“Joel, when will you have your own studio?”

When Otherness came to be in 2022, on a Rotterdam street with trees aplenty for pet dog Omelette, Joel Derksen answered his clients’ longtime question. And sure enough, today the boutique studio is humming – the award-winning design headquarters leads visionary brand leaders through once unenvisagable transformations.

What happens here, however, is more metaphysical than material. Working with Otherness means working with Joel. If even existent, the boundary between the two stays so porous that professional engagement with the studio 

 to business therapy sessions with its director. The collaboration consistently entails a highly personalized, deeply personal, and usually quite emotional exploration of who/what/when/where/why a brand is – and, crucially, how it will be out in the world.

So how did this unlicensed practitioner get so practised at design R&D?

Opener

lowlands img

Joel’s design career began as a self-taught 14 year old in the early 2000s. In his hometown in Saskatchewan, he started creating websites and logos for neighbours with small businesses. By 16, he had inevitably evolved into a deft account manager too. By 19, he escaped the Canadian province known for flat prairies and vibrant skies. He went East, first to attend NASCAD University in Halifax and then, backtracking a bit to Toronto, OCAD University, where he graduated with a degree in graphic design.

For 15 years, design jobs kept Joel moving: from Toronto to Munich to London to Amsterdam. Besides full-time employment at global firms, including Landor and IDEO – where he helped remarket giants like Carlsberg and Salomon – he worked at boutique agencies, such as Oxygen, served as art director for the Toronto Botanical Garden, and freelanced for brands both international, like Acura, and local, like Ontario Wine Appellation Authority (VQA). Although he postponed crystallizing his own perspective, award after award honoured his ability to hit the nail on the head of a design brief while simultaneously challenging the use of a hammer.

Thanks to his expiring Commonwealth backpacker’s visa and Brexit bureaucracy, Otherness was founded not in the U.K., but in the Netherlands. The country’s strong creative culture gelled with Joel. An anti-capitalist undercurrent encouraged local designers’ more absurdist, humorous tendencies to thrive. Plus, since society was unshy to argue, Dutch clients could take a push-and-pull approach to business that efficiently moved the whole team to score the goal rather than slow plays down in a director-vs.-client dynamic.

lowlands chapter

contrarian img

From day one, Otherness has embraced the complexity of translating human desires into material designs. Joel sees it as part of his and his scalable team’s duty of care to clients. In fact, this policy of turning a priori assumptions on their head is what led to the studio’s recent success in 

transforming clinical trial platform Medable

 into a beautiful brand system. Who says a B2B company serving pharma as its key customer can’t have an elegant lifestyle aesthetic that still conveys life-saving precision and power?

Contrarianism 

Another case study Joel treasures comes from his time in Toronto. For 20 years, marketers had told a family-owned apple-picking farm to position themselves as a butter-and-cinnamon-scented stand-in for Mum, but the strategy never stuck. As it turned out, the company’s true essence demanded a magical realism style to storytelling about ordinary life in a small town. Joel realized this in a Tim Burton’s 

-inspired digital and packaging program. The apple-bobbing goats, ducks swimming in lava cakes, and whipped cream clouds brought tears of finally feeling seen to the founders’ eyes and let the brand flourish.

It’s not for nothing that Joel is gently contrarian. For strategy-seeking and identity-questioning brands, he provides a safe harbour to rest and regroup. But by also asking the difficult questions and taking time to thoughtfully interpret the complex answers, Otherness is a lightning rod for re-imaginings that can transfigure everything – and everyone – that has been taken for granted.

contrarian 2

In 2024, 66% of Otherness clients self-identified as female, queer or POC founders. For the studio’s two years of operation beforehand, the statistics tipped similarly. Joel hasn’t expressly sought to work with members of outsider groups, but they tend to feel at home with him because he can sit in ambiguity and multiplicity longer than most. Uncoincidentally, these partners are frequently functioning in a startup capacity around a brilliant solution that the right design releases from its cocoon.

