Wow.

We are beyond honored to be recognized by Ad Age as their first Business Transformation Agency of the Year.

Ad Age stated the recognition is intended for companies who, with their clients, are “rethinking product offerings…reconfiguring how clients reach customers…recasting a company’s brand mission, or in general finding new ways for clients to…create new connections to incite loyalty, or increase and build their customer base.”

In short, it is a recognition that values strong outcomes as much as strong output. We like that.

And it is directly in line with the belief COLLINS was founded upon fifteen years ago:

Design is not what we make.

Design is what we make possible.

And speaking of possibility, none of this happens without:

1. Each and every one of our remarkable clients. Thank you for your trust, partnership and industry leadership.

2. Our incredible people. We have an extraordinary team spread across our San Francisco, New York and London offices, as well as around the world–from Australia to London to Los Angeles.

Thank you, Ad Age, and thank you, Adrianne for your thoughtful story.

And bravo to all of the rest of the A-List honorees, here, especially our friends and clients at Mailchimp for their In-House Agency of the Year award.

Onward, all.

The people at Creative Review took the time to cover the new purpose and re-brand we recently launched with our friends and clients at Freeform.

COLLINS “was briefed to bring the platform to ‘a new generation of viewers’, by emphasising Freeform’s commitment to ‘young adult stories that buck tropes, flip scripts, and curb such conventions’.”

Not to get too geeky, but as part of the project, we worked closely with the leadership and creative team at Freeform and with the global typography company Monotype to create a new way to deliver a brand voice. We used the very first cut of Helvetica, Neue Haas Grotesk (designed in 1957-1961 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman at the Haas Type Foundry), and developed a system which allows letters to evolve, shift and warp to better express different ideas, themes and emotions.

As CR said “It makes for striking branding when used in static imagery, but really comes to life in motion – which feels fitting for Freeform’s new positioning…”

Read on here.

We could not have been more thrilled to work with the remarkable team at Freeform to re-engineer their purpose and brand. Now, Freeform is equipped to continue their mission—pushing new perspectives for the ever evolving young adults who make up their loyal audience.

Joe Ortiz, our partner and SVP, Marketing at Disney says it best:

“What we started thinking about is shape and looking at that curvature and the implied motion, and so everything feels like even when it’s static, it’s moving or it’s about to move. Always at its heart, there’s the ability to change and an openness to change.”

Full story here.

In the wake of Nokia’s recent rebrand, Print Magazine asked L.A. Corrall, COLLINS Vice President and Creative Director, his thoughts on how to best evaluate the work.

“Nokia clearly wanted to signal to the world that Nokia is changing— strategically and as a business— and they wanted to do it in a bold manner. They wanted a javelin thrown into the future. This logo is the sharp end.”

You can find the rest of the interview here.

We can continue to talk about Bolt’s new logo (which we like) from Koto.

Or, we can talk about the more interesting conversation it’s uncovered–

We can talk about originality.

Liz Stinson and the good team at Fast Company invited Brian Collins to do just that.

Full story here.

Steve Jobs had invited Brian Collins to his home for dinner. That night, he told Brian that Apple existed for just one reason:

“The world needs Apple. We need to make things that are insanely great.”

Over the last 12 years, however, groupthink in Silicon Valley and beyond has replaced big, outsized ambitions with three words:

Minimum Viable Product.

Not insanely great. Not even great. Just enough to make it through.

Now, we understand the need for fast prototyping and testing. Got that.

But how do we regain the energy embodied by “insanely great”?

How do we fuel that aim everyday?

At COLLINS, we work to make room for embracing the unexpected, mistakes and the absolutely unintentional.

And we never leave serendipity to chance.

See the full clip of Brian’s talk at D&AD in London here.

Join us as COLLINS Creative Director Joseph Han and Design Director Sanuk Kim speak at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design.

March 20, 2023.

More details here.

Our friends at Square Roots, the technology leader in indoor farming, just announced plans for a new facility in Kentucky. It marks a tripling of their growing capacity this year.

The new location features the latest in Square Roots’ growing platform, promising yield increases of 30% using a range of automation technologies from seeding to harvesting and sanitization.

It’s another encouraging milestone in their journey towards making locally grown, fresh produce available to everyone, all year round.

Read more here.

We have all spent time working as a part of a team. So we all have experience with projects grinding to a halt or workstreams hitting a wall.

It’s draining, frustrating and often confusing as to what, exactly, went wrong. We blame ourselves. And sometimes (if we haven’t had our coffee), we start pointing fingers.

But more often than not, the people are not the problem. The problem is how those people are working together.

That’s where Mural comes in. They know that good work only happens when you work well together. It’s why they designed a new platform and tools to make seamless, thoughtful collaboration easy for any team.

We’re grateful to have worked with the great people at Mural to craft a new strategy, tone of voice and design system. To support their transformation from a collaboration tool to a community primed to close the gap between ideas and impacts for teams everywhere.

Case study coming soon.

Wow.

We’re thrilled seven of our projects have been selected as winners at the first AIGA Design annual design competition in more than a decade.

Bravo to all of our incredible clients and, of course, to our team.

And thank you, judges. What a way to head into the holiday season.

You can see all the honorees here.

We are always delighted to see when It’s Nice That covers our work—which they just did with (almost) everything we launched with our friends at the Institute of Design (ID) in Chicago.

It was the perfect way to end the week.

See their full story here.

Coming to you from KALW 91.7 FM in sunny San Francisco:

A very special Friday edition of COLLINS Sounds.

