Four founders and a Nokia job, 1999.

Kinetic began in Singapore in July 1999 under a different name. In a question-and-answer feature published by Marketing (Marketing-Interactive) on 4 September 2015, co-founder Carolyn Teo gave the founding date as 1 July 1999 and listed the founding team as Sean Lam, Benjy Choo, Adrian Tan and herself, trading as Kinetic Interactive. She told the magazine that Lam had been her schoolmate at junior college, that Choo was a close friend of her husband, and that she approached Tan, then at the agency Ad Planet, to set up the company, which she said was done within three days.

Teo named Nokia as the studio’s earliest client. She said she was finishing a term at Nokia when her bosses asked her to complete a video project at her new company, and that the studio secured the rights to use a Massive Attack track for it. According to Teo, that job gave the studio the capital for three computers, and a project for the pest-control firm Pestbusters followed. She said the founders kept the company small and paid themselves little, so the pressure to win a large number of clients early on stayed manageable.

The same interview describes the studio’s working base. Teo said Kinetic was housed in Thye Hong Centre for ten years before the partners saved enough to buy a shophouse in Joo Chiat, and that Pann Lim doubled as the interior designer because the renovation budget was tight. She said owning the shophouse meant the studio would never depend on a landlord, since rent is a heavy cost for many companies. In the same feature she said the founders ran the place as a family, with house rules that let the team be themselves, and that she could wear a T-shirt, shorts and slippers to work with clients’ trust.

Teo also used the 2015 interview to describe K+, a space the studio had opened about eight months earlier. She said it was meant to give local designers, crafters and retailers a place to show their work and to bring in international artists, and that it had hosted demonstrations and workshops for anyone interested in design.

A second name in 2001, a third in 2009.

The name changed in 2001. Teo told Marketing in 2015 that, two years after Kinetic Interactive began, the partners started Kinetic Design & Advertising with Pann Lim, who had also been at her junior college, and Roy Poh, her husband. In the founders’ list printed with that interview she gave the 2001 team as Pann Lim, Roy Poh, Adrian Tan and Carolyn Teo. A Marketing news report of 5 October 2018 gives the same sequence: Teo founded the agency in 1999 with Lam, Choo and Tan, it became Kinetic Design & Advertising in 2001, and the move saw Teo and Tan running the agency with creative director Pann Lim and Roy Poh.

The third name arrived in 2009. Both Marketing articles say the company was consolidated as Kinetic Singapore that year. Teo described the split of roles in 2015 as Lim running the creative side and herself running the business, with Tan remaining the investment partner. The 2015 feature opens by saying the agency “is now officially known as Kinetic Singapore”. Asked in the same interview whether the founders would consider a buyout, Teo said it was not for her to say never, but that the founders had not started Kinetic for money and did not see themselves ending it for money either; she closed the answer with the line “KIN is family”.

Pann Lim’s path into the studio is set out on a DesignSingapore Council profile page. It says Lim graduated with a Diploma in Design and Advertising from Temasek Polytechnic in 1998, worked at DDB Singapore and Batey Ads, and was invited in 2001 to start Kinetic with Carolyn Teo, Roy Poh, Adrian Tan, Sean Lam and Benjy Choo. The page describes his portfolio as a hybrid of visual design, interactive design and advertising.

The leadership changed again in 2018. Marketing reported on 5 October 2018 that Carolyn Teo had left the agency to focus on her family business and to spend more time with her daughters, and that she would continue to work with Kinetic behind the scenes until December 2018 to help with certain aspects of the business and coach the team. The report said Pann Lim remained creative director. Teo told the magazine she had been with Kinetic for nineteen years and that she saw the move as leaving the work, not the people.

A studio name that changed as the partners did.

Studios across Asia often carry a name that has to work in two scripts at once. A wordmark may sit in Latin letters on an international website and in kanji, kana, hangul or Chinese characters on a domestic business card, and the two versions rarely share the same rhythm or width. Many studios settle this by treating one script as the primary mark and the other as a quiet companion line, set in a typeface chosen to sit comfortably beside it.

Lowercase names, single words and symbols such as the ampersand are common devices. A name set entirely in lowercase reads as informal and close to handwriting, while an ampersand turns a name into a small typographic object in its own right. Both choices put the burden on spacing and letter shapes rather than on colour or ornament.

For a studio, the work itself is often the strongest brand surface. Objects, books, posters and exhibition installations travel further than a logo does, and a consistent approach to material, white space and photography lets a body of work read as one hand. Exhibition catalogues, studio monographs and the studio’s own website then become the places where that identity is collected and shown.

Client work under the Kinetic name, dated.

The studio’s client work is documented in the trade press with dates. Marketing reported on 12 September 2017 that MINI Asia had re-appointed Kinetic Singapore to handle its creative duties for two years, with an option to extend for a third. The report said a closed pitch was held in June after the incumbent agency resigned, and that Kinetic began working with MINI Asia in September 2017. Teo told the magazine the studio had already worked on the account for six years before the formal re-appointment.

The 2018 report on Teo’s departure listed a wider set of clients the agency had worked with, among them MINI, CDL, Keppel, Nokia, Nike, Ho Bee, Frasers Centrepoint, 100PLUS, F&N, Hasbro, Lazada, HBO, Citibank and HSBC. The names run from property developers and banks to a toy company, a soft-drink brand, an online retailer and a television network.

A clear piece of identity work is the festival look for AdFest 2018, the Asia-Pacific advertising festival held in Pattaya, Thailand. The Stable reported on 29 November 2017 that Kinetic Singapore had created the new identity, inspired by the 2018 festival theme “Transform”. Lim told the publication that the concept came from the process of transforming one thing into another, a process he called often vague and transcending time and space, and that the studio chose to express transformation as a gradient, where the blurring of colours represents the melding and evolution of ideas. AdFest’s own announcement of 30 November 2017 said the festival has a tradition of inviting the previous year’s jury president for design and print craft to design the following year’s logo; Lim had held that role at AdFest 2017. The Stable also noted that Lim runs the gallery space K+, a family art collective called Holycrap.sg and Rubbish Famzine, a zine he makes with his children.

For a design guide, Kinetic shows how a studio’s name can track its partnerships: Kinetic Interactive in 1999, Kinetic Design & Advertising when Pann Lim and Roy Poh joined in 2001, and Kinetic Singapore from 2009, with a shophouse in Joo Chiat as its base. Compare &Larry and Bravo, two more Singapore studios in this collection. For this guide we use magenta, orange and ink black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kinetic’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.