Another Otherness strong suit is taking inspiration from non-visual stimuli. This accounts for ideas and identities that have not yet been seen or heard, much less proliferated in the trend cycle. An Inquiry by Design course that Joel followed at the Höchschule für Gestalting in Basel was a masterclass in this lesson. Students were tasked with making designs solely in response to readings, such as by philosopher Immanuel Kant and architect-engineer-historian Antoine Picon – there were no Pinterest collections or mood boards.

While contemporary design has been commandeered by a mindset of 

, Joel channels fighting frictions between signifier and signified to create something new. As his portfolio shows, brands are actually often grinding on the edges of two (or more) definitions. Instead of trying to flip a nonbinary reality to be 100% one way or 100% the other, as many agencies do, Otherness knits together the edges of contradictions and conflicts, understanding that any treatment otherwise is a whitewashing of the culture and a silencing of an origin story that needs to be heard.

stories to be heard

In name and raison d’être, Otherness reflects Joel’s own experience with otherness, a feeling of not being here nor there as well as of being here and there. In everyday practice, its mandate is to help others express the fullness of their true complex selves.


Whether the studio is new to you, or you cheered when Joel became his own boss, or you once hired him to build that GeoCities website: you’re warmly welcomed.

welcome

Who / what / when / where / why is Otherness

The painter sweeps their brush across the canvas, colors following the contours and bumps of the layers underneath, a thick layer of titanium white covering the geographies of colors that set before it, thick application after thick application, covering the riots of color underneath.

Simplicity as an ethos started as a manufacturing shift coming out of the necessities of the industrial revolution. 

It found its footing on the cusp of World War II by the Bauhaus.

Today it often acts as a philosophical bludgeon for designers: grid systems, simplicity, pixel perfect, less is more. Maybe you’ve heard your designer tell you these things. Maybe you are left with two fonts and three colors, and a few Linkedin memes about how “a logo isn’t branding” and no real clue where to go next.

As brands scale from small affairs keeping the lights on, to leaders and lighthouses guiding the way, the opportunities to understand customers and speak to them grow exponentially. Your personas become real people who may not agree with the trajectories you’ve set for them. The markets start to push on you, co-opt you, copy you, steal from you — and in turn you navigate the twists and turns of being a business in the real world, seeking to be seen and selected.

So where do three colors, two free fonts, and a logo fit?

Is monolithic simplicity fit for purpose in a modern era? With all our fractured media, multiple screens, and liquid timezones? Is it fit for purpose for the next Nikes and Apples, operating in their garages, and aiming towards the horizon?

More importantly, were those brands as “simple” as they ever seemed in our minds' eyes? Are the brands that stand out to us truly as simple as they appear? Or instead, did they aggressively grasp the contemporary, falling in love with their time and place, and use the energy of the moment to reveal a facet of themselves?

 (or, really, understand), or do you need clarity into how you should navigate the atmosphere of the marketplace today and tomorrow without losing your brand’s soul?

When designers bang on about simplicity, what you should demand, instead, is clarity.


Painter intro

Being on the edge means being misunderstood.

In late 2022, the life sciences startup Medable found themselves in a similar conflicting relationship to simplicity. As visionaries in the niche of digital clinical trial platforms, they’d broken through the usual clutter we’d associate with pharma and medical brands. The look was simple: one font, two colors (and a few tints), a grid, and spacious photography of bare shoulders, dapples of freckles, and expressive gesturing fingers, paired with moody shots of microbes from the petri dish.

Part 2 3.5 typo

Though incredibly elegant, their brand system was strangling them. Thin fonts that looked gorgeous in highly controlled situations demanded heaps of negative space to be successful. In reality, Medable's biggest tool for assuring credibility were dense technical materials. As a design system, they had grid systems that worked only in a few specific formats, and photography that had the target audience mistake the brand for a skincare company.

Fundamental misunderstanding is an invitation for meditation inwards and projection into the future; coming equipped with new knowledge from the experiences gained (for better or worse). It’s an invitation to ask where the pursuit of simplicity has led to a loss of fidelity. Where might complications bring out truer versions of oneself?

Misunderstanding means returning to the source (and in Medable’s case, the voice of their founder) to anchor the company in where it needs to go, and how it will do that on its own terms.

pt 2.5

photog

Strategy that is durable is filled with contradictions: to be impressive but not arrogant, to be an authority who is down to earth. To be credible in a deep technical niche, but also at ease in the company of brands like Sonos, Apple, and Rimowa.

