OFFF Festival 2025: How to run a brand design agency
In front of a full crowd at Barcelona’s OFFF Festival, DixonBaxi offered a masterclass in how to navigate the ever-changing modern landscape and run a highly successful creative agency.
“It’s all about the people you work with and how you collectively go after something,” says Simon Dixon, co-founder of major branding and design agency DixonBaxi. He’s joined by an eager crowd of design enthusiasts at OFFF Festival’s enormous Root Stage, along with his co-founder, Aporva Baxi, who’s also on stage.
A key pillar of the duo’s talk – and DixonBaxi itself – centres around the idea of designing with intent. We may live in a world facing existential threats including war, climate change and political strife, but despite of this seemingly bleak backdrop, DixonBaxi believes a positive mindset can help create a better version of the future.
This leads into a discussion about the agency’s ‘innovative engine’, Super Futures, which encourages employees to think freely about the big challenges brands face, and the ideas, products and experiences audiences want to see. It’s important, Baxi says, to reclaim that feeling of liberation when designing.
Such a free-thinking ethos was evident in the agency’s work with global racing brand Formula One – a complex project that required a branding system capable of appealing to audiences around the world. As part of the Super Futures approach, DixonBaxi ran a campfire session where every employee could chime in. “That’s what creativity is about,” adds Dixon.
The team recognised the need to extend the F1 logo, which led to the creation of the racing line concept. Acting as a clever yet audacious metaphor for the most optimal path a driver can take on a racecourse, the design system was seen at F1 75 Live, the brand’s 75th anniversary celebrations, at The O2 Arena in London earlier this year.
“Be brave enough to be uncool,” Dixon urges the crowd. The pair explain this idea in the context of their work with the North American streaming platform Tubi. Looking at competitors, it was clear that there was a serious lack of personality and distinction – something DixonBaxi could capitalise on.
The key to avoiding the pitfall of being boring, they say, is to try to be everything for someone rather than something for everyone. This allows for energy over perfection, and opens the door to trying new things. The outcome demonstrated this: quirky, bold visuals were accompanied by a confident tone of voice and a weird yet enticing sonic brand.
The agency’s work with Roli taught them that failure isn’t the opposite of progress, and that it’s okay to accept when you’ve taken a wrong turn in a project. Meanwhile, its Roblox project demonstrated the importance of crafting a brand that truly works for the intended audience. The agency collaborated for months with the Roblox’s internal team to ensure they could carry it forward effectively.
The talk concludes the same way it began: with a call to consider the importance of the people in your agency. Over two decades of building DixonBaxi, perhaps their key insight can be distilled down to this: talent is rare – access it.
In that spirit, the agency published Essentials, a collection of three books that outline DixonBaxi’s key principles. One of those books, Journeys, articulates the journey of everyone in the studio. Offering leadership and coaching, it includes a wealth of advice accumulated by the internal team and has now been open-sourced for the whole world to access, if they wish.
“It’s not just designers, it’s the collection of people that makes a great team,” Dixon says, before reiterating, “This industry is all about people.”
