Working together
You like to talk to individuals you know and trust
We’re picky about who we work with, and our small, dedicated team oversees a small, focussed number of projects. This keeps our creative standards and level of client care high.
You want to feel heard
Join us on a rigorous (but fun! and informative!) strategy process to understand your brand and how it can connect with audiences in new ways, while staying true to its heritage and your vision. Our happiest clients are those who didn’t feel previous studios really understood them.
You want to know we understand your brand
There are no short cuts to an authentic brand. However, we keep our exploration productive and targeted. We step outside the present moment, with deep cultural and historic knowledge that ensures you know yourself in your contemporary context.
You feel your brand on a personal level
By building a working design and art direction approach to express the true essence of your brand, you’ve got a starting point from which you can move authentically and confidently, not held back by the existing expectations of others.
You want to love the end result
All work is scoped collaboratively and without compromise on beauty. It’s ready to be used by the teams and stakeholders that need to work with it, both now and as it evolves in the future.
You want to feel ready to take it and run with it
As working brand system meets the real world, we build, motivate, and mentor high level in-house design and brand teams to use the system with confidence, ensuring that the brand continues to thrive after it leaves our hands.
Our process together
Origins & destinations, based around 4 questions
What came before us?
Landscape and trend analysis
Design thinking & consulting
What matters about us?
Brand positioning
Brand strategy
How do we express our brand today?
Naming
Art and creative direction
Voice, tone and copywriting
Branding, visual identity and standards
How do we adapt, evolve, and make it last?
Brand execution
Packaging and print design
Website design
Implementation planning
Brand training
Otherness is run by Joel Derksen
Joel completed his formal studies and launched his design career in Canada, working with boutique clients and agencies across the country. He then left for Europe, working for premium brands like Acura, Salomon and Bacardi, while nurturing his own smaller clients.
He settled in Rotterdam in 2022 and founded Otherness to offer his systematic “no stones unturned” approach to problem solving to start-ups, scale-ups and brands that aren’t like everyone else. He is involved in every project from pre-conception through to launch.
His passion for design keeps him learning, taking summer classes and residences around the world in the topics of fashion, art direction, and concept development. He has had solo and group shows of his artistic work in London, Rotterdam and Seoul.
Visually restless, Joel believes that strategy and artful execution are not opposites, and is always interested in creating new and surprising connections instead of revisiting familiar territory.
Joel is co-founder of Nor, a digital co-operative commons dedicated to the discussion and critique of the material culture of Canada.