The layers of contradiction become pathways to meaning: to find contrasts and juxtapositions, balancing tensions back and forth across a range of emotions.

Contradictions are keys to context. Contradictions embrace the grey areas between separate perspectives and become a wellspring of ideas that can play off each other. They adapt to context, mood, and trend.

Contradictions give a brand EQ — the ability to read a room — to know when to wear work boots and when to wear a white tie. 

Elevated.
A human touch.
Tech forward.
A staid, clinical category.

colorways

A warm, chic camel color, mixed with a digital-only purple.

Combinations that link the sensitivity of a premium fashion brand to the speed and always-on sensibility found on ubiquitous screens.

Everything is more entangled than we usually understand, shifting between the personal, the cultural, the logical, and the institutional.

In embracing emotional contradictions, a brand can continually surprise with its range of expressions.

For Medable, contradiction plays through all of its look, including the subtle world of typography. Here, a robotic DOS-era font signals a sense of precision and technicality that's unconcerned with aesthetics. In counterbalance is a hard working, modern-but-friendly sans serif family, filled with weights and options.

Contemporary yet technical.
Big yet fast.
Elevated yet welcoming.

The elements of type, color, pattern, photography, and animation are layered in turn. Each brush stroke building on another.

What ultimately seems simple is a delicate constellation of meaning, filled with contradictions, moods, and contexts.


Part 3. Entanglement & clarity

contexts

If the world was ever simple, or at least simple enough to merit a monolithic approach to branding — where a few colors, and a regimen of simplicity is enough — it certainly isn’t now.

The economics of venture capital funding have shifted. What was once betting on a return (with 0% interest rates) is now another situation. Brands need clearer reasons to exist in the eyes of customers and their VC backers. And startups need more differentiated, harder to copy branding to keep the market space they want to claim.

It is important to not just point to Pinterest and say, “me too." It's not enough to nod along to the branding memes of simplicity.

Who is that "me", and what does "too" look like? What are you chasing, and why? If you can find it on a Pinterest board, how will you defend your edge in a market swelling with choice?

champions of simplicity of the 1940s and 50s

 who were eager to leave the messy past of the World Wars behind, simplistic approaches in a complicated world often leave us wanting for something more human, and messy.

Pt 4

blanding imgs

The ironically-iconic blanding look of the mid-2010s

 (modernist, minimalist, approachable) was just as character-erasing as the rebrands of the 1950s, if not as idealistic.

Are three colors, two fonts, and one logo enough today?

What do we leave behind of our unique perspectives, our visions, and our opportunities to shine when we embrace simplicity without question?

So, when designers bang on about simplicity — instead turn inwards and seek clarity. It’s far more durable.


A flat-white surface, dappled with textures. A palette knife scrapes the surfaces, revealing a  buildup of color, on texture, on color.
It was never just a white surface, but a delicate agreement of everything that has come before.


pt 5

What do they mean when they tell you, “simplicity”?

An artboard filled with Experimental Jetset, MoMa rebrand concepts, immaculate, smoothed, infinite expanses of white and well-proportioned rectangles, housing negative space and art. I’d wanted a project like this for years. Coveted it, even.

You know this type of project, the one that everyone else seems to be doing but you - the fashion brand, the lighting company, the Scandinavian-Italian faucet startup. Nike, I guess, because who else?

“Design for designers” is what they call it. Design that is meant to be thrown back into the masses of trendsetters, king-makers, blog-writers. To sit beside the ironically self-aware wine, the unabashed paper sample books, the pet project from that student who will SURELY get a D&AD pencil from their AR recreation of famous Paul Rand logos.

For almost a year now, Todd, Patrick and I had been chipping away at revitalizing the Canadian Design Resource: a latent collection of artifacts from Canadian designers.

Renamed to Nor, and christened with a new mandate, I found myself at that golden junction of a conceptual, cultural, and aesthetically-empowered project.

I’m left looking over the edge into what should be my speciality: branding.

