English design studios through eyewitness: Spin

This year I was able to participate in the traditional departure of the British Higher School of Design in London, UK, in the framework of which excursions to several English design studios were planned. I visited two of them - Spin and Fitch. In this article I want to share my impressions of Spin. Details about Fitch will be as follows.

Design Studio Spin

Spin is a small design studio, the office of which is located near the Kennington metro ( on a Google map ). The office is located on the first floor of a small Victorian building. The Moscow metro area resembles something like Academic or Shabolovka by Moscow standards.

The office has 3 main rooms - a photo studio at the entrance, a meeting room and a work room. At the entrance you immediately pass through a photo studio and enter the atmosphere of complete peace of mind, but not relaxation.

The head of the studio greeted us with a smile:

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The tour was led by one of the company's designers, a man of forty named Ian. He prepared some set of works for the demonstration, and then offered to show an electronic presentation already on the big screen. We placed ourselves in a large meeting room at the table:

I liked the works shown with interesting ideas and excellent performance.

The main works of the company are associated with corporate styles and design of various types of printing - these are posters, invitations to exhibitions, catalogs of artists, layout and design of books. In particular, I liked this corporate style with the letter “M” without too much:


They also made an interesting design of the screensavers of Channel 4 programs of British television, in particular for the program of investigative journalism Dispatches (on the website you can watch the full animation):


As you can see, all intermediate results are posted on the wall for public viewing. Ian talks about the works in more detail:



In each project, the team tries to try new materials or technology. Also, practically for all projects on corporate styles a new individualized font is being developed.

Crazy creative disorder could not be detected at all. In all reasonable order, as on the shelves of books:



After the tour, Ian answered questions. It turned out that neither the Basecamp nor the other managerial software in the company is particularly used. There was only one customer who insisted on Basecemp. In general, the emphasis is on communication, and not on information technology. Begin work at 9.30, finish at 18.00, with a break for lunch. In terms of recycling, Ian said that this is the exception rather than the rule. During lunch, a billiard table is usually used:

As part of the exchange of experience, they were able to tell about such a wonderful thing as the CSS framework 960.gs. I hope it will be useful to them.

It is symbolic that we saw one of the posters made in the studio for the Whitechapel Gallery of Modern Art immediately after the excursion when descending to the Kennington subway station:


In general, I really liked the atmosphere, the approach and the work of the company. In my understanding, Spin is the standard of a small professional design studio.

PS It seems to me that it would be great from the point of view of “techies” that we have organized trips not only to design studios, but also to foreign companies like Facebook, Amazon or Google. What do you think?