60 — Thomas Kurppa

THOMAS KURPPA

18

Graphic excellence is like a promise to the world.

DESIGN AS 'BUSINESS ARTISTRY ' Thomas Kurppa, the founder and Chief Creative Officer of Kurppa Hosk on Identity design at the intersection of the rational and the irrational.

For as long as we can, we just play with ideas, keeping all the doors open as long as possible. The most important thing is that we have a great idea. That's the core.

Cover: Beatport Various graphics taken from the new brand identity for the global home of electronic music for DJs, producers and their fans 2021

THOMAS KURPPA

Has the pandemic changed your working life?

The most obvious change is that everyone is working from home.

When the pandemic first hit, everything changed overnight and we had to, very quickly, come up with a new way of working. We’ve been very lucky.

Actually, we had our best year ever in 2020. 2021 is looking even better.

Why do you think that is?

I think, working with a lot of digital companies has been important, because digitalization has been sped up by the pandemic. Also, we work quite internationally anyway, but I think the world has opened up a bit too. After all, if you’re going to have video meetings with your agency, they can be in Vancouver or London or Stockholm.

It doesn't matter. It's just the time difference. That's the biggest change, I think. You're not limited to domestic agencies or clients anymore.

Securitas New Brand identity and communications platform including an update to the well-known logo, which has remained unchanged since 1972.

2021

Securitas Logo update 2021

Do you enjoy working from home?

The peace and quiet suits me sometimes. I’m half Finnish! So, just being able to focus alone sometimes, at different phases of the work. It's perfect.

Open plan offices can sometimes be quite difficult. When people are just coming up asking questions. It’s easy to get interrupted. The flow state that you reach, sometimes. It can be easier, when you work alone.

The peace and quiet suits me sometimes.

That flow state is central to good creative work, isn’t it?

THE 'FLOW STATE' THAT YOU REACH, SOMETIMES. It can be easier, when you work alone.

Bobbi Brown Adjusted identity 2019

It's not something you can force.

For me, at least. Inspiration or this ‘flow’.

It can happen when you’re in the shower, or you’re out, riding a bike, or whatever.

It's almost when the body is in the right mood for ideas.

Direct interaction is really important too, particularly for teamwork Absolutely. Inspiration always comes when you least expect it. But also, from where you least expect it. When we work more at the office, you can just walk by someone else’s desk and introduce an idea from a totally unrelated thing you are working on. It's very much about this random way that we interact with each other. The ‘magic’, the ‘flow’.

I think it's a volatile state that all creatives have access to, but it’s unpredictable. Our organization is very much built on that – because the ideas can come from anyone, anytime, we have no prima donnas or rock star designers. It’s a very egalitarian environment in that sense.

You always take something with you from one to the other. I mean, working with music for example, could be very beneficial for a bank as well.

Flow is unpredictable, but there’s usually a deadline, right?

So, very different businesses can meet and cross-pollinate in the design studio?

How do you manage to cover so much ground?

That’s true, we need to deliver. But I try to push things, so it doesn't become like toil, so to speak. It is more like, ‘we need to solve this, but let’s just play for a while.’ So, for as long as we can, we just play with ideas, keeping all the doors open as long as possible. We don't want to get stuck too early in the process.

The most important thing is that we have a great idea. Perhaps we don’t have the time to do all the mock-ups but, we have the best idea that we could come up with. That's the core.

Right now, I think that design is becoming so much more important.

It’s almost like advertising was 20 or 30 years back. It's very crucial for businesses. Competition is increasing every day. Everything is looking better.

For example, when you discover an app or an experience that’s not up to scratch, you are disappointed really fast.

There’s almost 80 of us now, at Kurppa Hosk. Some people say it's kind of a big agency. But this is the trend in design – agencies are getting bigger. The beauty of this is, you can actually have specialists within the agency. So, we have typography and motion guys. Then there’s people that are more into concepts, who see how you put everything together, and system designers that are better at rolling things out. They understand that a decision here has for consequences over there, further down the line. For me at least, it's really nice that we don't need to shop outside the agency anymore.

For example, we can do bespoke type, and we can make discoveries in that area because we can work so closely with it.

So, your clients, they come to you for that focus on ‘ideas’?

I think perhaps they like the fact that we work in so many Industries too, we don’t just work with banks or fin-techs, or fashion or music. We try to have that span of clients because, as a designer – and also for the strategy – it's very nice to learn new things, to discover new businesses and new categories.

You always take something with you from one to the other. I mean, working with music for example, could be very beneficial for a bank as well.

People have high expectations In terms of UX, if you don't understand the product, or it's hard to navigate, people loose interest fast. When it comes to visual design, things are very forward looking too. Banks are looking at players from the fin-tech side, not at the old school, traditional Banks. In part, this is because the target groups are changing, getting younger. The people that buy design are also much younger. They are usually into the other fast-moving brands. The fact that we work with these younger brands, more lifestyle brands. They realise that this could be beneficial for them. Of course, they also want to have a piece of the ‘magic’ too.

AS A DESIGNER, IT’S VERY NICE TO LEARN NEW THINGS, DISCOVER NEW BUSINESSES AND NEW CATEGORIES.

For as long as we can, we just play with ideas, keeping all the doors open as long as possible. The most important thing is that we have a great idea. That's the core.

Designtorget New brand identity 2015

Villa Visual identity 2010

Type and motion are clearly important to the work you do. Was that your own background?

It started for me back in ’86, when I was discovering new dance music and DJing.

House music was almost like the new Punk. Back then, people said, ‘you can't do music with computers!’ It was impossible. It wasn't real music. I was always drawn to that. For me, it was an identity in itself, something to belong to. Then I started my own label, producing a lot of house and techno in the early ‘90s.

That’s when I started to discover record sleeves. You had Mark Farrow for The Pet Shop Boys. Then there was The Designers Republic doing amazing stuff for Warp Records, And Peter Saville, of course, for New Order. So, I slowly began making covers for our label. And after a while I thought, ‘This is just so much more fun than producing music…’

Even though music production was still a huge part of my life.

At the same time, I was discovering design history. Modernism and all these ‘50s posters from Switzerland. I saw a pattern between these things and graphic design, when it became less decorative.

Do you come from an arty background?

So, when was Kurppa Hosk born?

I grew up in a small city in the middle of Sweden. My parents were not into design at all. Design wasn't something that I was told was a profession, something that you could even study.

I discovered it for myself.

We started Kurppa with Måns Hosk, my co-founder in 2009. It happened by accident, more or less. It was not planned.

Skip forward to your graduation and there was a chance encounter of some importance, wasn’t there?

Well, Tyler Brulee was there. He came by and offered me a job at Wallpaper magazine. I started at Wallpaper in London in ’98, I think it was. Wallpaper was, at the time, really interesting. It was very fresh and different. But I was a junior designer. The art director made all the broad strokes and set the tone of the magazine. So it was more or less just updating templates, adding new images to new articles. I was quite bored.

Time to move on?

It was. So, I moved back to Sweden and started a small design business. Then I joined the Stockholm Design Lab in the early 2000s.

IDENTITY HAS BEEN THE CORE OF THE BUSINESS FOR A VERY LONG TIME. IT STILL IS. Did you start out doing identity work?

From day one, Kurppa Hosk did identity, it was born through that. We actually went to a pitch for “Tele2”, which is a telco operator, here in Sweden. At the pitch was me, Måns, and my sister, who's a graphic designer too. I think we came as a wild card though, there were 15 agencies involved. So, Identity has been the core of the business for a very long time. It still is. Over the years though, we have added brand strategy and digital design, which, nowadays, is often the only touch point some of the smaller companies have.

Stockholm Concert Hall New brand identity 2017

What makes up an identity?

We usually divide this up by the design toolbox in itself. There’s logotype, typography, colours, imagery… and then you have icons and so on. At KH, we sub-divide this into hero elements and dynamic elements. Heroes are the elements that give us recognition over time. Logotype is almost always one of these heroes. A hero element, when you see it isolated, you can recognize it and connect it to the business or company immediately. On top of the hero, we usually look to have a couple more items that can run for a long time. Then you have Dynamic Elements, which could, for example, be colours or photography or illustration. These you can change over time.

So you build with these elements?

It's like the elements can come to life to express an attitude, in things like digital concepts, an app or a website, a movie or motion graphics. That's the recipe that we work with. Over the years, these recipes have become essential for the brand to come alive, it’s where your content comes from. This whole experience has been changing very rapidly over the last few years.

Is this where your concept of ‘Business Artistry’ comes from?

This is our methodology. Business Artistry is basically business understanding together with the artistic side

of our offering. When the agency began to grow, we were invited to work with bigger companies. When that happened, brand strategy and understanding became very important. We needed to be better at understand the challenges the companies were facing. It’s this intersection between the rational and the irrational, data and artistry. It's not unique, but I think we have been lucky enough to seamlessly connect these processes into something unique.

You see the world through your client’s eyes. Do they look through your eyes too?

Our designers work very closely with the strategists. We invite them into our process and make sure that we can articulate their strategy as a prototype, so they can see really quickly the direction things are going. That’s something clients really appreciate. When they can actually see the business idea come to life in the form of different prototypes.

It becomes an easy process then, because the strategy is very tangible.

Having that kind of clarity must allow your clients to make strong design choices?

One great example of that is the Stockholm Konserthuset. It’s like the Royal Concert Hall, in Stockholm. They host the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, so it's kind of a very traditional institution in Sweden. But they have a very modern identity that stands

out in their category. They've been very happy with it too, coming back to see how we can develop it.

