Inner Workings
Erik Ulfers formed Clickspring Design in 2006 as a studio environment capable of taking on a broad range of experiential design challenges. Over the last eleven years, we have grown from a boutique firm to an international creative practice with offices in New York City, Austin, and Beijing, specializing in Broadcast Design, Consumer & Corporate Branded Environments, and Events & Entertainment Design.
Our award-winning projects include TV news set design, broadcast studio environments, branded office environments, consumer retail environments, consumer interiors, brand destination design, environmental branding, theater and live events, pop-ups, and trade shows.
Staffed with hand-picked individuals from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and areas of expertise, Clickspring’s diverse team shares a singular vision: programs and the environments they inhabit, when thoughtfully designed, can produce a powerful communication tool — an extended, measurable, and transformative experience. We believe in the power of design to communicate, resonate, and inspire action.
Good design is smart.
We believe that design and visual form are principal mediums of productive thinking and communication — not independent and isolated decorative phases. We begin the design process with this question: what is the communication intent and how is that intent brought to the physical or virtual world?
The experience of design should communicate that intent. This precludes the notion that the entire event of design is an intuitive one, where solutions are fraught with subjective bias. The reality is that every visual pattern is potentially a carrier of meaning. This potential for meaning is what interests us. If it’s an object of beauty but has nothing to say, then it’s not an effective product of visual thinking; it’s just an empty vessel.
When there is a fluid, interconnected dialogue between the experience of design and the thinking behind it – the intelligence – we’re suddenly engaged in a cognitive world where what we see influences our thoughts and our thoughts influence what we see. This design dialogue inspires connection, response, and action.
What’s with the clock?
The alarm clock was chosen as an illustration of the company’s philosophy: good design wakes up an audience and creates more time with that audience as well. The X-ray image indicates our passion for getting to what exactly makes our clients tick. (And yes, we took the alarm clock in to a local hospital for the X-ray.)
THE MECHANICS
Process makes practice.
The hands turn, the chimes sound, the finished case looks incredible — but it takes an amazing number of parts to make it happen, and they must be put together just so. Our process ensures that the solutions to every creative challenge are always specific to your objectives, audience, and content. It takes a lot of time — but it’s time well-spent.
Our process begins with a period of research and rigorous situational analysis — examining the client’s project objectives, brand attributes, service initiatives, and historic perceptions — to build an essential knowledge base which becomes the foundation of a focused, strategic design solution.
Covering analysis and execution of studies, diagramming is a means by which we come to understand a design opportunity and a tool to chart the path, from beginning to desired end. Diagramming reveals useful information about scope, strategy, and tactical approach.
Effective design is additive. To help rationalize the creative process, we view the end solution along a pre- to post-experience continuum, ensuring that we combine the communication strategy and design into a holistic experience. This robust solution ultimately increases the chance to form a deeper, more sustained relationship with the consumer.
Before a design solution is activated, it is qualitatively evaluated for its potential efficacy. Questions of how and why the proposed strategy will work are addressed and provide valuable feedback regarding the design by highlighting areas that need adjustment as well as those that are working as intended.
Depending on synchronous movement of physical and virtual components, activation is the construction observation phase where the entirety of the property vision is actualized.