Chances are you’ve come across a Detail Design Studio creation somewhere in Dublin, whether it’s in leisure centres, the corners of Merrion Square windows, or emblazoned across Meteor billboards around the city. Having worked on a huge range of projects and managing to adapt and expand over the past decade, we caught up with directors Brian Nolan and Paul McBride to find out their recipe for design success ahead of their appearance at OFFSET 2014.
How would you describe what you guys do and how it started?
Brian: We met working together as directors of Dynamo sixteen years ago. We were doing a lot of identity projects together and found that we worked very well together. After about five years, we came to a place where there was an opportunity to do something ourselves. There wasn’t a master plan, although we might like to tell people there was, but it was really a chance to manage ourselves and point in a new direction.
Paul: We really wanted to get back to designing. We had been spending all our time in meetings: staff meetings, client meetings, strategy meetings; by stripping it back to just the two of us, we found we could actually concentrate on the work.
B: We found the more we worked by ourselves that it was the relationship between ourselves and the clients that really appealed to them. [Clients] weren’t so interested in things being sent down a chain of command, and this ability to meet people and discuss the work in person became one of the main things we had to offer. We realised that the part of the job that was much more significant than we thought was the relationship-building. We ended up getting a couple of big jobs that we didn’t expect, bigger than we thought people would be willing to give to us. As a result of that we realised that there were people who weren’t just after the big service of design, they wanted to have input and direct contact with a project.
Can you explain a little bit about how the company has grown and your experience over the years?
B: There’s still a good bit of making it up as we go along but we have honed our process and formula a bit. We’ve been really lucky in that we haven’t had to do too much promotion and the work that we’ve done that’s been appreciated has tended to give us more work. It’s not very strategic but we don’t really put ourselves out there. When we left Dynamo one thing we really wanted to do was readdress the balance of work that we were taking on: a lot of our projects there would have been a much larger and longer scale. So with Detail we decided to take on some smaller projects, a mix of cultural and corporate work.
P: It’s about balancing the portfolio, and different types of work can also cross-pollinate one another. The issue with being niche about working on one very specific area, be it corporate or cultural, is that it can become quite narrow. Each area of design can sort of feed another and that’s what kept things fresh for us.
B: We’ve learnt a huge amount from various experiences that we’ve had. The chances we’ve had to be involved in businesses at early stages have been amazing. There was one time we worked on a conference in San Francisco for a massively successful tech company called Iona Technologies. We’d worked for them since we’d all been at Trinity College. I’d done their identity for them as a nixer and didn’t really have a clue what they did.
A few years later we end up at this conference and we were helping them float themselves on the NASDAQ. The speech was really important because they were announcing a new relationship with a collaborating company and we were working on the visual slides for the speech. When they gave it, we stood back and began to realise the significance of what we do. There was a particular announcement during this speech where a group of suited men sitting at the back row got up and left. They were analysts who had left to phone their stockbrokers and the stock price during the two hours we were in that room hit a billion dollars. That was when we realized…this is kind of important. The business arrangement was the big story, but it was how they communicated it that made it so successful. It was a little bit of a rude awakening…it was a long way away from doing posters in college or album covers.
So then as we got busier we needed someone else in and around about that time we started off the internship programme with Zero G and Atelier David Smith called Threex3. That was the programme that led us to a lot of the people who became part of the staff. It was initiated by David Smith because many of the internships for graduates weren’t that well structured and were in doing the lower level stuff…
P: Like ‘Get coffee’ or ‘Rearrange the books on the shelves’.
B: Yeah, so it was planned to be a little bit of an antidote to that, and we found that ‘your first job’ when you finish college can be this dream or notion in your head and you can often be put off or misguided by your first experience. This gave you the chance to do three months in three different places and get a broad range of experience. From seeing how a studio and business works, to learning about difficulties with clients and all kinds of other issues.
P: It’s great for us as well because when you’re constantly getting new people into the studio it changes the dynamic and means things never get stale. It’s also the type of thing that we would have liked to have done coming out of university, the chance to get three different experiences of studio personalities is a really great opportunity. Then you can make the decision about where you fit into that or whether or not you fit into it at all. It’s a real baptism of fire. But it’s definitely something I wish I could have done…I might get a wig on and head down to the interviews as a ‘mature student’.
B: I don’t think you’d get in.
What is the landscape like in Dublin in terms of design?
P: Dublin can’t compete with say London, New York or Berlin in terms of the size of the communities and there’s good press and visibility there. It’s getting better here but another factor is that a lot of people have left the country over the past few years.
B: It goes through phases. The landscape currently is really good and there seems to be a lot of creativity here at the moment which has been spurred on by the lack of opportunity. Anyone who’s creative… those industries seem to thrive. But Ireland is a bit behind and needs to make greater inroads, mostly to do with the value of design. There is still a bit of cynicism and lack of understanding. Programmes like The Apprentice don’t help where you think you can sit behind someone in Snap and tell them “Oh, that should be blue” and that’s designing something.
The design industry has obviously changed a huge amount in the last ten years, how has that affected your work and process?
B: How people purchase design has changed quite a bit and with a lot of cultural jobs that we would like to take on, previously they would have hunted out a design agency, probably one or two of them and had a good conversation before deciding how they wanted to move forward. That was typically how our skills were purchased in the past, but now almost all public procurement is done on a tender basis and unless you’re involved in that process you won’t really get to do those jobs. There isn’t the same conversation or relationship and we generally don’t partake in it.
Nowadays all of our jobs also include a few different streams of media, whereas when we started everything would have been in print. Then it became radio or, “Oh, we need a website!” and what’s great about the skills of the people we have working here is that it doesn’t phase these recent graduates at all. Things change every six or twelve months, whether it’s a new technology or a new way of delivering messages. Everybody just rolls with that and there’s an interesting way of combining the traditional skills that we have and the skills that come with these digital requirements and mixing them all together. We’re having fun working in these new areas.
Do you have to make sure you’re constantly researching new technologies and methods in order to stay on top of your game?
B: It’s funny, actually, because solving visual communication problems hasn’t changed. The thrust of what we’re doing and the value that we add to it hasn’t changed. The delivery mechanism and the software that’s used are new but the communications issue is pretty much identical to what it was.
These days you can buy design quite cheaply if you want from website templates or stock artwork/imagery. The bit that we have that brings it onto a different level is being able to mould that, sculpt it, solve a problem and unify it. You’re not just putting together a patchwork quilt of elements and hoping that it will work. Often what we’re focusing on is the part you don’t see: the process and why something veers in the direction it does. There’s a lot more going on than you realise and that’s where we play our strongest cards. It’s the details – no pun intended – that add the most value.
Words: Emily Carson
Images: Mr. Whippy Soundsystem – Identity;
