http://www.oceandesign.co.nz/, http://www.oceancaravan.co.nz/, http://www.twitter.com/Blair_Ocean

Ocean Design, 143 Vivian Street, Wellington (2026)

28/03/2024

Last Thursday we hosted our first B Corp event, celebrating our certification and all things B Corp. Our event ‘This Way Forward’ was our contribution to the global ‘B Corp month’.

We promised our manuhiri an Ocean twist and so it was fun to surprise them with crayons on a Thursday evening!

Featuring a panel of leaders from Method Recycling, Runn, and Write, we discussed the certification process, good business practices, and how to drive progress.
Guests expressed themselves through drawing, notes, diagrams, quotes, and questions creating a buzz of creativity.

Thanks to all who joined us – you made it such a cool event. Stay tuned for ways to share this experience with the wider B Corp community.

Happy B Corp month, everyone!

26/01/2024

Te urunga ake o te rā
The dawning of a new day

We are thrilled to announce that Matt Everitt (Ngāti Ranginui) and Rhueben Meredith , have joined Ocean’s Blair Mainwaring as business partners. The addition of Matt and Rhueben will better equip the agency for telling multicultural brand stories in contemporary Aotearoa.

Matthew and Rhueben have been with Ocean for a number of years and have built reputations as leading exponents in the complementary areas of digital design and crafting brand identities.

We believe this is going to be a great change for our team and clients! The future looks bright!

31/12/2023

Ngā mihi o te tau hou - Happy new year!

24/12/2023

Meri Kirihimete atu ki a koutou, nā te whānau o Ocean Design!

29/11/2023

What does B Corp certification mean for Ocean?

At Ocean, we’ve always believed our work should create a positive impact. For tāngata (people), for whenua (land), for te taiao (nature).

B Corp certification has been a long-term goal of ours. Not because it marks a shift, but because it reflects our whakapapa as an organisation and where we’re heading in the future. And it’s tangible proof of the effort we take to ensure that we’re acting in the most responsible way possible.

We'll be posting more about our journey in the coming days. If you can't wait you can always head to our website to find out more ...

B Lab Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

13/11/2023

We did it!

We’re thrilled to announce that after a long, 18 month journey, we’ve gained our B Corp certification. This has been a long-term goal of ours and we’re absolutely delighted to join the community of other brands and organisations both here in Aotearoa (and around the globe) including some of our amazing B Corp certified clients including Sharesies, Method Recycling, Kin and Springload.

Led by Charlotte Mason, we attained a 85.4 rating across governance, workers, community, environment and customers.

It’s been a great opportunity to reflect on our agency and how we roll, and to understand how we can make even more of a contribution in the coming years to this planet we call home.

Find out more on our website.

23/10/2023

Applications for our Panana Programme close this Friday, October 27th at 5pm.

Panana is a 4-week Agency Bridging Programme at Ocean. Six graduate design students get the opportunity to get a real taste of being part of an agency!

The programme runs from 13th November to 8th December. Four full days a week at our studio in Te Aro.

Apply today by emailing
[email protected] and tell us about yourself, your degree, and your design dreams and aspirations. We're eager to see your portfolio too!

Please note: this is an unpaid graduate experience but you won't be working on live client work. We don't profit from your mahi.

We look forward to hearing from you soon. Very soon!

16/08/2023

Te oranga o te tāngata, he whenua, he moana
Our wellbeing is drawn from the land and the sea

At Ocean, we believe our work should create a positive impact. For tāngata (people), for whenua (land), for taiao (nature).

Last year, we began our journey towards B Corp certification — something that had long been a goal of Blair’s. And while we were hoping to have been accredited by today, our last post of our Ocean A-Z series, it was not to be.

B Corp certification is a big deal for Ocean. We see it reflecting our sustainable origins and cementing our pathway for the future. If we achieve it, B Corp will help reinforce the principles that guide us in our everyday mahi.

So watch this space… hopefully soon we can announce joining our friends and clients Springload Te Pipītanga, Method Recycling and Kin as fellow B Corp’ers.

As we celebrate our 35th year, we also continue to look forward. Ocean's dedication to operating as a force for good, empowering clients in developing modern Aotearoa brands that embrace inclusivity and that prioritise the well-being of te tāngata (people), remains our passion - and our commitment.

……….

Finally, if you’ve followed these 35th birthday posts, thank you, it’s been fun tripping down memory lane.

16/08/2023

If creative agencies are known for their work, then by extension an agency’s designers shape a studio’s reputation.

It’s been no different for us here at Ocean as we’ve been lucky to employ some exceptionally talented creatives over the last 35 years.

We can’t name them all here, but we thought we’d take a look at our first ever and our most recent junior designers.

A junior designer brings a freshness and open-eyed enthusiasm to a studio.