It looks like a bounced beam of light Basically, it’s an interpretation of the conductor's baton. But it’s not a static logotype, it changes all the time. Even so, you recognize the ‘kind of shape’.

I think it could work as an identity for a techno club in Berlin, but it's actually for the Philharmonic, which I think is so beautiful. It’s a good example of Business Artistry too. We spoke with all the musicians in the orchestra very carefully, trying to find something they were proud of, but also something we knew could stand out in the category.

It’s important for them too, in competing for new audiences. I mean, younger people that wouldn’t naturally discover classical music. So I'm very proud of that work.

You like the strong visual marks This is one of the things that we’re quite known for. In Swedish you could say this is quite ‘signifikant’. The word ‘branding’ came from the Swedish word ‘Brandr’, an old Norse word meaning a sign you burned into livestock. They were very simple marks that said ‘I own this cow.’

Referring back to the heroes and dynamic elements of design, heroes should be strong, relevant and unique. And also, quite simple. I think a good symbol should be something you would remember well enough to draw on a napkin.

Funny how such an ancient concept remains relevant today Actually, over the years, the surface on which these marks are used has got smaller and smaller. On all these digital touch points, strong visual marks are something that we have discovered to be very effective. A strong mark can create recognition instantly, even on small surfaces. Graphic excellence is like a promise to the world outside.

It says, ‘we know what we're doing’.

Working with fin-techs, for example.

For them, it’s almost mandatory to have that recognition.

QNTM Visual identity 2020

I think a good symbol should be something you would remember well enough to draw on a napkin.

Pinterest Brand identity update 2015

Beatport New Brand identity various graphics 20xx

Beatport Graphics taken from the new brand identity 2021

Everyone is inspired by everyone.

But that also makes it harder to stand out. Much harder.

Heart Aerospace New brand identity, 2019 image: Heart Aerospace

Archive Foundry Marketing poster 2020

It’s getting harder and harder to stand out from the crowd, isn’t it?

Back in the ‘90s, everything was print, basically. Everything was more based on rules. Now, just by talking to younger designers you find that, for them, the rules are less important and there’s just good and bad design. It’s obvious that the field of design has expanded.

The young talent that comes to Kurppa Hosk, they do so much. They work with 3D applications. They work with motion design in After Effects. They code. They are so multi-talented and everything is more open, the possibilities are endless.

It’s like music, like Spotify or Instagram or Pinterest. The amount of stuff being produced, even as we speak, is bewildering. It's easier to get copied too, and I think people are copying each other more. But it’s not such a problem anymore. Everyone is inspired by everyone. But that also makes it harder to stand out. Much harder.

So, what can be done? How can a brand stand out?

Brands need to push their experiences to even more interesting domains. We have all the digital aspects of a brand of course, and this is changing constantly, adding new forms, like glasses or watches. The requirements are changing

all the time. So I think that brands need to be strong, regardless of the situation, or the application.

Is it important for you to feel like your work is doing good?

I think everyone wants to feel their work has meaning, is doing good. But, at the end of the day, we solve commercial problems. Having said that, since advertising is not so effective any more, I think the importance of meaning will be even greater in years to come. Just by looking at Millennials and how they interact with brands, it’s obvious that yes, identities are becoming deeper, they have more aspects to them, like ‘sustainability’. They’re trying to have a good personality and a good effect on the World.

Like Heart Aerospace?

Exactly like Heart Aerospace. I love working with sustainable transportation, it’s just so much fun. They’re making an electric airplane, that theoretically, will keep us in the air while also helping to save the planet. It’s great to feel that you’re doing something for a better world, helping out. You become a friend of the brand. Everyone at the agency wants to work on something like that.

It’s a really strong identity We’re just just bringing some good news to the attention of people, improving the general mental atmosphere.

Will Identity design continue to evolve?

I think so, and there’s a technical aspect to this as well. Just look at some prototypes of technology that’s coming up. Things like Metaverse and holograms. These technologies are just around the corner. I think we are on the tipping point for what's coming next.

We've seen some little bits and pieces, with things like kinetic type, but this is just the beginning. Sound design, audio branding is coming up very strongly.

We’re doing that with music already, but in the future, branding will make use of many different little things we haven't seen yet. Pulling all the senses together. We’re just in the beginning of a brand-new revolution.

I THINK WE ARE ON THE TIPPING POINT FOR WHAT'S COMING NEXT

AFound New brand identity 2019

WE’RE JUST IN THE BEGINNING OF A BRAND-N EW REVOLUTION.

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This catalogue is published for Thomas Kurppa's lecture "Business artistry – our way of branding" at Mudam Luxembourg on 15th December, 2021 organised by Design Friends