We’re OFF+BRAND., a (small by design) design and development studio born in Glasgow, Scotland.

We started in 2020 as two co-founders with a shared vision: to build amazing experiences like our heroes at agencies such as Resn, Monks, and Lusion. Unfortunately, neither of us knew what the path to doing that looked like: we hadn’t worked at any agencies or done that kind of work, ever.

Six years later, we’re a team of 30 incredible talents. We’ve delivered flagship projects for clients like Microsoft, Slack, and Webflow, and we get to work on projects that genuinely excite us.

Our Journey

OFF+BRAND. began as two people in a small office space in Glasgow. We both wanted to build something that allowed us to be creative. Because we were both workaholics with no personal lives to worry about, we were able to do good work. And then our breakthrough happened with Totem: a build that cost us probably four times the budget to deliver and was a nightmare to manage. But it was the first brief where we knew we had a chance to make something special. When we showed the client the final experience, they all ran around, and one of them jumped into a swimming pool because he was so happy. It was brilliant.

The project took Site of the Day on Awwwards and FWA, and almost overnight, we got bigger clients who were willing to hand over more creative control. Before Totem, clients didn’t trust us to be creative. After Totem, clients came to us expecting something special, which meant we could do more impactful work, which in turn led to more recognition. We realised great client work starts with the reputation you build before the client ever calls. Without that trust, everyone ends up making safer decisions (aka bad decisions).

Even though we’ve delivered lots of client work we’re proud of, we’ve never stopped investing in our internal projects. These are probably as important as the client work because they massively upskill you and your team, and (for us) they are what led to bigger clients. They’re also a lot of fun. Two good examples are Manifesto and Aether. There are plenty of bad examples that don’t see the light of day, but you learn from them too.

Creativity at Scale, for Enterprise

It’s boring, but as we’ve grown, we’ve learned a lot about the (frankly immeasurable) importance of good governance and change management. They sound awful, but these two things are what allow you to deliver creativity at scale. Basically, build and maintain trust with big clients, and they will let you do creative work. Lose their trust, and you’ll either lose the contract entirely or deliver something vanilla that disappoints everyone, which is much worse.

And you build trust by:

1. Being visibly in control of the project and timelines.
2. Helping the client see and believe that you are in control of the project and timelines.

So, when we think about creativity at scale, the second most important thing (after client appetite) is governance. But once you understand this, it becomes easy(er). And the creative part then opens up: you need to give the creative people the space and authority to do amazing things. The more you get in their way with concerns, the less special the experience will be.

Showcase Windows & Surface

We’d never delivered a project at this kind of scale, with so many different agencies and tiers of management before. The scope was massive. OFF+BRAND. had to create a full design system for Microsoft’s three flagship products (and get sign-off from each department).

A very big challenge:

1. Design and build the new Microsoft Windows website. Another very big challenge.
2. Develop the new Microsoft Surface website experience, as designed by our friends at Feels Like Studio. Not easy.

The first step was to create the reusable components and shared design system—the foundations that had to hold up on one of the most visited technology websites in the world, across their entire product suite. In practice, this project overlapped with the Windows and Surface design work, which made it more complicated to get sign-off, but also ensured we got a stronger system in the end. We managed to create a beautiful, modern design system, which is now being scaled out across the full ecosystem.

We then designed the new Windows experience and developed both, Windows and Surface. Most notably, the Windows landing page is a big step forward for them. It’s not your usual corporate homepage experience. The hardest part of the journey was the number of stakeholders and ensuring everyone felt heard and understood. There’s no shortcut: you just need to make sure you’re genuinely taking on board the feedback of everyone involved, and at least explaining properly why you’re not taking it all on board if you can’t. Lots of trackers, lots of spreadsheets, lots of meetings, but we all got there.

Lando Norris

Lando was all about the experience and telling his story beyond motorsport. Lucky for us, he won alongside the release of the site, which led to massive traffic and probably helped the overall impact, which was even bigger than we expected.

In terms of design, we didn’t need to worry about a wider system; it was about maximum impact for users of the site. It’s the kind of brief you only get very rarely, so we went all in on making something beautiful and original.

The hero experience has now become a meme, with every single vibecoder on Twitter recreating their own (sometimes awful) versions. But when we released the site, it was a fresh concept that had the biggest impact we’ve ever seen. The hardest part of the whole thing was conveying the idea—we knew it was a winner from the start, but we were just terrified the client wouldn’t love it, so we almost built the whole thing before showing it to them to make sure they would sign off.

In terms of timelines, this was a proper race: less than two months for the full design and development. We then sat on it for about six months, anticipating that it might be a big release for them, but not knowing. Our Head of Development, Adrian Gubrica, said from the start it would be Site of the Year. Well done, Adrian!

Trevor Noah

We’re massive fans of Trevor, and we couldn’t believe it when he reached out to work with us. He said he wanted to make something interesting and fun, so we spent a long time exploring ideas before settling on a direction. Trevor wasn’t pushing us for time, so we had a lot of fun exploring different angles to pursue.

Trevor does a lot. Stand-up. Podcasts. Writing. Live shows. Commentary. Every idea we explored ended up trying to force those into neat categories, but that never felt like him. What did feel like him was the constant curiosity, the sense that he’s always noticing things, making connections, and collecting ideas, and that became the concept.

