[…] It’s challenging to build an agency with a graphic designer’s mindset because it requires a broader vision that includes business development and networking. […]

[…] Moreover, starting a studio in Reggio Emilia, a city within one of Italy’s wealthier regions, definitely had its advantages compared to, say, a smaller town in Sicily or other parts of Italy. From the get-go, we had certain opportunities that stemmed from being surrounded by industries. So, it wasn’t just a stroke of good fortune or having a good idea; we were also strategic in tapping into an existing market and elevating our services beyond just local clients. We didn’t settle for a comfortable niche; we pushed ourselves beyond that. […]

[…] Our priority was to attract engaging endeavours to our town and beyond, as Reggio Emilia alone didn’t suffice for our ambitions. I began organising events at 16, starting with a punk hardcore festival, learning the value of self-initiative and self-sufficiency early on. Rather than complaining about the lack of offerings, I sought to create them—whether it was inviting artists or setting up exhibitions. In the end the goal was not to meticulously plan for financial gain but to find a balance that allowed commercial work to subsidise our artistic aspirations while maintaining the ‘Do it yourself’ ethos. […]

[…] I didn’t limit myself to just being a musician playing bass in a band: I was in charge of managing the band, booking tours, promotion, press… and I would look for deals. When you start making music, when you’re looking for a label, you have to send demos all over the place. As a music fan, I was interested in the music industry, I was familiar with this or that label and I knew who I should send my demo to. (…) I already had that determination to understand the industry within me, so when I started working in graphic design and fashion, I just applied the same process of trying to understand where I was, how the industry worked, and who the key figures were. […]

[…] The idea behind The Colour Journal’s Instagram account was to start growing a fanbase. That’s exactly what we do in music: before releasing an album, we go on tour to build a fanbase so that the day we release an album, there’s already an audience waiting to buy it. I said to myself: if I start my magazine and spend two years working on it, I should already have some kind of fanbase of people who follow the project. But I didn’t want to reveal the magazine’s content on Instagram before it was released. I found it quite fun to play Instagram at its own game and do the opposite: a visual mood board based on the colour, even though the magazine is the opposite of that. […]

[…] A brief is like a problem that needs to be solved. The client asks you a question, and it’s on you to provide a solution. Instead of thinking about the true problem that the project poses, and the goal the project has to achieve, clients just end up benchmarking. Paradoxically, this means you end up copying what others do rather than distinguishing yourself from them. […]

[…] I was lucky to realise very early on that you could quickly become an architect who let himself become overtaken by his projects. That is to say, tomorrow, you offer me one, two, three, four, or five projects. Financially, that’s cool, but creatively, not so much. If first, you see the money, the opportunity, you’re gonna get into it, make your schedule. You’ll get crushed by your work, and your creativity will vanish. […]

[…] In fact, the idea is to give yourself very high goals without temporality. Concrete goals with little temporality. Well, that’s my technique anyway. My goal is really to inspire. It is in no way a competition or a war. […]

[…] “We’re going to stop waiting for Galerie Kreo, we’re going to stop waiting for the galleries on Rue de Lille, we’re going to stop waiting for the brands. What we need to do is self-production. I need to do this on my own.” At least I won’t have to wait for anyone.” […]

[…] What worked was that my generation went online. We understood that the Internet was the key, and it opened up the whole world to us. Go straight ahead, without asking anyone anything, […]

[…] In the design landscape, we are quite particular as a studio because we can merge both sides. We have quite an ambiguous practice and we like that because we are not only preaching, we are also dealing with certain issues, and we are also trying, as best as we can, to bring some narrative from our research into the more commercial projects. […]

[…] what we need more now—because now there are 12 of us—is to have more structure. And it’s something that we are trying to build with this very horizontal approach. We don’t have specific roles in the studio. […]

[…] We were trying recently with a person who was supposed to work more the way I had, both for administrative matters and projects. But then we realised that the best solution for us might be to have a PA and to empower some of the people working in the studio to create teams without fixed roles or hierarchy and also to have a point person for each project. We are working on this collectively to try to determine how to set our practice up in a way that avoids it becoming hierarchical. […]

[…] I liked the manifestos of other studios. So I set up my own as guidance. I am not educated as an entrepreneur. I was not trained. I knew how to deal with bosses, but didn’t know about having my own clients, working on my own, how much I should charge… And writing that set of rules helped me to stay closer to me, to always stay close to my original principles for starting the studio. That was my ideal working environment. I always kept them in the back of my mind and I would bring them back to the front to check whether I was still connected to the rules. I still look at them. […]

[…] I designed HORT based on my own experience, and I want to have a very flat organization. I want to discuss things on a flat hierarchy, to listen to people. I wanted to create a space where it is possible, first for me and also for the others. But it wasn’t a strategy, it was based on negative experience. […]

[…] Do I want to go full metaverse? Am I doing more https://danae.io/collections/7: NFTs? Is this really what I want to do? It’s such a blur, and this medium is so new… Of course, it is very interesting and makes sense with my work. I am super curious to know about the future of beauty and self-expression in this virtual world. But sometimes I think, “This world is kind of weird. Do I really want to go there? Is this thing truly good for us? Should I be doing physical artwork?” That’s another thing that bothers me. […]

[…] SE
We always want to stay in our design bubble. We love pretty books, we love really nice posters and just nice stuff, but for strategic purposes, you almost have to go hardcore business and read those boring things. You have to get a bit uncomfortable when they talk about negotiation practices, then once you know them you can be sitting in a high-stakes meeting then you’re sort of like « Oh my god, they just did that technique! I know what that is now! ». It’s more about learning the mechanics of business. It’s actually fun sometimes. […]

[…] SE
There’s a really good book I’ve read lately called “Convinced!” by a professor from Munich. His name is Jack Nasher. It’s about negotiation. It was amazing when I first read it. Some parts are cheesy, but it’s a really good idea. Chris Voss also talks about a lot of techniques that magicians use. There’s one technique, for instance, where the big motion hides the smaller motion. It’s called misdirection. There’s also the technique of mirroring a person. If I want to make you comfortable, like with you and me, we’ve got the same haircut, so I’m instantly mirroring you.
These techniques, they help in business. Just don’t try to be too cool for school all the time. […]

[…] SE
We meet up and then we talk about it: “Where do we see ourselves in five to ten years?” And that goal might shift, but it’s more to do with talking about the way you want to go forward, which is inspiring. It gets you out of the daily routine where you have to deliver on the clock for a deadline. It’s good. It inspires you. It sparks ideas. […]

[…] SE
I’ve always been a Kanye fan. Not just because of his music. The way he thinks is different to anyone else. He just sees things that other people don’t see. Adam and I always wanted to work with him, and I remember we launched the 032c website and the next day we had an email from Adidas and the Yeezy team working on his product. We didn’t approach them or send them emails. Sometimes, if you work towards a certain goal, you end up working with the right people that you want to work with. […]

[…] SE
We tend to slowly grow. Very slowly. We want to have intensive relationships with our people and team because we spend so much time with them. I spend more time with my team than with my family, almost, during the day, so for me it’s really about just the team and getting the right people. I don’t want to grow fast. I want, in terms of business, to grow successfully over time. Step-by-step. Maybe in three years’ time we will want to be larger or not, but for now I think the team size is great. […]

[…] On the topic of strategy and behaviour, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, describes cognitive biases and explains how our gut reactions often override our rational decisions. One example that’s relevant to design is the “framing effect”: how people can respond differently to the same thing depending on how it’s presented.
And lastly, I can recommend Venkatesh Rao’s oddball book Tempo and blog Ribbonfarm. Essentially, it’s a book about storytelling and decision-making. You should google “Double Freytag Triangle.” […]

[…] Since my university was in Osaka, it was natural for me to base my design company in Osaka. Tokyo is the center of design in Japan, so everyone wants to go to Tokyo, but if I had been to Tokyo, I felt that I would have only been working for Tokyo and focusing on Tokyo. I probably couldn’t have worked for clients abroad. I chose a local city called Osaka, where it is possible to have an equal perspective with different cities in the world […]

[…] Until now, we have responded to requests from clients, but in the future, we would like to create more and more of our own projects. […]

[…] One of our characteristics is the strength of being able to provide comprehensive designs to companies (…) We help the company by conducting comprehensive creation including branding and art direction to convey the quality of the product. Instead of doing a lot of work with many companies, my company is good at working on and putting effort into one project. […]

[…] I didn’t feel like myself doing this so in my free time I would always try to work on personal projects, things that I liked, my own ideas and designs how I imagined them. That was on the weekends or during off-hours.
Without realizing it, things started changing and there was a kind of snowball effect: the more I created things I liked, shared them and drew attention to them, the more other commissions would come in. […]

[…] I want to focus a little more on artistic ventures, to leave the more commercial stuff on the side and only take on certain projects. Now we’re at this turning point and focused more on artistic and personal projects than on commercial ones. […]

[…] There are three of us, but two more guys will be joining our team. For the next couple of years, my plan is to keep a super solid, small team, to work well together, to execute the ideas the way I envision them, for me to be able to keep doing what makes me passionate, which is to sit down and design, but in my own very personal way. […]

[…] Then for the brand identity side, that’s really me. I do it in my free time. Sometimes at night an image comes to me of something we did a long time ago and I post it. I got on Twitter because it’s very connected to communities and to the NFT world, and also my idea for the future is to have my own community of collectors, of fans, of people to talk to peer-to-peer. Instagram is more like a portfolio. I manage all the social media […]

[…] Producing objects is a rather heavy undertaking, so we could perhaps begin with a very limited number of pieces and see how it goes, because it’s an amazing experience as well as a great way of communicating. […]

[…] I would like to do more projects that can be understood by a broader range of people, beyond any barriers of language, nationality and regionality. Those architectural and spatial projects we are doing to be in a more global situation. […]

[…] We were reading those international design platforms online and offline, but we did not even imagine our projects on those magazines. It was something related with the Korean tradition of being modest, of not showing off too much. But when we saw that it was working out, we started to proactively send out every projects to the international press, hoping to be published. Not sure if all these were “strategic”, but it was persistence. We kept sending out our names and projects to the world. […]

[…] jokes aside. When there is bigger question marks growing at Dinamo, we sometimes take out some time and visit our friend Michael on his farm in the south of Germany. He’s a sort of crossbred between business adviser, philosopher and grandfather to us. And always has great ears and thoughts for our troubles. […]

[…] FH
Another big learning curve was realizing the difference between time-based and sales-based rewards. That was when we started to meet with Michael and figured that there is no space for “yours” or “mine” within Dinamo, and that everything just is “us”.
 […]

[…] JB
You could call that a strategy maybe? It is a great filter to decide: if it isn’t equally interesting for everybody involved, it’s probably better we don’t do it. The same way we don’t differentiate between tasks or projects anymore, but just take everything equally seriously. […]

[…] FH
It really has become a value-based licensing now: small companies pay small fees, medium companies pay medium fees, and large companies pay large fees. It sounds banal, but it was a lot of discussion to get here. About how people select licences, or how people select fonts. And what question should be asked from our side. And when and how. We even tried to use our collected data to play through predictions. Our new system seemed fair to everybody we sat down with. But if people on the internet wouldn’t understand and accept the change, it could have meant a huge loss. […]

[…] People want to work with you because of what you have already done. So if you want to do this or that, you need to do it proactively, beforehand, to give direction to your work and portfolio. […]

[…] Strategy can seem like a very cold, practical pragmatic word, but what it really is is self-care. […]

[…] (Strategy) is realising who you are, what you really like, who you want to surround yourself with, who are the people that you really want in your life. Who benefits your mind and your passion? Who contributes the most to your art? Who makes you ultimately better? […]

[…] DL
When you really want to be a partner for a client you have to have a strategic point of view on the world we both operate in, from a holistic point of view. Not only the market but what is happening in the world on a grander scheme […]

[…] DL
We worked with a philosopher, Andre Platteel, to create a strategy for our studio. As mentioned earlier we live in challenging but also interesting ever‑changing times. We were looking for a strategy that felt more like a fluid construct. Something to refer back to, but also something that was able to change and adapt. […]

[…] RM
Strategy is a funny thing, too. It’s a bit like graphic design: no one knows what it means. Because conceptual art is strategy, it’s only strategy (…) in that sense, we consider strategy and conceptual thinking very aligned, and that’s basically what we do. We are absolutely strategic. […]

[…] OK
We see the role of the graphic designer as having the potential to be very much in the middle of all the decisions. And if you can negotiate with those around you then you can… I mean, that’s the strategy isn’t it? It’s a negotiation. It’s about relationships with other people that make the decisions. […]

[…] JE
The realisation that we needed to be strategic was one of necessity (…) and when you realise that your choices actually make the success you have, you can’t help but be more interested in it. So what other decisions can we make? Where else can we bring change? […]

[…] JF
It just comes down to assessing the landscape, assessing your situation in a very honest way, even if that analysis hurts (…) If you build a strategy upon a falsehood, then I think that strategy is probably doomed to fail. Taking a cold hard look at your situation, and then building a response from that seems like the natural way of doing thing, when you read about strategy, that’s one of the first things they say. […]

