Top 4 Digitalish projects by DesignThinkers speakers

This year, I was going to only write about DT speakers who work predominantly with the pen, the press, screen prints and the joy of knowing that your mistakes can't be Ctrl+Zed (you can read that article here). However, I HAD to do a digital-first companion piece because, goddammit, it is a stacked digital lineup!!!. So many of the DesignThinkers conference participants this season are working almost entirely in motion, code and interface and it turns out the "soul" I went looking for in analog craft is alive and well in a spreadsheet rebrand and techno club identities. 

Here are four projects, from some of the highlight studios/designers that made me go… woah!

Too Gallus

Magic City

It is an agreed-upon statement that Glasgow is an often-not-talked-about-enough hidden gem in the history of house & techno. Magic City is a big entry point for underrepresented communities into Scotland's electronic scene, which is a lot of cultural weight to hang on a single nightclub’s brand. Too Gallus answered it with a system built to move: full strategy, identity, motion graphics, web design and build and a social strategy that clearly isn't an afterthought. This brand reminds me of clubs 30 years ago, and will look amazing in 2056. It is a LEGO block-style typographic system that breathes and blows everything away in a category full of static flyer templates.

Super Keen

Equals

Every spreadsheet brand looks like a bank. Super Keen's work for Equals, a next-generation spreadsheet built for modern analysts, looks like it grew up on a Commodore 64. Working directly with the founders, the studio built a modern grid system flexible enough to shrink and scale to any application, then went digging in 90s computer culture for its texture, generative pixel art, palettes that feel more arcade than enterprise SaaS. A nostalgic vibe I can get down with. It's a smart bit of positioning in a bland world as well. Rather than pretend the spreadsheet has no history, they let the sources show, which somehow makes the modern take on an old way of doing things land harder.

Thonik

WAS

Two techno brands in your Top 4? Yeppir. Thonik doesn't do quiet. WAS isn't a quiet client. It's an 800-capacity techno room built into the old laundry room of Utrecht's defunct Werkspoor Cathedral factory. It hosts long sets, no big-name headliner circus, a booking policy built around disco, house, electro and techno played properly. A DREAM. Thonik is known for turning heritage/institution briefs into bold conceptual typography (Centraal Museum, VPRO, Dutch Design Week). An industrial dance floor is a different kind of vibe. However, they treated it with the same conceptual rigour they'd give a national broadcaster, just louder. Hearing how to translate, running on adrenaline in a former factory into a coherent visual system is exactly the kind of talk I want to catch.

Dada Projects

On Running, The Running Event

Every time I see a Dada Projects project, I think of the word squelchy… that is on me. DP calls itself a ‘female-led studio building an alternative future for 3D design’, and their work for On Running shows that. For The Running Event in San Antonio, they built a dynamic visual system for On's treadmill trials that translates CloudTec, a cushioning technology inside a shoe, into an immersive motion experience. That is a crazytown brief: take an invisible material property and make it feel like something in a trade-show environment. It is consistent in Dada's work with Google DeepMind and Patek Philippe, again visualizing something abstract (climate data, watchmaking process, foam compression) until it becomes tactile, even when there's nothing to touch. Wild.