

Emerging trends

One of the biggest value-adds that we bring to our American clients is a European design sensibility. At the same time, cross-pollinating our work from both sides of the world gives us a new perspective on what we create. Plus we’re getting eyes on emerging trends (design or otherwise) from America that often make their way over to us in the UK. Speaking of, anyone for Disc Golf? If you haven’t heard of that, check out the Glasgow contingency.

Small world, big impact

Our nine-strong designer team is about the size that any creative team would be in a larger organisation, but we often view ourselves as small. However, when we step out into the wider world, we realise the big impact we have with the work we do. These reminders include the billboards we pass on the street and the banknotes we designed in people’s wallets. On the other side of the world, this includes bottles we designed lined up in a bar and logos emblazoned on the walls of a skyscraper in downtown Denver.

From sunny Colorado straight back to torrential rain and flooding in Scotland, we landed with a bit of a bump, but still feeling super inspired and motivated with new projects on the horizon.
That feeling might be a leftover from the lasting effects of American positivity… not the only souvenir we brought back from our trip!

At O Street, we’ve always loved bringing others into our creative circle when working on a particular project. These others are often our clients but where possible, we love collaborating with other creatives.

Neil at the Northern City exhibition at the Lighthouse Gallery by Peter Dibdin.

When we first started out as two upstart designers in an attic, we collaborated a lot to help establish larger creative teams for big projects (PriceWaterhouseCooper, Celtic Football Club and The Edinburgh International Film Festival with photographer Peter Dibdin.

As we grew, we started to bring those skills in-house (artworking, illustration, animation etc.). However, we still recognise when external specialist skills are required, be it a professional photographer or a website developer for a complex build.

When pitching for the visual identity project that became HOME a number of years ago, the marketing manager suggested we work alongside a local Manchester agency called Creative Concern. I’ll admit, at the time I was slightly disappointed that we didn’t win the project outright. However, we genuinely clicked as a team and we’ve worked on numerous projects with Creative Concern ever since (Thackray Medical Museum, National Trust, Johnstone Credit Union.)

Even now, when we have a broad range of design skills in our company, we still opt for collaborative teams when we can. Working outside the creative echo chamber of your own studio can lead to unexpected inspiration, the discovery of new development tools/tactics and even (dare I say it) some healthy competition.

It’s hard though right? Working in an industry where the development of brand new ideas and unique takes on briefs requires a great deal of confidence in your own thinking. Letting others influence these early, febrile musings requires a skill many of us designers don’t have: a lack of ego.

During our redesign of Scotland’s banknotes for Royal Bank of Scotland, led by service design agency Nile HQ a panel of our peers was appointed to scrutinise our design concepts, sense check our visuals and critique our work. With our egos left at the door, we embraced the approach and truly believe that the results of that project were made greater by the input from the broad range of creatives involved.

It was a model we also adopted when working on the Ulster Bank notes with Belfast agency shesaid. Again, a relationship we’ve continued, most recently on a project for a new global player in the Irish Whiskey space, Outwalker. Check our socials for some exciting announcements about that very soon!

With jobs like these, the other important dimension is including the authentic voice of a geographically local agency, so we often look to collaborate with studios around the world to ensure that voice is present within these projects too.

What The Client Wanted by Andrew Rae

Collaborating well takes skill though. As the saying goes ‘Opinions are like assholes… everyone’s got one’. It’s possible to take on too many opinions and try to please too many people. Most of us can spot the ‘design by committee’ ideas a mile off. They are the brand identities or campaigns that seem to tick all the boxes (approachable font, neat motif, bright colour palette) but they just feel a bit… meh! They lack a spark, a bravery that a bold creative often brings to a project. There will be times when an individual needs the freedom to disagree with others’ opinions and push on. It’s good to realise that that’s okay too.

As we grow and develop our agency, I don’t think we’ll ever stop collaborating with others. This approach has allowed us to work on massive global projects in the drinks, TV/music streaming and beauty spaces, whilst maintaining our creative-led boutique agency size and approach. We’re small, but mighty—with an agile, creative team that delivers big ideas.

It’s at this point in a blog where I realise that I haven’t mentioned half the projects or collaborators I meant to. So, very briefly, take a look at our recent project for Santini Cycle Jerseys with Fourtwentyseven, Stuco and Patrick Hughes and keep your eye out for soon to be released This Day branding project—a global philanthropy brand created with Good Point and Atime.

We haven’t mentioned everyone, there are too many to list, but we want to thank all of the talented people we collaborate with. You know who you are!

