Namur, 2006.

Dogstudio is a creative studio based in Namur, the capital of Wallonia in Belgium. It was founded in 2006 by Gilles Bazelaire, his brother Mathieu Bazelaire and two other partners, according to profiles of the company in the Walloon chambers of commerce magazine CCI Mag, dated 20 February 2015 and 16 January 2018. The Belgian broadcaster RTBF also dated the founding to 2006 in Namur in a report of 20 May 2022.

The 2018 profile told the story of how it began. It said Gilles Bazelaire took a diploma in visual communication in 1999 and spent the next years working for several agencies in Brussels, learning web design on the job. After losing a job in 2005, he took a career break in Mexico with his future wife, working for a non-governmental organisation, and came back a year later having decided that he wanted to work for himself and to settle in Namur, his home town. In the 2015 profile, Bazelaire said that Mathieu had studied design while he had studied communication, that both had worked for large advertising and communication firms in Brussels, and that, with self-employed parents, the brothers wanted to be independent too. He described the founders as part of a generation of tinkerers who were discovering the internet and teaching themselves.

From the start, he told CCI Mag in 2015, the partners wanted to combine design, development and computing. Their early clients were mostly small and medium-sized businesses, but they also included European institutions and pharmaceutical companies. In 2015 Mathieu Bazelaire was the studio’s technical director and Gilles described himself as the co-founder in charge of clients and the company’s vision; by the 2018 profile he was chief executive. The magazine said the company had kept its base in the historic centre of Namur, despite suggestions that it should move to Brussels.

The way the studio writes its own name has stayed constant. The name runs as a single word with a capital D, and the title of its website, read in October 2026, sets it as “Dogstudio.” with a closing full stop, followed by the description “Multidisciplinary Creative Studio.”

From Namur to Chicago and into DEPT.

The studio’s reach outside Belgium grew through a series of projects that the Belgian press reported at the time. CCI Mag said in February 2015 that Dogstudio had worked as a consultant for Instaply, a San Francisco start-up, had won a competition to design a new visual identity for the show creator Franco Dragone and his productions, and had been chosen to handle the digital communication of the Belgian pavilion at the Milan Expo of 2015. It also reported a new contract with Microsoft in Seattle.

L’Avenir explained the American link in a report dated 3 November 2016. Bazelaire told the paper that an American speaker due at the KIKK Festival in Namur could not find a hotel, so he put him up at home. Two years later that contact was working at Microsoft in Redmond and thought of the studio for a video-game web platform. He also added Dogstudio to a list of agencies invited to compete to redesign the website of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, a contest the studio won. The paper said Dogstudio was then thinking about opening an American office, possibly early in 2017.

That office followed. CCI Mag reported in January 2018 that in March 2017 the agency opened a branch in Chicago, with the help of a partner who had moved there. By May 2022, RTBF and the newspaper La DH were also listing offices in Mexico City and Amsterdam.

Ownership changed in 2022. In an announcement dated 19 May 2022, the Amsterdam-founded agency group DEPT said Dogstudio had joined it and would continue to be led by Henry Daubrez, partner and chief executive and chief creative officer, and Nicolas Moies-Delval, managing partner. DEPT said the studio had already worked with several of its teams, including its Amsterdam office on a 3D experience for the Dutch department store de Bijenkorf. RTBF reported on 20 May 2022 that Dogstudio had been bought by DEPT and that the name, the Namur offices and the staff there would be kept. La DH, on 24 May 2022, quoted Daubrez saying the studio had been approached by would-be buyers since it opened in Chicago, and had always said no until DEPT, after about a year of talks.

A one-word name with a full stop.

Digital and interactive studios rarely have a product on a shelf, so the name and the website carry the identity work. Many of the names are made up rather than descriptive: a word with a numeral attached, a film-industry term borrowed and hyphenated, a phrase that hints at a way of working. The same name can also be written several ways over the years. Trade magazines may print it in lower case while the studio’s own site sets it in capitals, and a hyphen or a numeral can become a distinctive part of the mark.

The studio website is usually the main brand surface. It works as a portfolio, with full-screen video and case studies in front and the typography kept plain. Office cities are often written as short codes along the top of the page, and project credits, director rosters and archives are treated as part of the brand, because they show who made what and when.

These identities also change shape as the business changes. Studios open and close offices, split a film arm from an agency, or fold their work into new ventures under the original name. When reading them, look at how the name is set across the website, the credits and the trade press, how the studio lists its cities, and what it keeps from earlier eras in its archive.

A festival, a hub and dated projects.

Dogstudio’s story is tied to the KIKK Festival, the festival of digital and creative culture held in Namur. CCI Mag reported in January 2018 that Gilles Bazelaire set up the festival with Gaëtan Libertiaux a few months after the two founded Superbe, a company mixing digital and physical objects for interactive installations, in 2011. The same profile said Bazelaire was also behind TRAKK, a creative hub in Namur that opened in 2015. RTBF wrote in May 2022 that the KIKK Festival was born within Dogstudio’s orbit, and the studio’s website lists the festival among its featured projects from 2012 onwards.

Later projects appear in the press with dates. RTBF said in May 2022 that the studio’s developers built the digital version of the Tomorrowland music festival in the summer of 2020, and that its work centred on mobile applications and immersive websites. La DH named the Dubai world exposition among its immersive digital experiences, alongside the virtual Tomorrowland, and listed Google, Microsoft, Adobe and The New York Times among its clients. The studio’s own site, read in October 2026, lists featured work for Navy Pier in Chicago from 2018, the Museum of Science and Industry from 2015, the Kennedy Center in 2017 and the Royal Opera of Wallonia from 2016.

The way the studio describes itself has shifted over time. In 2012, its homepage, as archived by the Wayback Machine, called it a Belgian digital creative agency made up of designers, developers, music fans and self-described nerds. Its current site calls Dogstudio a multidisciplinary creative studio at the intersection of art, design and technology, working from offices in Belgium and Chicago.

For a design guide, Dogstudio shows how a studio can keep a small-city base and a plain one-word name while its client list and offices spread abroad. Compare B-Reel and Big Spaceship, two other digital studios in this collection. For this guide we use brick red, slate black and terracotta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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