Photography by Ladislav Piljar

Happy launch day to Outwalker—the latest whisk(e)y brand we’ve been working with… and this time, it’s Irish!

Outwalker Whiskey is a collaboration between global mixologist titans Sean Muldoon and Jillian Vose (owners of Charleston’s Hazel and Apple), ex-Irish rugby player Darren Cave and the Merchant Hotel’s former general manager Adrian McLaughlin.

We loved working with the Outwalker team and our Belfast-based collaborators SheSaid and Conor Kelly on this one. Conveying the bold brand concept, The Restless Spirit, with a custom bottle and label design—we helped them create a new Irish whiskey for a young, modern Ireland.

Stay tuned for our case study where we will share more on the collaborative work and the branding process. In the meantime, we’ll be at the launch party in Belfast tonight. Check out our socials tomorrow for some photos. Sláinte!

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!

When I started at O Street, I was the only woman in the team amongst a bunch of beards and beers. Meeting the Glasgow creative scene for the first time at a design festival, my experience was much the same. This introduction to working within the design industry was at odds with my recent, predominantly female college experience. Where were all the women?

My Graphic Design degree class at Edinburgh College of Art had 11 graduates; only one of those graduates identified as male. As we approached our graduation in 2014, there was an undeniable air of optimism for us to boost the ranks of female graphic design graduates. On reflection, we were probably just making up the numbers. According to Graphic Designer Surveyed published in 2015 by GraphicDesign&, over half of emerging graduates were women. This is a startling fact to consider when, just a few rungs up the ladder, only 20% of partners at graphic design firms were women.

Despite my bubble-bursting introduction to the lack of gender diversity in graphic design and the industry generally, I never felt ‘othered’ by the O Street team. My gender never hindered or indeed influenced my time here. I am fortunate to be mentored by two genuine, inspiring and compassionate leaders, David and Neil. As a result, I have thrived as part of this creative family—going from a fresh-faced Junior to Creative Director at one of the best design agencies in the UK.

So, what’s the situation now? Are things any better nine years on?

The gender disparity, while improving, still exists across the industry. As reported by Kerning the Gap, while 63% of graphic design students are women, only 17% are Creative Directors. We know that having female leader visibility is vital to pushing change—something that Natalie Maher (founder of Kerning the Gap) identified in creating her mentorship programme. So, we’re celebrating International Women’s Day by highlighting some of the incredible women at the forefront of design.

We have changemakers like Jessica Walsh, who founded her agency, &Walsh, in 2019, one of the 0.1% of creative agencies owned by women. A vocal advocate for women and non-binary representation in the industry, Jessica launched a non-profit initiative, Ladies, Wine & Design offering mentorship and networking events around the world. Check out Ashleigh Robertson and Lorraine Smith who currently run the Glasgow division. Ones to watch…

Speaking of ones to watch, Ilka were the OG female figureheads for me as a budding designer—I was initially introduced to Lisa and Laura as the first LWD Glasgow hosts and celebrated later as they launched their design agency. They’ve gone on to become the first B Corporated certified studio in Scotland. Aspirational indeed; they set a precedent for a women-led design agency in Glasgow.

In more recent times, Sachini Imbuldeniya took pioneering steps to combat the lack of diversity in the industry, specifically the barriers facing women, people of colour, people living with disabilities, and people from a working-class backgrounds. She founded Studio Pi in 2020, a photography and illustration agency that champions the underrepresented. Their manifesto centres around bringing a fresh perspective to clients and brands, by creating a fairer world for underrepresented producers, illustrators and photographers.

Another headliner who has created a studio making iconic work for global clients is Rejane Dal Bello. Author of Citizen First Designer Second, Rejane refined her craft at Dunbar Studio and Wolff Ollins before launching her own studio. Rejane specialises in design with social needs in mind, exploring how simple design ideas can make a real impact.

Despite these pioneering figureheads, it’s worth acknowledging that there is still a way to go before we achieve a balance of gender, both in the design industry and in society in general. Among a myriad of issues, everyday sexism, prejudices, systemic discrimination and the gender pay gap contribute to this ‘lag’ in women in leadership. I can only hope that, as an industry, we can continue to build on the changing landscape that has started to emerge in recent years and champion those who deserve recognition.

Now when I look around our studio, I’m proud to see a strong, solid team of eight folks, five of whom are creative, ambitious and interesting women. I appreciate working with each of them every day and look forward to what the future holds for them (and us as a studio!).

This blog isn’t exactly an entirely new take, but we’d like to use it as an opportunity to share resources—tell us your favourite inspiring creative women, women-led studios, podcasts or authors. Where are all the women? We’re right here!

—Tessa

Relevant Reading:

Design by Women
It’s Nice That: Follow Their Lead
Design Week: Women are studying design – so where are all the female creative directors?
The Floating Magazine: People – Jessica Walsh
Creative Boom: Studio Pi

Women-led studios:

Practise for Everyday Life
Sail Creative
Rejane Dal Bello
Together Design
Salt and Sister
Studio Nari

Disclaimer: This blog is written from personal experience. I’m discussing a small part of the industry’s overall lack of representation and aware that many underrepresented people are affected by this disparity. I have not intentionally excluded anyone. However, please let me know of any errors.

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