Format-3
Directing a studio of designers hired for craft, wherever they were.
Format-3 is a digital product studio started in 2023. I was asked to help build it in its first months and became Partner, then CPO, running design and product. Everyone on the team was a designer, hand-picked for craft. My job was the direction: one vision held across product, motion, sound and story, through ten industry wins between 2023 and 2026.
Highlights
- Craft over location: designers hand-picked worldwide
- One vision, directed across product, motion and sound
- Designers embedded inside the client's own team
- One standard across every client, reviewed daily
- The build owned with engineering partners, by designers
The seat
Format-3 started in 2023, as the agency market headed into a downturn, on an observation its founder and I shared. The agencies that could do real craft were small and hard to scale. The agencies that could scale were templated, and craft was the first thing to go. Clients paid a premium either way.
A month in, the founder asked me to come and help build it. I came in to run design and product, and the titles followed the work. A chief strategy officer joined later. The team gathering around the studio was designers through and through, and the one thing it needed was direction.
I held one vision across every discipline in the room, product, motion, 3D, sound and story, and directed each person until what was on the screen matched it.
The studio
The team was hired for craft wherever it was: Nigeria, Morocco, Poland, Slovakia, Glasgow, London, New York, Nashville, the Middle East and South America. Every one of them was a designer. The studio owned the build toward its clients and did it with engineering partners who worked alongside us, so the operating seat was design from the first conversation to the last release.
The studio worked from inside the client's own product, engineering and business teams rather than across a table from them. I reviewed the designers' work every day, whatever the client, held one standard across all of it, and presented the work and the reasoning behind it to the people signing off, from a practice's two founding physicians to a streaming service's leadership.
The direction
Direction at Format-3 meant holding the whole pipeline. Motion graphics, 3D, sound design, the interface, the product and the story they told had to be one thing, and I was the one person in the studio who could carry that thread from the vision to the final cut. A designer beside me could model, animate and edit as well as anyone I have worked with; what the work needed on top of that was someone holding the story, and the studio sold roughly 20% more creative work to its existing clients on the strength of it.
Every frame in that reel began as a vision in one head and passed through hands on five continents before it reached a screen. In 2025 the Elite Business 100 named the studio British Bank Start-up of the Year.
Four of those engagements are on this site under their own names: Pendragon Cycle, Bentkey, Paradigm Health and April Knit Studio.
A studio of designers, working with engineering partners on the build.
