Studio Visit: Airside

2 Jul 2008 Category: Graphics, Worldwide

Studio Visit: Airside

Mysterious neon glimmer at the entry of London-based design company, Airside... What might be behind this?

Chic restaurants and cafés line the plush streets of London’s neighbourhood of Islington, and this is right where Airside, THE super sweet creative studio that handles all sorts of media works (such as publishing, website and TV ads) has recently relocated its headquarters to. Some of you might recognise the name from one of its founders, Fred Deakin also being a member of electro-pop duo Lemon Jelly. And you really must be familiar with the utterly cute video clips they did for the band! PingMag made a city trip to London for an office tour and a chat with their senior designer Henki Leung.

Written by Chiemi
Translated by Natsumi Yamane

Oh, it’s a fantastic studio. You have a great view of the Business Design Centre! When did you move here?

In May, this year. Before, we used to use a studio near here.


Starting with the top floor, a nice and bright meeting room.

And their old silk screen printing work we found in another room of the same floor.

“Which tea would you like?”: The kitchen drawer they showed us was filled with a great selection as if in a café!

Waste bins with cute illustrations for separating trash. Airside has a “Green Mark,” an environmental certification given to businesses with good environmental performance.

So it was a long-awaited relocation. Now, Airside was initially founded by three people, would you tell us more about that?

Yes, and the three founders are still working here as directors. Alex works mainly with videos, Fred with design and Nat does the interactive projects. As for the others, we currently have twelve full-time staff including designers, interactive designers and product managers, a new intern every three months and we also have some freelance staff too.


A corner for the freelance designers.

And immediately to the right is a mini-library full of design books.

A quick shot from the back of the work space for the full-time staff, who looks fully occupied with their work….

Toys lining the window sill next to Henki’s desk: He is apparently fond of Japanese things.

A peek at the sketchbook on the desk of one of the designers, Jamie….

Stitches, a group of handmade cuddly toys decorating the shelf: From left, Yves、Ray Ray (who’s apparently blind), George and Catdog.

Airside is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year! And you are working on a compilation book…

That’s right. The compilation is going to be bilingual in English and Japanese, extensively covering our works from old and new over more than 300 pages. In our early days, we used to do a lot of music related works such as designs for flyers and clubs including the Ministry of Sound. This one is a slightly later work, and it’s a poster for the Takeshi Kitano film, “Zatoichi.”


A flyer designed by one of the founders, Fred Deakin around ten years ago, which some of you might recognise.

The British poster for “Zatoichi” was also one of Airside’s designs.

What kind of projects do you mainly work on these days?

Media and clients vary each time but we do a lot of gallery related works. For example, we provided the website for the recent “China Design Now” exhibition at the V&A, the previous website for the White Cube Gallery and a work for the “Jam” exhibition held quite a long time ago in London and Tokyo.

Is there a particular style that Airside is making a point of maintaining? Colourful works with cute characters is my personal image of your work. However, looking at these old works, that doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case.

If anything, we are trying to make something different each time so I don’t think there is a fixed style. However, your colourful and cute image I think isn’t exactly wrong either.

A Coca-Cola ad with just “LOVE” written in front of the colourful rainbow background. The goal of this design was to make it look less like an advertisement but rather a simply beautiful visual.

A visual for Mika, a popular Lebanese singer in Europe. This work uses Mika’s favourite pictures he brought with him.

Lemon Jelly’s PV featuring cute heavy metal characters. Naturally, the clip was directed by Airside.

The website for the recently finished “China Design Now” exhibition at V&A. They also created a game to go with this website.

When you receive an offer, how do you decide the person in charge?

First of all, we have a meeting with everyone.

With everyone?

Yes. We exchange ideas together and either the person with the strongest idea becomes responsible for the project or the idea is passed on to be expanded by another member of staff. The length of time given to come up with the idea varies, we might have just thirty minutes or it can be a whole day.

That system sounds great in terms of internal communication. Also, taking up the strongest idea at any time sounds like you are always totally committed to the projects too! By the way, I was meaning to ask, but are these your business cards?

This is the colour proof of our business cards. The back is quite interesting…

A rare sight!: The colour proof of the Airside business cards.

The back of the already cut cards look like some Arabic text…

…but if you look at it vertically, you can see that it’s actually the profile of the members’ faces!

What an intriguing idea!

We’ve just finished the press pack to send to magazines and other media and these ones also come with a twist too.


When you open the back of the DVD case of their showreel…

…you can see that the name of the seasons on the spine are pre-printed so that the unnecessary ones can be marked out to save printing each time! Good idea!

Full of fun — as we imagined! What is important to you to keep being creative?

It has to be personal passion and working with equally passionate people. If I wasn’t passionate about creativity, I’d give up and be a farmer or something…

What’s Airside’s future plan…?

We would like to have a studio in Tokyo too! Then our colleagues in Japan can work on projects in Japanese hours and our British staff taking it over from there in British working hours! So we can finish them very quickly!

Indeed! (laughs) Henki, thank you for inviting us to your wonderful studio today!

62 Comments

  1. Henki is a god!

    Posted by: Anonymous on July 2nd, 2008 at 8:18 pm

  2. I don’t like him.

    Posted by: Guy on July 2nd, 2008 at 8:30 pm

  3. AIRSIDE ARE AN INCREDIBLE COLLECTIVE OF OUTSTANDINGLY TALENTED INDIVIDUALS

    Posted by: Lucy on July 2nd, 2008 at 8:32 pm

  4. Henki IS god!

    Posted by: Anonymous on July 2nd, 2008 at 9:04 pm

  5. I don’t think my comment went through! Lovely interview Henki… great look: American pop with bubbles.

    Matthew Rose / Paris, France

    Posted by: MATTHEW ROSE on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:02 pm

  6. i dont find them all that cool.. sorta amateuish…
    theres nothing fantastic about it…

    kader/singapore.

    Posted by: kader on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:35 pm

  7. very nice! fresh and unpretentious.

    Posted by: selena on July 3rd, 2008 at 12:19 am

  8. Nice work but his art looks stale and dated,

    Posted by: Hiroshi on July 3rd, 2008 at 4:59 am

  9. Excellent work Airside… You’re the Janet Jackson to my Paula Abdul.

    Posted by: Timothy on July 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 am

  10. Yeah their work isn’t so good, it’s just run of the mill, not bad, but not worth the airfare from Tokyo ;). Business cards are cool though.

    -South Australia

    Posted by: Joseph on July 3rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm

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    Posted by: Anonymous on July 4th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

  12. Love the new studio and logo.Airside excellence continues…..

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