—David

O Street is officially 15 years old this year. In business (or cat) years that’s a wise old age, a sure sign that we are doing something right.

Over that time, we’ve helped lots of brands grow and we’ve provided a creatively inspirational place for lots of people to work. One approach we are particularly fond of—and might be the secret to our success so far—is our ability to do things differently and tackle things in our own way.

So, if you have a minute (or 10 cat minutes) we’d love to indulge ourselves and hopefully entertain you with 15 ways we have zigged when others have zagged:

1. Looking beyond the computer to generate our graphics

From carpenters building us billboard posters to hand drawn whisky labels, we’ve often pushed against the conventional method of generating graphics on a computer. My favourite was our very first big job, drawing the Edinburgh International Film Festival logo in light, using long exposure photography.

2. Keeping things simple

Sometimes the best solution is the simplest. Suggesting changing the names of the Dean Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to ONE and TWO was a bold move that met a lot of board-level resistance. However, with Edinburgh taxi drivers adopting it within days and Visit Scotland adding an extra star rating due to its less confusing visitor experience, it was a creative decision that still makes us proud.

3. Taking the space no one else wants

For the Scottish Show in 2007, we were asked which gallery we would like to display our work in. Most of the best spaces had already been nabbed, so we chose the toilets. Our experimentation with Otl Aicher-style people icons was a roaring success, staying on display at the Lighthouse Gallery for years after the other exhibitions had been taken down because, surprise surprise, no one else ever wanted to exhibit in the loos!

4. Making mix tapes

Music has always been an important thing for our team. You could say we only formed a design studio because all our efforts to form a successful indie band failed. So it’s no surprise that we have used music over the years to help win new work: including a mix tape-styled portfolio we used to impress Last.fm, a client we have worked with for the last 10 years as well as winning work with Spotify, the Brit Awards and our latest 7” cover for DJ Bessa to raise money for Refuweegee—more on that soon.

5. Looking at things ‘indirectly’

We have often looked to indirect competitors for inspiration in our work. Back when we started O Street, we were asked to design Celtic Football Club’s website. Looking beyond the direct reference of other football teams’ sites, we took inspiration from US baseball teams and suggested to Celtic that they put video highlights on their homepage. It seems like an obvious solution now, but at the time, no other football team in the world was doing that, so it helped Celtic stand out and make extra sponsorship revenue.

6. Keeping shop

We made a conscious decision to move our studio from a third floor office space to a street level shop unit. A less corporate move at the time, but one that reflects the affinity we have with our local community. In the early days, a mother ran into our shop with her daughter who was having a medical crisis. Once the minor emergency was resolved and mother and daughter left smiling, we remarked how strange it was that they had chosen our design studio as opposed to the doctor’s surgery across the road. There must be something in making your place of work appear so welcoming!?

7. Getting fully immersed

As a designer-led team, we love to work as closely as possible with our clients, understanding their business and providing creative work that really aligns with their ethos. We believe that an organisation’s ‘brand’ is best understood and communicated by the people that live and breathe it every day. A great example of this was the two days Tessa and Neil spent on the farm at Fyne Ales Brewery before our rebrand, it’s harder work than it sounds.

8. Working with our clients, not just for them

As a branding studio working with amazing clients, it’s no surprise that we often fall hook, line and sinker in love with what they do. That belief, that authentic understanding of what they are trying to do positions us in a great place to help others engage with our clients’ work. In 2011, The National Theatre of Scotland planned an ambitious 24-hour stream of live theatre productions. So of course, we wrote (in collaboration with Graeme Virtue) and performed a short play from the studio starring our own thespian wannabe David Freer (has he already told you the one about him being an extra in Trainspotting… yawn!)

9. Collaborate, collaborate collaborate

Let’s be honest, there are loads of creative agencies out there and many see that as a threat to their own business success. Very early on, we came to the realisation that these other studios are actually the key to our continued success. We learn from (and become better) working and sharing best practices with other creatives just like us. It’s too long to list in full but to high-five a few of our besties: Plus, Creative Concern, Spey, Stuco, Nile, Jenni Lennox Timorous Beasties, Shesaid and BYND.

10. Using a typographer, who didn’t even know they were a typographer

Any design company doing their own rebrand is gonna be a hard task. Even riskier when we hired a typographer to draw our logo who didn’t even know they were a typographer, you can read about that here, but in brief, we hired Roadliner Tam to draw our logo and brand font as part of our new identity. The resulting short documentary is still touring with the British Council as an exemplar of authentic British craftsmanship.