Niki Pennington was a graduate from the world renowned Wellington Polytechnic School of Design (now Massey University College of Creative Arts – Toi Rauwhārangi). She strolled into Ocean on her first day back in 1994, full of confidence and talent. The daughter of artist Suzy Pennington and product designer Mark Pennington (Formway), Niki has creativity baked into her DNA. She worked with us for a couple of years before heading overseas. Her subsequent career took her around the globe. She left her role at Ocean to study under typography maestro Wolfgang Weingart at the renown Schule für Gestaltung Basel for several years. Then London with stints at Greymatter Williams and Pharmacy, The Partners and Lambie-Nairn, before being lured to NYC to work for Arnell Group. Niki is now an established artist, exhibiting in New York, Basel and Aotearoa. You can check her work out here https://lnkd.in/enGjz7dV

Our most recent junior graduate is the wonderful Amrita Marks who’s known for her thoughtful and considered design approach, intelligence and hard mahi. Also a graduate of Massey University College of Creative Arts – Toi Rauwhārangi, Amrita worked with us on various contracts and freelance jobs at Ocean before joining our tīma in a permament fulltime role. Where Amrita’s career will take her is unknown, of course, but we are certain that she has the talent and attitude to go far.

It’s our responsibility to support and enable these talented rangatahi to achieve their best. And over the years we’ve seen our junior designers rise up through the ranks at Ocean and go off and do great things out in the world.

Our homegrown designers have been:
Niki Pennington
Amrita Marks
Clare Garner
Matt Bluett
Rochelle Sanko
Penny Thompson
Maraea Gourlay
Richard Wilson
Anthony H**e

We’re extremely proud of all of them!

14/08/2023

“They might secede from New Zealand. If so they’ll need a passport. And a flag. Can you design them? You’ll be paid in crayfish.”

This simple brief was asked of the Ocean team in the early 1990’s.

30 odd years later, the actual details are all a bit hazy but it was (and still is) one of the out-of-the-box briefs we’ve ever received.

Let us explain…at that time there were apparently high level negotiations going on at the highest levels of government about the future of the Chatham Islands.

The islands had experienced 150 years of New Zealand control – years we were told, of mismanagement and exploitation. Allocation of fishing rights had been very controversial.

We were told that if the Government didn’t act, then a very notable NZ politician was going to take the bold step of announcing the Islands independence in the House … and he needed a passport to branish in the air to reinforce his point.

The team got to work, a passport with a Chatham Island Coat of Arms was designed, printed and delivered to the politician.

But it was never revealed.

Some time later, the New Zealand Government presented the trustees of the new Chatham Islands community trust with a large cheque and confirmed that ownership and control of all government infrastructure assets would be handed over to the Trust if conditions were met in time. They were.

Did what we did have any influence on this outcome? We’ll never know.

But true to our client's word, a week or two later, a very large polystyrene box arrived at Ocean full of delicious Chatham Island kōura (crayfish).

* xenocracy: a condition in which a country is ruled over by foreigners.

11/08/2023

W is for Wellington.

Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington is a city known for its creativity. For coffee, a characterful breeze and the inability to be beaten on a good day (much like today).

We can’t imagine Ocean without Wellington. The city has shaped our story as a studio and given us our character.

So when we turned 30 we celebrated by giving something back to our community with a project we called One Square Block. Documenting a moment in time of our neighbourhood, local photographer Joseph Kelly took portraits of the people behind the 44 unique businesses located on our block.

Celebrating the diversity and richness from recycled fashion to fish mongers, lawnmower sellers to lawyers, fine dining to death metal venues, One Square Block is a beautiful snapshot of a moment in time in our ever-changing city.

We launched this by hosting an exhibition of Joe’s images in our studio with a ‘’Block Party’ and shared a simple but beautifully designed tabloid by Ocean designer Matt Bluett with all the businesses celebrated.

It was poignant to capture our community, as early the following year Covid hit and since then Cuba Street has started a new cycle of renewal.

It’s been our most important realization in 35 years of business, the important role that a business can and arguably should play in supporting, fostering, and simply being present in its local community.

After all, he waka eke noa, we are all in this together.

07/08/2023

Culture is the heart and soul of any company. And shared values help shape an organisation’s culture - and brand.

In 2015 we made the bold decision to significantly change the structure of the agency. We separated into two different business divisions: ‘Ocean Design’ and ‘Ocean Brand and Culture’.

Ocean Design would focus on design.

Ocean Brand and Culture would focus on, well, brand and culture - in response to Blairs vision that the future for brand agencies would require them to be experts in understanding and shaping organisational culture as well as being experts in traditional branding.

Blair believed (and still does) that brands are intrinsically shaped by people. So Ocean needed to be able to create ‘People driven brands’ as our brand strategist Dave Ralph once memorably coined it.

We went all in. We completely reorganised the business.

And we developed a great product, our first: the Ocean Values Deck.

The Values Deck filled a need for a simple tool to help leaders define their organisation's values. We’d seen that defining values was a complex and messy exercise. We designed a kinaesthetic tool that turned this exercise into something any leader could run with confidence and would allow their teams to share opinions and collaborate in a systematic way. Jeremy Dean created and led this project and did a fantastic job with it.

Now for the million dollar question.

Did the change to the business work?

To be honest, it didn’t. Two years later the agency morphed back into a shape that it still largely has today. A number of the team sadly ended up moving on.

But this experiment did have benefit.

We learnt an awful, awful lot. What we could have done differently. What we could have done better. What we did well. Our approach to brand and culture work was defined and remains to this day. And the value of our core skill, design, was affirmed.

And we got the Values Deck.

Ocean Design

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