top office interior design firms
(playful music) prime studio, as we call ourselves, are product plus brand design consultancy. and what that means is that we do both of those things for our clients. we obviously create products for them, that's what we're known for the most. but we also work with developing brands through the lens of physical product.
we very much strive topartner with the clients and work with them tounderstand what it is that they're looking to do, and what they're trying to create. and then we think aboutdeveloping products and packaging for that,to fit with that dna. we don't have a house style. we design to the needs of the brand. one of the things thatled us into the field
of brand design is that i spent many years working with some of the larger corporations. when i find that what happened is that as a design firm, you often end up being the conduit between like the marketingdepartment, the engineering department, perhaps theeventual manufacturer. so you develop a skill set which
allows you to thinkholistically about the product, and that's the same type of thinking which i think you need when you'recreating brands from scratch. one of the great things is that, you know, we're here right in the heart of new york. you get so much just download of new things from just walking around on the streets in new york. that's one of the reasons i love it here.
but we also have a verykind of multicultural team. so we all kind of bounce offone another a little bit. i think that that's important. as i design, i go, constantly keeping your eyes open, really, for, for new things and new trends. (suave music) - i always knew i wantedto do something creative. but i started in architecture, and i
found out about industrialdesign in london and have been doing it ever since. - i actually went toschool for architecture, and i realized that that was not for me. but luckily, there was anindustrial design program, i just changed majors, it was perfect. - currently what i'm working on is some designs for a cutlery set. we do everything from, you know,
the block to all the different sizes of the knife handles, as well as different blades that go alongwith, with the handles. - so right now, we areputting together a prototype for a knife block. and we have a couple different directions. this is the first prototypewe're putting together, and this is really good to help us understand dimensions, and how something's
gonna sit on a countertop, if it's too big, if it's too clunky. and, yeah, it's somethingwe can do really quickly and, and get like really good feedback. - we work with a variety of software. but we are still alsokinda old school, you know, like we do a lot of pencil sketching, and it's nice to geteveryone around the table and kind of do some thumbnail sketching.
- we don't like bringing in cad too early in the design process, because it really can like break you down, like getting hung up on little details, which don't really matterto the overall idea which you want to bring across. - typically, we bring it into photoshop and render up a, you know,all our different concepts that we've selected,because a lot of times
what we found is that when we show them like a super hot rendering,it's almost too final. so a lot of times ourclients are kinda hesitant or afraid to comment on,on the different concepts. - when i started primestudio, one of the things that i was really interested in is that we worked on a wide variety of products. every project we do is different, and as i said, what we liketo do is like sit down
and really work with the clients to figure out what their needs are. the needs of a corporation like unilever are very different to theneeds of a startup company. we were the company that was responsible for the axe detailer. we launched howie's razors. and we've also developedbrands from scratch, like squish.
(energetic music) squish is a line ofcollapsable housewares products that we designed for our long-term client, robinson home products, in buffalo. they came to us with a very simple brief, which was that they wantedto design some products to get into the collapsablekitchen (unintelligible.) they wanted us to basicallydevelop a brand from scratch. (upbeat music)
the products that wecame up with for them are very fun, they're very colorful. they have a great amount of utility in that when you don't use them, they basically collapse to nothing. and it's been a verysuccessful line for them. initially, what we took a look at was current product already in the market, purely from an aesthetic point of view.
it's really to bring us up to speed with what everyone else is doing, and familiarize ourselveswith this type of product. but again, we're alsoalways looking for like, is there a certain area of opportunity where people are not currently playing? - [juan] i, i actually thinkthis one's really comfortable. - because you think it never goes forward, but like sometimes when you really
get in there, you can kinda go over. - with your thumb, right. - so that you don't, you know, you don't slip over. - yeah, and i think thathaving this cut here could actually like playinto like having this nice thumb kinda grove. - so finally, after we'velived with these things
for a while, and tested them at home, what we did was we capturedwhat we thought was some of the real positive benefits of some of these products. these are really justthere for us to discuss with the client, and ultimately, that led into a kind oflike a featured list, a feature want list, that we created for each individual product.
(cheerful music) the culmination of all this research was that we presented to the client four different mood boards or images for what we thoughtwere possible directions for this new brand and this new line. that information is what we used from then when we went ahead and createdour initial design concept. also at this firstpresentation with the client,
we also started to explorenames for the brand. ironically, the one thatwe ended up going with was squish. i say ironically because every project we give a little nickname in the project, and we knew that this project was gonna be about collapsable products,so i called it project squish. so even though we presenteda nice range of names with the reasoning behindeach one to the client,
everyone gravitated towardssquish straightaway. what we next did was presentthe logo options to them. when we're developing these logos, what we're trying to do isgive a little bit of a nod to the function of theproduct and how it works, so for example, here on the logo we have the, the circles going to theoval, which is actually a reference to the shape of the products, but gives the idea thatthe product itself is
collapsing a little bit. here you can see that we have basically, we're squishing in from side to side. and then this is a little bit of a more literal reference to the fold lines in the product itself. and this is how the logo actually ended up in actual usage. we also came up with this tag line,
cook, squish, store, which i think like really epitomizes what the difference between these products are. so after we got thedirection from the client on what type of look and feel they were looking for the line, wecome back to the office and we do our initial sketch explanation. these are just purelyfor those internally. they're never shared with the client,
but it's for the designershere to collaborate, put sketches up on the wall. we all discuss them and try to get a feel for what's the right concepts that we wanna move forward with. we actually really makelife hard for ourselves in the beginning, because we know if we can come up with adesign language that works, on very disparateproducts, then obviously,
it'll translate to thingswhich are closer in. initially with squish, i think we launched eight or nine products, but now we're up to perhaps 45 or 50. so it's really importantthat the design language we come up with at these early stages is flexible enough totranslate to all those different types of products. - once we have an idea, which direction
we wanna take, we takethis into the cad model, and then what makes it fun is like the reality check in one sense, that, you know, it has towork in three dimensions. but still, like, very muchpart of the design process, it's not just executional. there's still a lot ofcorrecting and adjusting and fine-tuning that'shappening as you work on the cad model.
- so, we've got the tongsprototype, haven't we? - which, uh... - oh, wow. - i have to say it's pretty amazing. - that's a fun prototype.- yeah. - very often the vendor who is actually doing the touring for usand the production is also handling the prototyping, often, and you get feedback from the factory
about design for manufacturing. squish is, for example, there was like quite a bit of back andforth about the right stiffness for the materialfor it to work well, and had to be like changed around, just for the manufacturing process. often people would think, like, it's all kind ofscientifically figured out, but very often it just comes down to
just giving it goodcase and trying it out. but that's really like just a few times back and forth until, like,we're all in agreement, and the factory can continue into the tooling. - once we had the product design, the next thing was to comeup with the packaging. one of the things you'llnotice about squish products is in reality, theyare all different sizes
and all different shapes. and what that means is that we have to think about each product individually, but also as a whole, so when you look at all the lineup, all the packaging has to look the same, but yet each one has to be designed completely separately, because it's gonna hang on the shelf differently, and it has
completely differentshapes and parameters. - there's maybe a misconception in design that sometimes there's the right answer. and i think that there'snot only one solution to any design problem. i mean, i think as designers, your job is to think about thosesolutions objectively. we're constantly evolvingthe way that we work. we obviously, softwareis obviously evolving.
it's just a question of keeping our eyes and ears open, i mean, we're all active in the design community, so there's, uh... there's a lot of learning goes on just through word of mouth. we're very real world people. we wanna work with the manufacturers to make sure that thedesigns that we come up with
can be easily manufactured. otherwise it's not a good design.