This week, we speak to David O’Hearns, Managing Director at Dawn Creative, about how a nightmare at an old agency turned into a beautiful dream of a fresh start. A new dawn, if you will…
How was your company born and where are you based?
I started the agency after a bit of a nightmare ending with my previous agency, which I co-founded with a couple of other guys. Long story short, I started Dawn pretty soon after that. I knew how I wanted to do things, what I could bring to brands, and ultimately, I knew how much the world needed great design and communication, which is what we’re all about.
From there, I set out our mission, to rid the world of bad design and poor communication and got on with bringing brands out of the dark and into the light. And that was the start of Dawn.
What was the biggest challenge to the growth of your company?
There are a few, but I’d say one of them is just the general reluctance to invest in branding. It’s seen as a bit of an added extra, just the clothes your company wears. When actually, it’s absolutely everything that you do as a brand.
The reason you make decisions, because they’re based on your values. The reason you employ certain people, and the reason you don’t. The way you approach things, the way you speak to your customers. The tech you use, the tech you don’t. If you don’t have a solid brand, there isn’t a reason behind what you do.
You end up making subjective decisions for the business, rather than making them based on what the company stands for, and that’s the worst thing you can do.
What’s the biggest opportunity for you and your company in the next year?
It’s got to be in the digital space. We’ve had a couple of new recruits in the past 2 years who have transformed the way we think about digital projects. Now, things like Conversion Rate Optimisation and UX journeys are far more considered when running a website project. Or even as standalone projects.
Being able to bring that extra layer of great design to clients is what’s going to propel us forward in 2024. Because as we know, good design isn’t just visual.
Can you explain your team’s creative process? What makes it unique?
So every project we do, we base around bringing the brand out of the dark and into the light (very on-brand, of course). For a lot of the website projects, we end up doing brand work too. Because we’re brand-led, meaning we always take a step back, and look at how the brand/company is set up, what the overall goals are, etc, it doesn’t usually make sense to do web work in isolation.
There’s always something that might not have been thought about. If we’re creating a landing page, for example, and we need some photography, we’ll need to know their brand guidelines around photography.
We’re not just sticking any old stock photo in there and hoping for the best. If we need a sound for the opening of a video, what sound are we choosing? It all needs to be brand-led, everything chosen for a reason. And you can’t do that without looking at your brand first.
How does your team remain inspired and motivated?
Constant communication with each other. It’s underrated, but having a team to bounce off is one of the best things I think we have here.
Which agencies do you gain inspiration from? Do you have any heroes in the industry?
Johnson Banks and Ragged Edge: they’ve both produced some amazing work recently. The marshmallow rebrand by Ragged Edge was brilliant in that it brought a completely new angle to what people would see as a boring industry.
The way Johnson Banks brought Jodrell Bank’s brand to life through animation, breaking the barriers in the design industry was excellent, too, and one I reference a lot when talking about great branding.
What is one tip that you would give to other agencies looking to grow?
Focus on doing relly, really good work. Make sure you’re constantly improving, pushing the boundaries of what you can do. Whether that’s investing in more motion graphics pros, people with better digital expertise who can add extra value, or even just keeping your designers motivated and making sure feedback is passed around freely.
Great work should always rise above everything else. And great customer service too. Be a nice human.
How do you go about finding new clients/business? (Pitching, work with retainers, etc.)
We have a few new marketing angles we’re excited about, working with a brilliant SEO and PPC agency, a new PR partner, trying to get the agency more and more visible so we can get as much inbound as possible. Aside from that, it’s mostly relationships that I’ve built over the past 20 years.
There really is nothing more powerful than someone knowing you can deliver a great job, recommending you to someone else, or working with them as they develop throughout their career and move on to new places. If they want to take you with them, that’s the biggest compliment you can get, for me.
What’s your one big hope for the future of the industry?
That people value creativity more. Get more Creative Directors on the Board. See creativity in the same way you see anything else as important to the success of your business. And it’s not just our industry, it’s the world in general, and how they see creativity - art isn’t actively encouraged in school as much as, say, maths and science are.
But the benefits creativity can bring to not just business success but the way you think, the way you solve problems, are massive. And hugely overlooked.
Do you have any websites, books or resources that you would recommend?
Zag by Marty Neumeier, and the perhaps lesser known Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. To name just a couple.
