Our Manifesto

You should have a darn good reason for doing the work that you do. A purpose that drives you to get up in the morning and spend your day working with a delight and a fervour. The Office of Sarah has a few darn good reasons that get us riled up about the visual world that we live in. In a sentence, we think design and advertising should be smart, interesting, and made for humans. 

Smart.

Contrary to popular thinking, most people (your colleagues, your target audiences, your neighbour) are pretty smart AND (perhaps more importantly) all these people have the potential to get smarter. The more folks get used to smart design, the faster they’ll get at exercising those smart brain muscles. Designing for the lowest common denominator is not only a crime: it’s an insult. We want to design smart for smart people.

Interesting. 

In this so-called “Age of Information” meaningful content is traded for sheer quantity. Businesses don’t know WHAT they’re trying to communicate or WHY, which spawns (shock!) a lot of design that leads no-where and communicates no-thing. Slogging through this sort of design is incredibly disheartening and most of all, boring. Another design crime, if you ask us. Design should surprise, delight, inform, reward and serve a real purpose. We want to create design that is genuinely interesting.

For Real People.

This kind of ties into “Smart” and “Interesting”, but real people are so darn complex! We evade neat categories. We have unexpected and unrelated interests, passions and senses of humour. The Every Person doesn’t exist. You need to pinpoint exactly who you’re designing for so that there will  be an actual Somebody who’s interested in the specific thing you’re creating. In short, we like to design with a real purpose, which means we want to design for real people.

Is design ACTUALLY important? Read our Brief defence for (good) design.