11. Asking other design studios to critique our work

Taking criticism and external input can be difficult at any time, but asking rival local studios to do so at key parts of the biggest project we had ever worked on felt crazy. That’s exactly what we did as part of our redesign of Scotland’s banknotes for RBS. I should really blame Jeni Lennox & Nile for suggesting it, but in the end, it turned out to be a stroke of genius. It helped us create something bigger than we would have devised on our own, and deserving of the national impact it had.

12. Incubating our own tech startup

Running one business is tough, running a second alongside it is even harder. We were crazy to try and take on the likes of Instagram and Samsung with our voice-activated camera app Vapp in 2011. However, improving our creative entrepreneurship skills and experiencing how many of our clients must feel has been an invaluable lesson. Although the app ultimately failed (despite a copycat product in the US getting $10million investment for a similar product) we loved the journey and even won Glasgow Startup of the year in 2012 for it.

13. Championing remote working for over 10 years

We have had certain employees working remotely for years. When Covid brought an industry-wide lockdown, the new working practice was a smooth transition for our team. Of course being remote has its issues, and we still champion the camaraderie we have fostered in our Glasgow HQ. However, having senior team members working throughout the world has helped expand our new business pipelines and overall vision.

14. Having an international outlook

We love being Scottish, even those of us who aren’t Scottish. But it’s our global outlook and international profile that has helped us endure these first 15 years. Our global mix of clients has helped us remain busy during two major financial market crashes in the UK. Moreover, we’re proud to say that as well as learning from other cultures, we’ve left our Scottish fingerprints on work from Kenya to Italy, Sydney to Denver.

15. Building a company for the future

We’re cheating with this last one, but as a promise to ourselves and our team, we are actively looking at ways to improve and strengthen our business for the future. We don’t know exactly what this will look like yet, or how we will do it, but no doubt we will tackle the issue slightly differently than everyone else!

Hot take: Screens are everywhere. We’ve been progressively looking at screens in more and more places ever since the first little rectangles came into our homes in the 1940s. Even the billboard, the hero of traditional brand communication, is now more commonly a screen. In the US, the amount of digital billboards has doubled since just 2016.

Our exposure to video content is exploding, to the point where it seems almost irresponsible for a brand not to consider how it feels when in motion. Brands are increasingly being made with movement baked in from the start rather than added on at the end. For example, our identity for Big Pulse Dance Alliance, or the recent DixonBaxi identity for Paddington Central, with its responsive, moving ‘sundial’ at the centre.

In some ways, motion design is still a new frontier for design and communication. It’s a bit of a wild west, making us design cowboys, herding our pixels and rustling some keyframes.

With that in mind, what should be the key considerations before saddling up and creating some crafted motion design?

Feel

When I think of branding and storytelling, it’s never just about the logo or the colour palette, it’s how the brand feels when you meet it and say ‘howdy!’. Feel is the keyword here—at O Street, we ask clients how they’d describe their brand as a dinner guest, to get a sense of that personality. Communicating this is where motion design really shines. When someone sees something move, they have a subconscious connection to the personality of the movement. Of course, audiences can read your tagline and look at your product, but when the brand is moving, you’re looking in a different way, and getting a feel for character.

Woah, Easy

Seeing motion graphics is closer to looking at the world and nature than looking at a poster. Easing is one of the most common tools we use in motion graphics, the practice of smoothly slowing the beginning and end of a movement. Not only to make the movement look smoother and more characterful, it’s about making something feel like it has weight. In real life, an object with weight needs to accelerate and decelerate as energy is applied to it. Even when animating something abstract, like letterforms or vector shapes, without this easing, it just looks wrong. This is how people view motion—subconscious and emotional, in the gut rather than the brain. And it’s exciting as heck because you can write new formulas for communication that static design doesn’t allow for.

Tricks of the Trade

What’s more, the new frontier isn’t just about how motion is applied, but how it’s made. Tools are evolving; we’re seeing more potential for accessible generative animation, in both 2D and 3D, as well as code-driven animation and interaction. Taking this a step further, there’s Luke and Jody Hudson-Powell who are creating and handing over custom tools to the client, to generate their own organic 3D cellular animations – next level!