The homepage became a living collage of thoughts, stories, and moments, almost like taking a look inside Trevor’s head. For the most part, we kept things as flat 2D elements with a curated approach to WebGL. It was important that the technology never became the point; we wanted people to remember Trevor, not us (maybe us a little bit).

The other challenge was making all the different parts of his career feel equally important. We didn’t want stand-up, books, live shows, and everything else to feel like boxes on a grid. They all needed their own personality while still feeling like they belonged to the same person and belonged together in the same experience.

Steven

Steven and his team came to us with a genuinely difficult brief. They describe themselves as the operating system for the creator economy, which is a completely new category, and we needed to build a website that helped people understand that almost immediately. The problem was that our attempts at explaining it weren’t particularly visual. So we stripped it down to only the essential parts. Steven is built around four pillars: Creator Media, Community, Products, and Technology. We could have given each one its own page, but it felt like the wrong approach. The whole point of the platform is that everything connects, so we wanted the website to feel like something you could explore rather than read. This way, the user could explore the thread of interconnection between the ecosystem’s four pillars instead of jumping to separate chunks of information.

That led to the interactive canvas at the centre of the experience. Instead of acting as navigation, it became the navigation. Also, during the design process, our client (shout out to Georgia Gibson) liked the navigation Armillary sphere so much she came to one of our calls with an actual wooden model made by her carpenter friend.

Every part of the ecosystem had its own space and personality, pulling you further into the story before you’d really noticed you were moving through the site. It came from something we’d been experimenting with on our own Manifesto project, where we realised navigation doesn’t always have to sit outside the experience: it can be the experience. Steven gave us the opportunity to take that idea much further and prove it could work on a large commercial project.

The rest of the challenge was making sure all that interaction still felt effortless. The audience for Steven spends a lot of their lives online, so if the site felt slow or over-engineered, we’d lost them before we’d started. Everything had to load quickly, respond instantly, and still leave room for a bit of surprise.

OFF+BRAND. Manifesto

Our Manifesto wasn’t made for a client. It was made for ourselves, so it took about 2 years, and almost every single creative at the agency weighed in at one point.

It’s basically an online puzzle, with beautiful art direction and eccentric copywriting (if we do say so ourselves). It gave us a place to say and show what OFF+BRAND. stands for while experimenting with interaction models, narrative structures, and visual ideas that would never come out of a commercial brief. We had a lot of fun making the navigation the centre of the experience, a thread that carried into a few of our other projects.

It also gave us something really valuable when speaking to clients about what is possible on the web. Showing a client that we had created this mad world for the sake of it helped build trust that we would deliver for them. And it also illustrates what we can do in a way that you can’t with a pitch deck.

Aether1

Aether1 was a chance to go all in on motion. The whole product is about “boundless sound,” so the site needed to feel cinematic from the very first frame, one continuous arc from hero to footer, with every bit of movement timed to the scroll.

The part we’re proudest of is the AI chat built directly into the scene. Rather than bolting a chatbot into the corner, we made it part of the world itself, so you can ask about the product and get answers without ever leaving the experience. Around it sit holographic product demos and little touches like being able to control the site’s audio by messing with the controls on the side of the headphone. Honestly, Easter eggs like that are as much for our delivery team as for anyone else. We’ve no idea how few people ever find them, and we put them in anyway. That’s sort of the point.

Underneath it all is a mix of baked 3D choreography and real-time generative effects, and the real trick was keeping that smooth across every device, because a cinematic site that stutters isn’t cinematic, it’s just slow. Built entirely in Webflow, which (again) surprised people given how much is going on.

It won the 2025 Webby for Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics, and people stuck around for an average of three minutes, a long time for a product site, and about the best proof we could ask for that the motion was pulling its weight, not just showing off.

This site led us to land more work than any other.

Small by Design

The longer we’ve been in business, the less interested we’ve become in growing bigger. We both left careers to do something fun, so we make sure we stay close to the work rather than let our creative wee studio turn into an operations job. Working closely with our creatives (and at OFF+BRAND. everyone is a creative, including our producers) is the best part of the job.

Clients and colleagues come to us for the same reason: we release bangers. Everything about our culture exists to protect that. It’s a culture of excellence in delivery rather than process. We’re trying not to focus on management layers or methodology; we pick great people and make them accountable for things. We don’t need a rigid process, because everyone at OFF+BRAND. is exceptional at what they do, and every client we work with is one we chose.

We protect both sides of that equation by rejecting around 60% of the work that comes our way. Staying small and staying selective are the same decision: nobody here is overstretched, and nobody is carrying a project we took on just to feed headcount. We have done it in the past, obviously, but it’s horrible and nobody enjoys it.

Small by design is the way!

We also protect curiosity. Some of our favourite work has never had a client attached. Manifesto and Aether exist because we wanted to test an idea, and many of the ideas that end up on enterprise platforms begin life in those experiments.

And 2026 brought our first annual offsite, as many as could attend, all under one roof to have fun, exchange ideas, and keep feeding that curiosity, which we suspect is about to become a tradition.

We have spent huge amounts of client budget that we could have kept as profit just to try to deliver the best ideas, rather than the ones that will be signed off. Basically, our culture is this: if we deliver something that’s not right, but gets us paid, we failed.