What had started as an earnest and ongoing casual collection of designers and their creations had taken on a new life: one that was a little allergic to its previous incarnation. The Resource, dressed in a welcome-and-earnest red and nostalgic 

When this chance to design for the design industry arrived (or I suppose was forcefully willed into existence), the natural response is, of course, pure abject terror.

Yes, I am working on a collection of design objects. And, why yes, it is something of a museum, or cultural thing. And, well, yes. Maybe we do need a logo.

Must be iconic. Must be bold. Must be larger than life, push the boundaries. Must be strong, a force to be reckoned with, tell a story. Must be familiar. And never seen before. Nothing less than brilliant. Must work well in motion. Must use a typeface I haven’t used before. Must work on merch. Must work small sizes. Must establish a legacy. Sit up there with the greats.

Part 1: Must be well kerned

The comments section, courtesy chatgpt.

Panning through a bookmarked list of type foundries, systematically rolling NOR nor Nor through each one, screen-grabbing the interesting ones. Some with more angular cuts on the N, a tapered leg on the R.

Is modernity a cop-out? Why do we always end up here?

The PR releases say bold, but the output is expected. Within tolerance. “In the category”, the strategist might say.

The visual cues are actually easier to swallow at this point: Grid. Sans serif. Black and white. All caps.

Maybe it’s a control freak’s paradise: You get the ambiguity of being mysterious and absolutely in control, and the simultaneous opportunity to pretend that you’re not. The extra negative space means that you’re just the messenger.

Panning through a bookmarked list of type foundries...

Nor sans

Can the project afford to be divisive? Does it need to appease?

The artboard is locked and loaded with Helvetica(s). Having finally arrived at my timeless, modern, institutional NOR, victory is a little hollow.

What’s the stupidest thing I could do with this logo? The most absolute wrong thing?

I collect the trendy oddballs: extreme trapping, inverse stress, mixed case, drop-shadowed, those wibbly things.

Maybe it’s not about the logo at all, but a wild, moving grid system. Do we have budget to pull off some 3D moving something-or-other, bypassing this existential dread entirely by making it scream through a sizzle reel set to music?

But what, really am I saying with these trends? Besides eccentricity? Besides chasing cool?

What does a useless logo look like? What if I just break every single rule about “good logos” ever? Will I go to Designer Jail if I open dafont.com?


part 2: the wrong thing

wrong thing funky type

There’s something oddly beautiful about these letters. The ones that came before (nay without, or in absence of, or predating the concept of…) modernism. They have personality.

Having survived an apocalypse all their own, the swirls and flowers and textures of the Victorian, the Art Nouveau, and the terminally ornamented seem to take on a different aura.

In the era of straight-faced minimalism, these swirly, eccentric typefaces had long been relegated to specific places in the contemporary design repertoire: historical pastiche, the world of delicatessens, novelty, or postmodern irony.

Suddenly dropped into a modular grid, in stark black and white on retina screens, they sit up straight, and change the atmosphere in the room. Their moral dubiousness, the claims of intellectual and cultural rot that had been heaved on them—it all disappears. The arresting thick-thin contrasts, the giddying baubles, the mesmerizing curves remain.

Is it better to be honest about our complexity, or to sand it smooth?

part 2 section 2

funky type zoom in

“So I’m a little terrified.” An excellent opening line to any client presentation.

“I know there are high expectations in the project, since it’s quite visible. Design for designers can always be a bit intense.

The most obvious first step is to look at the minimalist approach, which I started over here. I think we could use some grids and interesting lock-ups to create something interesting…

But after I did that, I started to wonder what doing the exact opposite would be like. What making the most wrong option would be, and what it would look like. and… I'm kind of into it.”

“I like that this stuff is completely wrong. It’s interesting.”

“Yeah, there’s something happening with that in a good way.”

“What we’re not interested in is the Helvetica stuff. Like, whatever.”

On long walks in the evenings, I had been listening to podcasts about the anthropocene.

The anthropocene marinated every conversation at the time, puncturing through public consciousness from academia.

The weight of it, the monolith of systemic futility. The sad monotony of minimalist concrete blocks.

Design and capitalism, linked arm-in-arm together.

Scrollwork painstakingly stitched around the hem of a jacket.