Hold Your Horses

But with a new frontier always comes a level of responsibility. Because we know that it can all be too much; motion can excite, inform, distract, guide, bring a sense of harmony or conversely it can overwhelm. In the current attention economy, with a screen filled with content at every turn, our attention and time have become finite resources. Daniels, the creators of Everything Everywhere All at Once spoke about this responsibility when making their film. For them, to ask for two hours of their audience’s attention, “the only responsible thing to do in return was to blow their minds”.

I’m not saying that motion design needs to blow people’s minds, but it’s important to maintain the craft and not simply add to the noise and chaos of the screens all around us. There is a responsibility to make things that are beautiful and meaningful. And remember, don’t squat with your spurs on.

—George

If you’re ready to make your brand move, get in touch!

After an inspiring and engaging day at INTL, a creative conference held in Glasgow attended by people from all over the world, one slide, in particular, got us talking the next day; Swiss type design agency Dinamo’s bullet-pointed manifesto.

Often when you think of manifestos it’s of statements like ‘allow yourself to fail’, or ‘be your own hero’, both of which are directed at the individual. We thought it was interesting that Dinamo didn’t follow this expected path of self-help and instead focussed on how your actions can help a larger group of people.

‘Give full access to everybody you work with’

‘Document and share knowledge’

‘Watch out for gatekeepers (often former heroes)’

It’s interesting to think of a world where everything could be open sourced; imagine how much we could all benefit from learning and innovating with the knowledge of others. We’re definitely not going to get anywhere by guarding and keeping everything locked up.

HAWRAF is a design studio that did just that when, in 2019, their studio came to an end. To mark the occasion they shared everything that they had learnt along the way by creating a public Google Drive Folder filled with tools, assets and information; simply so that we could all learn from each other.

Not all manifestos are so pure of heart, sometimes they can be a quick and easy way for big companies to seem like they have a soul. Say, for example, a Scottish multi-million beer corporation that sells their beer in supermarkets globally with a ‘punk’ manifesto – “If you can evoke emotion, you can drive behaviour”. However, the truly great ones do make an impact and stick with you; see Nike’s and Patagonia’s in the image below.

What about manifestos for design agencies? Manifestos have the power to set your agency or company on a certain path; it’s making a stand, putting a flag in the ground as to what you set out to do and how you work.

Famously, British graphic designer, photographer, and writer Ken Garland released an iconic manifesto in 1960, that called for a shift in focus from using design as a tool for further growth of global consumer/commercial expansion/consumption and instead petitioned to use design for education and the betterment of society. Something that still feels as relevant today as it did in 1960s society.

Those of us longer in the tooth might remember how Manchester based design studio Music launched their company with a simple to do list on a webpage. Stating their brand intentions pretty clearly from the get go and inspiring a version of a Creative Review cover in the same style.

Anthony Burrill’s iconic ethos ‘Work Hard & Be Nice to People’ was expanded to a pocket size manifesto, with the inspiration to empower others through his creative insights on self-development and lessons he’s learned through trial and error. All beautifully presented as letterpress posters and unique spreads.

When O Street first started we had a simple ethos that came from our process: think, dream, do. Since then we’ve consciously and unconsciously built on this approach but we’ve never had something as concrete as a manifesto…

If we did, maybe it would look a bit like this:

– Do good work, with good people
– Use your hands to make things
– Something about side projects
– Don’t stand still (change is good)
– Go fishing

And knowing us, it would probably change next year (see point 4).

Manifestos can be powerful, they can also be bullshit. They can be a guiding compass to start you on the right path, they can be a way to tell the world what you do, or they can simply be a way of distilling what you already know you do in a five bullet point list. Maybe simply, like most things, a manifesto is what you make of it.

Here’s a list of some of our favourites:

Joseph Beuys and Heinrich Böll

Ken Garland

Dieter Rams

Riot Grrrl

Where do you find your inspiration?

Here at O Street we like to tackle it with a bit of fresh air. For years, we’ve been keeping our eyes open for visual oddities out-and-about, then sharing them in an aptly named collection: Ospiration. It comes in many forms: the typography on a takeaway menu, a brick wall covered in peeling posters and graffiti, book covers, foreign registration plates, scattered light on a city skyline. Even some quote-unquote old junk found in the attic can be creative fuel (see: Label O’ Love).

Some of our favourite pieces of Ospiration take the shape of aged shop signs, with their effortlessly timeless typographic flair, weathered paint and battered colours that have faded over time. We’re surrounded by a rich history of design, with creative beauty wherever you go.

If you’re ever feeling uninspired, taking your eyes for a walk can do wonders. To get you started, take a look at a few of our top bits of Ospiration collected over the years: