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FINGERPRINTS

As a partner-led design practice, our creative work is shaped by the founding partners Diti Katona and John Pylypczak. Our fingerprints are on everything produced by the studio.

At our firm, clients work directly with the partners on all critical creative phases of projects. This has ensured the quality of the work we have produced over many years and provides for a very high level of design creativity and project execution.

It's also true that we have confidence in the creative, project management and budgeting capabilities of our people. The fluid, non-hierarchical interaction between partners and staff creates an environment that nurtures innovative ideas but demands efficient and precise execution.

ZERO DISTANCE

At the heart of our design approach is a simple idea: zero distance between strategy and creative, an ambition that requires collaborative and responsive partnerships between our clients and ourselves.

One of the artificial divides in creative branding is the false distinction often made between strategy and creative. The prevailing bias is that strategy is always done first and provides the rationale, while creative comes next and delivers the pretty pictures. Another bias is that strategy and creative are functions that should exist in different corporate silos and should be undertaken separately by different kinds of specialists.

Our view is that there is a much more fluid exchange going on. Sometimes, all you need is a good strategy to inform a creative brief. But we've often found the opposite to be true: a design accident or visual experiment in the studio may reveal a latent message or a possible new direction for a brand, and, as a consequence, define the strategic direction.

OUTLOOK

From the beginning our practice has been shaped by clients with global outlooks and operations, and by our own ambition to seek out like-minded peers in the design and branding field, wherever they are.

Design ideas, talent and trends jump continents with the click of a mouse or the swipe of a passport. We travel a lot, in body as well as spirit, interacting with clients and peers around the globe.

We're very aware of — and professionally connected to — a dynamically changing and borderless cultural flow. While we have strong roots in Toronto — itself a diverse, thriving, globalizing city going through big changes — our orientation is naturally outward.

DELUSION OF IMMINENT PERFECTION

On your first project with a new client, you can knock it out of the park. There is always that expectation. It's no knock against the "homerun attitude" to suggest that our best work tends to evolve out of long-term collaborations, built from strong creative chemistry, nurtured on success, and sustained by old-fashioned trust and loyalty.

We operate on the assumption that the project we're working on is going to be the absolute best thing we've ever done. And then we feel that way on the next project. And the next. We call this the delusion of imminent perfection, and it works just fine as a methodology in self-improvement.

Many of our clients have been with us for many years. Most of our award-winning projects can be traced to our success in advancing our clients' business objectives within the context of a long-term relationship.

SURPRISE, DELIGHT, INSTINCT

The best brands evolve in ways that surprise and intrigue. Sometimes, to be strategic, one needs to be more instinctual in taking a brand from the past into the present, or from the present to the future. And this is best understood in the suggestion that the human relationship to products and services isn't black-and-white.

We all have complicated responses to visual information and branding messages that are informed as much by bias, emotion, susceptibility as they are by logic, clarity and rational need. We do believe that excessive rationalizations before, during and after a project can harm the process of uncovering the most profitably intuitive and strategic way forward.

Trust your gut.