Large flourishing drop caps. illuminated by candlelight.

Flowers growing through the cracks of concrete.

Once again, at 3am, clicking idly through every type foundry Google will supply me. NOR. NOR. NOR. Next. No. NOR.

In one of the unassuming corners of the internet this odd, modular, chiseled-and-shadowed-font shows up: NT Guru.

Strong lines. Almost purely graphic forms. Fatefully equipped with a tertiary layer of optional printer’s flowers.

I spend a lot of time thinking about Certeau, and of private subversions of systems. Of the things that can’t be measured or quantified. Of inner textures.

little terrified

nor nt guru

Patient collaborators. Another zoom call—the third round of rooting about. In truth, I stopped looking after finding NT Guru. Sometimes an option closes the doors to all other rooms.

“I want to jump over to the one that interests me. All of these weirdos have some stuff going on - some of them are more brutalist. Some of them are a bit trendy. but this one has really caught my eye.”

“I put it in some of these really loose layouts and sketches to show how it can come together. But I think this is the one. It feels so intense, so singular.”

“It’s engrossing. It’s wild, yeah. Wow.”

“To me, there’s something compelling about it - the strong lines feel like the built environment, and then these things here, like ornamentation, craft, the natural world. At tension, forced together.”

patient collabs

artboards nor early

“The big theme of this logo is the tension between these raw, brutalist, repeatable forms and their opposition. These forms symbolize the built world, a monolithic interpretation of design. Being fused with its opposite: the unscalable, the fussy, the natural world.

The most radical and subversive thing available to us in a capitalist machine is the refusal to scale. To be purposeless. To ornament and decorate.”

 is a patient collaborator. The wildly talented ones are always patient. Having discovered his work with 

 during my time in Amsterdam, and watching it from afar - I had a feeling he was one of the few designers in the world who could handle this project. With my talents in hand-lettering limited, I was excited to bring in a fresh perspective.

“It’s a conceptual lift. We don’t fully know what we’re going for - it’s going to be some guesswork.

All we know is that it can’t feel mechanical. It also can’t lean on the old world, like printer’s flowers. And it can’t reappropriate or appropriate from the known world, or from other cultures. It can't reference Western symbols, or things like the original printers flowers.

“Alien,” I stress on the briefing call. “Not mechanical. Organic.”

“But,” I admit, “It’s going to be a hard one. I’m going to be a shit client, because it’s an ‘I’ll know it when I see it situation.’”

“Conceptually the logo design to-date aims to be provocative. The clash between the brutish mechanical forms and the delicate, organic lines is deliberate and intends to create tension.

The nonsensical pairing of these forms should feel both alien and slightly jarring.

any questions

julian sketches

We meet for lunch at the Glasfabriek. Julien has made a rare trip from Paris to Rotterdam. But a trip worth making: Julien and his collaborators have secured an entire abandoned glass factory’s warehouse to paint according to their whims.

The ladders and swings and lifts, tennis rackets covered in black paint: A literal typographic playground.

Stories-high walls of the abandoned factory covered with wild, swooshing calligraphy.

bring this

glasfabriek

The final zoom call. Mockups settled, albiet impractical.

“Guys I showed this to some of my designer friends at drinks last night. They don’t know what the fuck to make of it.”

maple leaf

I think I owe you an explanation about the logo.

It gets even trickier when dealing with the frequent factors of tight budgets and few toolkits to work off of. Sometimes, too, there is an appeal not just for accessibility but radical accessibility.

Yet, what is the work of designers but to grapple with socioeconomic complexities and turn them into materialities that humans can be moved by? At Otherness, some best practices have led the way forward and keep us forward-looking.

yet what

First, define what accessibility really means. The term has become a DEIB checkbox in some corners of society, but behind it are discrete expectations that should be understood, especially before adding any qualifiers, like “radical.”

