Responses by Viv Greywoode, design director, Stink Studios.

Background: We started talking about rebranding Stink Studios back in 2019. Our existing brand, developed in 2016, featured a lot of colorful gradients and started to feel removed from who we are. We realized we needed a brand and website that reflected Stink now, and that was the main driver for this project.

We set out with the ambition to create something that feels, acts and talks more like our team. Our north star was creating a website that represents everyone at Stink Studios, our values and our culture and can frame the work we make for our clients.

Larger picture: This rebrand has been three years in the making, but the biggest shift came when Mark Pytlik, our chief executive officer, penned our company values during the COVID-19 lockdown. Suddenly, we had a much clearer sense of what the Stink brand is, why we needed a rebrand and what our visual identity should look like.

With our values in place, our decision to base the rebrand around system fonts like Times New Roman, Helvetica and Courier immediately made sense; it reflected our innate desire to strip things back to their core components. BY paring back our look to the bare-bones aesthetic of the early internet, we’re shouting proudly about our roots in digital culture as well as creating a frame for our creative work.

Design core: Within our minimalist structure, there are many moments where we’ve added surprising details and little flourishes. These moments let us tell our story and let our personality shine through. For example, in collaboration with Erkin Karamemet of Dinamo and Gregor Maria Sahl, we created Stink Dings, a custom font that recalls Microsoft’s 1997 font Webdings, itself a precursor to emojis. The font gives us the versatility to be creative and playful throughout the site, whether on our loading pages, our animated favicon or how a specific Stink Ding represents each of our studios worldwide.

Favorite details: I’d say it’s a toss-up between our new showreel and our updated staff portraits! We’re proud of both.

Personally, I’d have to go with the portraits. Without the ability to come together as a group, we took a DIY approach and asked everyone to take a head-to-toe portrait of themselves, letting the team become a visible part of our brand. It reminds us that there’s a whole person behind just what we’re used to seeing on a video call. It was fun looking through what everyone submitted!

Special navigational features: There’s nothing shouty or flashy, but the whole site is littered with moments of craft for people to discover. My personal favorite is the yin-yang-like symbol that appears on the top-right of our website. It enables users to toggle the experience between white on black to black on white. It is so simple yet beautiful and satisfying to experience.