Oilinwater approaches branding like an investigator, to build visual systems from rigorous research

It is quite charming to hear the backstory to Oilinwater’s studio space upon a visit to founder Matthieu Gorissen. Standing high above Brussels on one of the top floors of an old industrial building, we chat about what it looked like all those years ago when Matthieu was just at the beginning of building his independent practice. Formerly a carpet factory – or there is a lesser known urban legend that says car manufacturer Michelin, annoyed at their tyres not being used on Citroën’s first model, had bought the plot just to spite André Citroën – there are some of the usual details to a studio’s startup story. “I remember there was no heating for a while”, Matthieu tells us, “it was just me and my first Mac in this big open space.” Once Matthieu’s apartment and studio all in one, the homely space now houses the small, dedicated team of designers that make up Oilinwater, a creative studio that specialises in branding, naming and graphic design.

The studio’s name – Oilinwater – is one of the first things Matthieu addresses. Initially an idea he uncovered from a textbook belonging to his father, who was a chemist, the designer adopted it as somewhat of a label to work under in the first days of his freelance career. “It was not a symbolic choice,” he shares, nor was it preparation for what would eventually become a larger studio. “Often people say to me ‘oh because you are different from the mass, you don’t mix’. But that wasn’t really it. I simply quite liked the name,” he says. The designer’s first official project as Oilinwater was quite fittingly a visual identity for one of Brussels’ smallest independent cinemas Styx – a project that got the studio’s work in the cultural sector started, collaborating with institutions, museums and events across the city to build lasting design systems for their identity and scenography.

A more recent project in this sector saw the studio collaborate with Maison Hannon, a museum and masterpiece of art nouveau architecture that sits at the centre of Brussels. Oilinwater developed a visual identity for the museum that featured an ornate logo mark based on every visitor’s first interaction with the space: the shape of the building’s door handle. In another visual system for Picturesque, an exhibition of Belgian architect Jules Buyssens’ at Civa, the team developed motifs of organic forms that were taken from Buyssens’ own landscaping to inform cut-outs in the display’s build and surrounding print ephemera. This attention to space and context is a thread that surfaces in all of the studio’s projects, and is often a product of Matthieu’s unending curiosity instilled in a thorough approach to research, ideas and observation.

On his creative process, the designer shares that at the outset of a project, he’s always felt that “the idea exists, that it’s out there somewhere. You just have to go and find it. It’s like an investigation.” This role of the detective is something that defines Oilinwater’s almost scientific approach to these kinds of cultural commissions. Perhaps a passover from Matthieu’s background in advertising, working as part of the team at Publicis for the better part of five years, the studio has always been very concept-led from its start. “I don’t feel like I can just take a ready-made solution like a template that trendy studios seem to have mastered perfectly”, he shares. “I actually see creation as quite a painful process. Until I find the idea, I feel frustrated, panicked, I’m in a heightened state of alert.”

Sometimes, on the odd occasion, as creatives all know, you can get pretty lucky with ideas. In a recent project for Belgium’s largest fine food store Rob The Gourmets’ Market, the studio took on the packaging design for its first craft beer collaboration with Brussels Brewery En Stoemelings. “In the case of Rob beer, the architecture of the brewery’s building was so strong that it seemed unavoidable to me, there was no need for research, the idea seemed to be right there in front of me”, Matthieu says.

Adjacent to this visual identity work, a large part of the studio’s practice surrounds something seemingly quite niche: naming. “Here too, we work in an almost academic, scientific way,” Matthieu shares. But instead of visual motifs and images we investigate linguistics, etymology, art history, and literature.” Most important of all is finding a name for brands and projects that “tells their story”, says Matthieu.

While it’s clear the designer was initially drawn to graphic design for print and publishing, the value of storytelling has always stuck with the studio over the years no matter what tools they find themselves working on: “motion design, social first-identities, branding and now AI has arrived,” Matthieu says. “You have to be able to master and offer all these areas of expertise to your clients if you want to survive as an independent studio. I find that exciting,” he ends, “but despite the impression that the number of media and techniques to master has increased considerably, we’ve always recognised that finding a strong idea, a coherent narrative to tell, is still at the heart of what we do, and that’s what matters most.”