[…] You need to be able to pivot… […]

[…] That’s important to us: what does it mean, what does it make you feel and why. […]

[…] Every brand or collaborator is different in the way we deal with them. You have to build trust with them and build a conversation where they understand your creative thinking and your problem solving. They must be willing to take the risk. And you have to show them why it’s important to take risks. […]

[…] You have to build trust with clients and build a conversation where they understand your creative thinking and your problem solving. They must be willing to take the risk. And you have to show them why it’s important to take risks. […]

[…] Strategy is just a creative thinking that involves design. It’s very much part of how we think. […]

[…] I love the Germs! Actually, their strategy was they made T‐shirts before they made any songs.
They had T‐shirts before they even played a show or had a song which is kind of interesting,
much. […]

[…] In the end, my strategy is to attempt to help people understand design. […]

[…] I have a great thirst for knowledge about the ways other people go about their business (…) I like to talk with product designers, I like to talk with architects, with the guys who build my skis, etc. And see how business models in other fields can be applied – or not – to our profession. […]

[…] Strategy in our field, alas, usually all comes down to the network. […]

[…] When faced with such a complete misapprehension of our profession you have no choice but to educate the client. […]

[…] All the designers work on it. It’s very important for designers to know that. That’s the problem I have with graphic design in a way. A lot of graphic design looks good but doesn’t really make sense, and there’s not really a higher idea behind it. […]

[…] As long as the idea is good and there’s a good strategy behind it, it stays good for a long time. […]

[…] We’re in the middle of a new transformation. We have some basic ideas for the future. We don’t want to just offer services, we also want to offer products which normally, as a design studio, you would offer, like t-shirts, sweaters, posters, books, whatever. But actually our real aim is digital solutions for a kind of communication around smaller businesses. That’s also part of what we’re discussing at the moment, which would also allow us to move to a different stage. It sounds super boring, I know. […]

[…] We believe in the trinity: pure, simple, and powerful. We strive to get to the essence of a brand, strategically and creatively – that’s the purity. Then we bring it to life with a design as simple as possible. If you succeed in this approach, by definition the visual identity will be powerful and live beyond trends of fashion and taste […]

[…] We don’t randomly sketch and hopefully it’s a hit or miss. The process always starts with strategy.
First, the strategy is developed and when there is a clear strategy or a positioning, then we start sketching. We always refer back to a strategy. First strategy, then sketching, and then strategy and the whole concept: the visual result comes together. […]

[…] Nowadays, most design studio or agencies integrate strategy within their work, I see that also in smaller studios. In the past that wasn’t really in the vocabulary of a designer. […]

[…] (LA) A strategy is not a guarantee of success…
(MS)…Sometimes producing work is the best thing to do! […]

[…] (LA) back to the question of strategy: through our series we meet people and by meeting these people, we get new collaborations if it fits. Ideas are coming together (…) the pictures are also a motor in a way, they’re the engine for the road we take, the journey in meeting people. […]

[…] If you don’t create your own organic buzz, if you don’t go viral or if you’re not Swiss — that is to say if your reputation is not already made — it all comes down to investing in communication. However, if you don’t have the money to do that you have to build by focusing on your company’s core values, and the talented designers whose work you promote. […]

[…] Part of my communication strategy is to remain present in the minds of the decision-makers. When a client sees a list of three, five, ten typographies, it’s imperative for us to be on that list. To reach this goal, first we need a catalogue that makes us relevant as well as present in the mind of the buyer. This goal can be met rather easily. The second one is harder. It’s a daily effort to put your reputation out there, and build and increase brand awareness. […]

[…] The only strategic thing that we do is that we start by doing research, then we throw all the research out and look at it, then narrow it down to ‘yeah we think that’s the vernacular’. Then we present that, there is a discussion between us and the client, there is an edit and then there is a design. […]

[…] I think the impediment of over-strategizing, and any time that people do design by committee, it just dilutes ideas and it’s just the bad version of an idea. […]

[…] The goal is to build a community of thinkers creating amazing things. That’s my strategy
fundamentally. […]

[…] You’ve got to look at the whole package: good design and a good visual identity. You can have good design but completely screw up your image. You’ve really got to strike the right balance. Products, photos, models: a brand is so many things; and design isn’t necessarily the most time‑consuming aspect of it. […]