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!

We all know it’s been a long year. One thing a virus can’t stop is over-eating at the Christmas dinner table. To help you along, each of our team members has contributed one favourite festive recipe to make up O Street’s Christmas Menu. Cheers!

See the full menu >

Kenya believe we were in Nairobi? We barely remember the busy blur that was 2019, but taking a lengthy Christmas break helped to clear our heads. In-between the fishing trips, beer work and design events I really did fit in a trip to Kenya. And yes, I really did kiss that giraffe.

That giraffe.

How did I find myself here? At the end of 2019, we crafted a brand identity for Nairobi-based architecture firm BuildX Studio (formerly Orkidstudio). We also designed a new identity for their sister organisation Buildher. They’re a social enterprise that empowers Kenyan women by providing them with accredited construction skills.

Before starting the project, we ran a series of workshops to build a foundation for the brand. We also wanted to identify how these two brands would work alongside one another. BuildX and Buildher are connected, but working out how that connection works visually was a complex design challenge.

Alongside the BuildX and Buildher teams, O Street recognise the importance of getting ‘stuck in’ with a new client. To successfully brand an organisation, it’s vital to get a feel for the people behind the company and the projects they are working on. So at the end of September, we chose a designer to go to Kenya. And just like that, I was working out of Nairobi during the week and safariing on the weekend!

Evidence of me perfecting the art of snapping photos from a moving vehicle.

Of course, as I voyaged, I continued the O Street tradition of #otypesafari—hunting for typographic goodness. I was a kid in a candy shop upon discovering that nearly all of the signage in Nairobi is still hand-painted. It seems that skilled labour is more affordable than plastic vinyl alternatives. Casual signwriter ‘shops’ adorn the highways advertising their services. The result is a characterful array of shop fronts, signs and Matatus (wildly driven and decorated minibuses that service as taxis across the city).

Yes, that is a spoiler on the back of a bus.

The trip was a whirlwind experience and being fully immersed in the culture of both brands was the perfect way to kick off the project. It was also fun to join the ranks of O remote workers for a week. With a time difference of just plus two hours, it was surprisingly easy to keep up with the team. Continuing ongoing projects was a breeze. At the same time, I could recap the workshops I had run that morning, whilst the UK team were still getting their morning coffee!

Here’s to 2020, when we’ll finally figure out how to make conference calls without the deafening sound of Neil making tea in the background.

—Tessa

Last week we hung up our macs a wee bit early and piled in a van destined for Loch Fyne—our annual fishing trip. After the usual pit stops at craft breweries and Waitrose breakfast foods aisle, we settled into our loch-side bothy, baited our hooks and tried not to drink ourselves too sick to fish.

When it came time to hunt the waters, we followed our noses (and wily know-how no doubt provided by Neil and David’s magic fishing caps) and happened upon a school of mackerel ripe for the picking. From there it was all sushi, fried fish breakfasts and a bit of swimming in the icy cold waters—not a bad price to pay for a handful of hangovers. Here’s to next year!

The O Team Crew

I must confess, I am not O Street’s finest photographer. In fact I am really shit. Since a student I have been told all about f-stops and shutter speeds, but it’s gone in one ear and out my arse. Every time I pick up a camera it’s like my first time. I am not proud of this, in fact good photography skills is something we look for when recruiting designers.

Last week I was on a trip to Orkney as part of a research project I am working on with the Glasgow School of Art’s Institute of Design Innovation and I really, really needed to take photos of the people we were speaking to.

I rather sheepishly asked Ed if I could take the studio camera. ‘Sure’ he said, ‘no problem’. Well that’s where he was wrong, there was a big problem, I didn’t know how to use the bloody thing. I thought I could bluff it on auto mode, but all my shots came out with a blue tinge and that really cool blurry background thing I always ask other photographers to do for me didn’t work.

I did eventually throw in the towel and phone Ed, ‘Can you tell me how to work this camera man?’ he laughed. He talked me through it while I played around with the buttons and dials in a pub, I mean café. Here is my finest mastery of the blurry background thing (depth of field!), its an empty chair in the pub …café, and that’s where I peaked at that particular technique.

What does help however is stunning things to take photos off, and that certainly wasn’t lacking in Orkney, it even looks like I did that lens flare effect on purpose (*ahem).

The killer shot was at the end of the trip, the view from the top of the hill of the island of Hoy and the lighthouse just as the last of the sunshine was breaking through the clouds in what my grandfather once called ‘foal’s legs’. I needed to charge the battery though as it was really low. I plugged the charger into a socket in the office we had commandeered… damn the socket didn’t work! I yanked it out and the top pin of the plug snapped off. It looked quite funny, I picked up the camera to take a photo of it, but the little screen at the back said ‘Camera Battery Exhausted’.

…me too! (Here is quite a nice shot I fluked earlier in the trip instead)

Ed and I met a guy on the train last week who told us that bog rolls make great lightweight cassette cases. And who knew, it’s amazing. Don’t quite know how we’ll make our millions from this yet though.