Overpowered

The CEO and I had talked about the agency’s future for two years before I joined, including how it could grow in stages rather than all at once.

When he was ready, he invited me to join as Creative Director. The studio had to keep serving its clients while the team, the offer and the identity changed around it.

I started with what a prospective client would see. The website offered six services, from branding to AI data analysis, under a headline about digital dominance. The identity used military and gaming imagery, which limited where the agency could advertise and suited the established businesses it wanted to reach less well.

Inside the studio, designers could receive tasks from several people, and most coordination happened in WhatsApp groups. It wasn’t always easy to see who owned a task, when it was due or who had room for more.

The talent and the client base were already there. The CEO asked me to build the structure that would let the team grow, and to bring the brand up to the business they were already winning.

Redesigning the identity was only half the assignment; the priority was building an organization capable of delivering it.

Over 7 months the studio grew from 6 people to about 25, across graphic design, video, 3D, copy and UX/UI. Two art directors led the creative disciplines and reported to me; I managed UX/UI directly.

One designer was already doing an art director’s job without the title. I formalised his promotion and worked with him on how to review and direct other people’s work.

I wrote a hiring exercise around a premium olive-oil brand built on Arabic calligraphy. It gave candidates a real brief to interpret and gave us something concrete to discuss: their thinking, their craft and how they took feedback.

Designers reported to their art directors, and the art directors reported to me. Every task had one owner and a deadline the whole team could see.

Designers reviewed work with their art directors every day or two, and I reviewed it with the art directors each week. In reviews, designers explained their decisions before anyone else weighed in. When notes weren’t enough, I sat with the designer, opened the file and worked through the options together.

I wanted the team to understand why a solution worked, not change things because I had asked.

With the CEO, I focused the agency on small and mid-sized businesses, where it already had relationships and relevant work. Six service areas became three: branding, web and app, and video. Website projects moved to platforms clients could launch and maintain themselves.

Product work needed its own conversation. A CTO buying a digital product has different priorities from a marketing lead commissioning a campaign, so we set up OP Labs as a separate offer.

Once the positioning took shape, the agency needed an identity that matched it.

I directed the identity with the branding art director and the team, contributing hands-on to selected elements. We moved away from the military imagery and brought back the connected O and P mark from an earlier version of the identity, building the system around it, with logo variations, an OP Labs lock-up, a defined palette and type scale, and a pattern drawn from the mark.

We tested elements in small Instagram campaigns in the UAE, the UK and Egypt before committing. The agency went on to use the identity for about a year.

The website had to make people feel the new direction before they read a word of it. Instead of a showcase of services, we built it around a character.

In our story, Solvix was made by an order of craftspeople in a near future where brands had grown loud and interchangeable, to strip a brand back to what is true about it and connect it with the people it serves. It is a guardian of stone and crystal with a glowing core: calm, precise and powerful without being loud. That was the agency we wanted clients to meet.

As visitors scroll, Solvix changes form with the story. It follows the cursor as they arrive, gathers into a ball of energy beside the problems clients face, turns to show each service, and finally opens its core to reveal the people inside: the team behind the work.

I wrote the briefs for the 3D, motion and UX/UI teams and developed the direction with the art directors, section by section.