A Side -
100+ hand picked tracks from the KALW DJ’s.

B Side -
A discussion of KALW’s award-winning redesign between COLLINS designer Barney Stepney and Managing Editor David Boyer.

Turn your digital dials to our Spotify to see what’s playing in the Bay and hear our friend Barney’s made-for-radio pipes.

Mix

Interview

When the San Francisco Symphony invited us to work with them, they were already celebrated as a pioneering, global orchestra.

Their ambition was to expand that reputation, retain the devoted audiences who had come to love the Symphony and begin recruiting new audiences for the future.

Quickly, we realized the power of cultural institutions like SF Symphony lies just as much in their ability to pull stories, ideas and questions from the future into contemporary art forms as it does in their capacity to preserve the masterworks of the past.

To put it plainly: timeless art forms help us metabolize, understand and embrace the new.

So, together, we built a brand expression that offered up tradition as a fertile ground for innovation. And we anchored it with the Symphony’s dynamic typography–the idea of musicality visualized.

Creative Review checked in with the remarkable crew at NB Studio as well as with COLLINS about what might be next for the world’s performing arts institutions.

Read on.

Several years ago we were introduced to the dazzling creative work of Astrid Stavro, a designer, leader and formidable partner at Pentagram in London. Since that day we have tracked project after project she has produced with deep admiration.

On her way to Pentagram, Astrid built a reputation working with the likes of Phaidon, McKinsey & Company, ELEPHANT and AB InBev. She co-founded the acclaimed brand and design consultancy Atlas with Pablo Martín. She is a Visiting Lecturer at both Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and The Royal College of Art in London. Her work has received over 150 international awards.

So, she’s been…busy. But today we are insanely fortunate to announce something new that might make her even busier.

Astrid has joined us at COLLINS.

As Vice President & Creative Director, Stavro will play a key part in driving our ambition to deliver the level of craft, intelligence and adaptability of small, highly focused creative and technology studios—but against the world’s most complex problems and opportunities.

Welcome, Astrid Stavro.

We couldn’t be happier.

Sometimes legacy is best used as fuel for the future.

It was in the case of our work with the wonderful team at the Girl Scouts of the USA, which recently won recognition from the Art Director’s Club and Design Week in London.

See the full story on Creative Review.

Ask the next question.

“Every advance this species has ever made is the result of someone, somewhere, looking at his world, his neighborhood, his neighbor, his cave, or himself, and asking the NEXT question. Every deadly error this species has committed, every sin against itself and its high destiny, is the result of NOT asking the next question, or of not listening to those who ask it.”

—Theodore Sturgeon

Problem-seekers revel in the unknown.

We are at ease with ambiguity and have a heightened sense of peripheral vision.

We are looking for what isn’t yet obvious, a quest that begins with asking a question.

That leads to the next question, which leads to the next, and on and on.

The more meanders, the better. That means we’re getting close.

It’s almost in focus.

Almost there.

Join us as we ask the next questions.

Let’s assemble in Seattle in October at the AIGA Conference.

Brian Collins, co-founder of COLLINS, is hosting the event with fellow questioners and designers Rick Griffith, Lee-Sean Huang and Debbie Millman.

And there are still tickets left.

From the very start, COLLINS has sought to nurture and advance our people and their careers.

In looking to our next chapter, we have been seeking a true talent leader to help accelerate that ambition.

Lauren Ranke - the legendary Director of Talent at Wieden + Kennedy - has been our benchmark for quite some time. Over the span of 14 years, Lauren has played an integral role in building and developing one of the world’s most celebrated creative cultures.

Hoping to model who our VP of People should emulate, Co-Founder Brian Collins pointed to Lauren as just the kind of leader we wanted to find.

Co-Founder Leland Maschmeyer just pointed to Lauren.

So we called Lauren.

And we could not have been more honored when she said “yes.”

We are beyond thrilled to have Lauren join COLLINS to help us all build what’s next for each other, for our company, for our clients and for the future of design.

Welcome, Lauren.

The way we see it, we’re just getting started.

COLLINS Associate Designer Jaeyou Chung counts among our newest colleagues. For that, we count ourselves beyond lucky.

In this interview with the editorial staff at It’s Nice That, Jaeyou walks through his inventive approach to the X Museum—a project that was one of the reasons we were hoping to have him join us.

He also just won top honors for the Young Ones portfolio review and two Type Directors Club awards for typographic excellence. Auspicious beginnings, indeed.

So, welcome Jaeyou.

And go, Jaeyou.

See the full story here.

And his honors here.

We’re quite fond of the good people at Creative Boom.

They had a few questions about the work we got to make with our remarkable partners at CNET. COLLINS Design Director Jump Jirakaweekul and Creative Director Tom Elia had a few answers.

Happily, it was all written down.

Here.

We’re all made up of many things, but it’s hard to find one place on the internet that allows us to easily showcase all of them. It’s as if we toss our digital selves into a jumbled storage closet, where huge chunks of who we are—and what we do—get lost. Enter: Linktree. A tool that lets anyone untangle their web and become the personal tour guide of their digital universe.

We’re thrilled to have worked closely with our friends at Linktree to help craft their new brand strategy, tone of voice and design system–supporting their transformation from their “link-in-bio” beginnings to a revitalized, vibrant platform that champions self-expression and drives the discovery of all the extraordinary things happening just beyond the feed.

A full case study of our work together—and the many things that make up Linktree—is coming soon.