Black Sheep Design

Client

Wild

Category

Wild

Director

Wild

Design enters the fray at Black Sheep Studios. This is how we see it, go through it, and what it all means to us.

Design enters the fray at Black Sheep Studios. This is how we see it, go through it, and what it all means to us.

What is good great design?

We know great design has power. It’s way more than pretty pictures, nice fonts and colours that make things pop. When it’s used properly, it has the power to influence, to inspire, and to inform. It can make the goosebumps on your goosebumps stand to attention. It can make us laugh, cry and relate to one another.

It can rouse, deflate and intrigue. And it can be invisible if it needs to be. It could be a brand identity. A website. A book, event, product, experience or a thing. It could be a way to think, a way to order or to move forward. It could be a personality, a mindset, or an entire top to bottom belief system of your own — visualised from end-to-end, punctuated with a manifesto and a call to action to finish.

What else could it be?

Our process starts out in the wild. There’s a lot we don’t know, and that’s okay. We work through to untangle the mess as we learn more, making our way to understanding, what is known and how we define that knowledge through design.

Moving through the process

The journey of the process is important to us. It keeps us focused and aligned, in-check and on-track. While we have specific stages throughout the process that have been devised for different purposes, they each tend to follow this loop of understanding, created to guide us all from individual stage evaluation, through to expression.

01

Evaluate

Working with us enables clients to gain insight into themselves. Self knowledge, won through experience, is the kind that sticks. We measure success by how sustainably our clients can grow — listening to, questioning, and discovering themselves over and over.

02

Listen

Our clients’ experiences are important. Listening is not the same as waiting for our turn to speak, or formulating our next thought while you talk. Listening without doing anything else is the first service we provide. We hear you.

03

Ask & Discover

Actively listening lets us ask different questions. Our clients come with unique histories, patterns, cultures, baggage, successes and failures. The questions we ask arise from genuine curiosity about your story. The discovery phase helps us get to know each other and ourselves. Understanding the project, the client and the context shapes the way we work together.

04

Understand

A dialogue develops that unearths exciting gems, unveils big holes and presents opportunities for reflection so that we can listen, ask, and discover again. In this circular process, the seeds of ideas are sown.

05

Collaborate

True collaboration is founded on understanding. Creativity and ingenuity are everywhere, but thrive in a fertile environment. When everyone feels seen and their expertise valued, change is possible.

06

Trust

Collaboration builds trust, and not only between BSS and our clients. Working together with total transparency empowers our clients to trust themselves.

07

Express

We’re able to challenge the idea of what ‘normal’ means by using change as a force for good. Putting ideas into practice is one of the most powerful things we can do.

Janis Joplin said “I’m one of those regular weird people.” Weirdos get a bad rep, so people tend to be scared of them. Weird is a threat to our routines, to our comfort, to the everyday way of life we’re in living in… the same old stuff, day in day out. But nothing great was ever born out of comfort zones, the mundane or the homogenous — this is where mediocrity reigns supreme.

Who wants to be normal, anyway? Normal is complacent. Normal doesn’t take a chance. Normal never inspires. Normal blends in, and accepts the order of things.

That just ain’t us.

Want to kick off a design project with us?

Get in touch with Andy, our Head of Design, by emailing him here.

Behind the scenes

With a tight budget and a big script, BSS worked in collaboration with the BBH creatives and director Dylan Holmes Williams to shape the script into something achievable in the shoot window available. A truly collaborative writing process to reduce and maximise set-ups, camera positions, and performance from both our leading actress and our enormous custom manufactured leading man/bear.