There’s a dirty little secret in the design world: a lot of studios don’t actually talk to their clients. They collect a brief, nod along politely, disappear into their perfectly manicured work spaces, and hope they’ve nailed it. At Office of Omar, we don’t do that. We talk. A lot. We talk maybe too much. Over coffee. Over lunch. In person. Over the phone. In the WhatsApp chat that we’ve set up. The brief is just the integral tip of the iceberg; the bit of lunch that nobody ultimately remembers. A brief tells us what you think you want, but conversations tell us what you actually need.
Conversations dig up the good stuff: the founder story you never put in a pitch deck, the emotional tone your brand keeps missing, the weird-but-important reason why your product can’t use the colour blue, and the off-hand phrase you drop that ends up becoming your entire brand voice. You’d be surprised how much can come out of asking someone about the tiniest detail in their brief. You don’t get that from a tidy questionnaire with ten boxes to tick. You don’t get that from an email, or a spreadsheet of accounts. Proper chat is messy, honest, and wildly revealing. That’s exactly why it works.
We’re not chasing design for design’s sake. We’re chasing clarity. The moments when someone says something that shuts up the whole room because it’s just right, and occasionally the accidental moments of genius (I digress, but once I came up with a brand t-shirt uniform simply by mispronouncing a word in a meeting). Once that clarity surfaces, everything else falls into place.
Typography makes sense, colours behave themselves, layouts arranged like IKEA furniture that, for once, doesn’t just lead you in a singular direction. When you see the final work and think, “I didn’t know how to say this before, but this is exactly what I meant,” that’s when we know we’ve hit it. I don’t want to seem any more arrogant than usual for saying this, but that happens all of the time. The three of us make magic happen regularly. So yes, we design things. But first, we talk, and as we have already established, we talk too much occasionally, but talking is great, just ask every BT advert, ever. If you want a quick logo, there are websites for that. If you want something that looks, sounds, and feels like you then it’s time to pull up a chair. At Office of Omar, the conversation isn’t just part of the process; it is the design. Everything else is garnish.