Accessibility is an actionable concept. It has clear legal definitions with day-to-day implications for choices around physical features, such as colour, contrast, and scale. Some dimensions of accessibility compliance are black and white – national disability regulations and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), for example. But most inhabit a grey area, where context-defined ethical parameters dictate how to go about a design, be it an 

editorial campaign for an NGO that helps scale small coffee co-ops

entire brand system for a clinical research software platform

Radicality is an ethos. Its principles operationalize an organization’s or an ideology’s position in the service of spurring structural societal change. Whether modifying feminism, candour, or hospitality, “radical” implies the unearthing of that which undergirds a system – the word comes from the Latin for “root.” Radical accessibility is therefore as much a method as it is a mandate to design for people with diverse abilities and disabilities as well as intellectual, social, cultural, and economic differences.

Understand the terms

So how to start executing on a design brief that strives for such ideals in inclusivity? The next step is a step back – to listen.

Long before Joel Derksen founded Otherness, he worked at IDEO, where design thinking was a daily exercise in, essentially, radical listening. The experience proved that communicating with the actual people for whom a design is intended makes their needs the starting point of any solution. And listening on this level demands that project strategists also come from non-commercial backgrounds. In other words, when handling any deep, delicate subject matter, have enough humanitarians in the room.


Listen well, listen widely

nor manifesto

A more recent education in conscientious crowdsourcing came via Joel’s role as co-founder and director of 

 a non-profit cooperative documenting Canadian design. Today NOR is part digital museum and part Canadiana sounding board – a portal unifying 14,000 artifacts under an 

 But its launch was preceded by three years of shepherding community listening meetings and consensus-building. To include many voices, NOR engaged Canadian designers along with community-building experts and representatives of healthcare, Indigenous, BIPOC, DEIB, policy, and business perspectives. Outreach entailed surveys and interviews with 90+ practitioners, nearly 50 hours of in-person interviews, and establishment of an advisory network to ensure accessibility thresholds keep up with the times.


Listen well, listen widely2


For a legitimately inclusive future, it is not enough to make beautiful things today. Instead, hold space for people’s histories while using information from that past to chart what, concretely, a design gives back to them.

Historical discourses were front of mind when in 2024 Otherness launched the brand system for a project exploring 

 To fully articulate the vision of the client, Canadian artist and scholar Naila Keleta-Mae, the branding process did a lot of time travel. Researching the Civil Rights Movement was not only a historical examination, but the tracing of its distinct aesthetic and evolution into a bold Just-Do-It-style protest vernacular. The anachronistic mélange is incarnated as the heart of the “Black and Free” brand: a bespoke typeface inspired by Kente cloth with elements of contemporary African continental and diaspora design and nods to Afropunk. This font is likely the first in Canada to be created by a Black designer, and there has been discussion to release it under a CC0 so that even after the project has wrapped, the lettering will live on.

Accessibility, thus, necessitates the dimensionalization of the history and players all around a project. Push the past to commune with the present. With the power to reframe, ask: what still resonates? What should be rejected? What can a discursively designed future do better?

honor

baf images

Finally, no matter how radically welcoming the intention or execution is behind a design, a community’s trust may not yet be earned. In that case, wait.

Effective designers are ipso facto empathetic – their job is to help clients succeed and feel great doing so thanks to a concept so meticulously tailored to them that it seems natural. But the discipline is to accept that design alone cannot reconcile legacies of repression and marginalization. Sometimes clients themselves must surface their moral compass to take a stance, and the design falls in line accordingly. The remit, then, becomes to deploy tasks and tools for the benefit of a community without co-opting its culture or aesthetic. Adopting colour palettes is not an act of decolonization; selecting a typeface with characters to write in Cree, for instance, is common sense. Radical accessibility can begin with a simple technical spec.

Who measures the degree of a design’s inclusivity? The people do, through their physical or digital traffic. Rejection might not take the form of outright protest, but will at least manifest as a silent turning away from. And yet even in those instances, the responsibility of designers remains to show up thoughtfully, work diligently, and hold open the door patiently, sometimes radically so.


Conversations
to
have

Who / what / when / where / why is Otherness

What do they mean when they tell you, “simplicity”?

I think I owe you an explanation about the logo.

How can designers hold open the door for radical inclusion?

What to expect

Conversations to have

Who / what / when / where / why is Otherness

What do they mean when they tell you, “simplicity”?

I think I owe you an explanation about the logo.

How can designers hold open the door for radical inclusion?

What to expect

Conversations
to
have