Hybrid Design and Super7: Monster Designers
Brian Flynn and Dora Drimalas, the husband-and-wife core of San Francisco-based Hybrid Design, have created a monster — a three-headed one, to be exact.
First there’s Hybrid Design’s main studio, which handles branding and design projects for such clients as Nike and Converse. Then there’s Hybrid-Home, an offshoot that creates and distributes decorative housewares. Finally there’s Super7: a popular store, magazine, and website devoted to Japanese and Japanese-inspired toys, art, books, accessories, and apparel, some of which Flynn and Drimalas design and manufacture themselves.
For this creative duo, it all seems manageable, thanks to their complementary design styles, nonstop work ethic, and relentless attention to detail — and of course, a studio full of Macs.
Two Heads, Three Businesses
“Dora is — I don’t want to say methodical, but she plans it all out,” says Flynn. “Everything’s on a schedule, everything’s organized. It’s reflected in her design style. You can tell when projects are her lead, because they’re much more Swiss-oriented. On the other side, I’m — “
“Brian is the mad scientist,” Drimalas puts in. “Brian has more sketchbooks than anybody I’ve ever seen. Every square inch of them is filled with a little idea, a little character, something he’s written down. He’s always taking chances. And I’m like, ‘Hey, come back to earth!’”
“That’s the complement,” Flynn agrees. “I push her a little bit further, and she reminds me of reality.”
With their combined strengths, Drimalas and Flynn are able to handle an impressive range of design projects, from corporate communications to textile design to manufacturing toy monsters. And these days, their creative worlds are starting to overlap.
“More and more, it seems like our Super7 work is influencing clients’ decisions in the Hybrid world,” says Drimalas. “Super7 is the laboratory where we take chances. We’ll make something for the store, like this wallpaper we did — a client saw it, and the next thing we knew, we were doing wallpaper for their retail installations.”
“I like making stuff,” Flynn says. “And with Super7, Hybrid-Home, and to a great degree Hybrid Design, it really comes down to making things you think would be fun to do. Well, what’s stopping you from making them? It’s just a matter of following through.”
From Watches to Swooshes
Drimalas and Flynn met in the early 1990s as students at the University of North Texas. When Drimalas saw Flynn’s design work, she changed her major to graphic design, even though she was just a few credits shy of her film degree.
After graduation, Flynn went to work at the Dallas headquarters of Fossil, where he created limited-edition watches. “Brian did all the monster watches, like Frankenstein and Godzilla,” notes Drimalas. The following year, when a headhunter tapped Flynn to work for Nike, he moved to Portland, Oregon. Drimalas joined him on a summer internship, and was soon offered a Nike job as well.
The pair spent five years at Nike, but in 2000 decided to relocate to San Francisco, where Drimalas taught branding and other design topics at the Academy of Art and CCA while Flynn worked on freelance projects.
Flynn launched Hybrid Design in 2001. “I realized that people weren’t comfortable giving a solo freelancer the kinds of projects I wanted to work on,” he says. “They like the security of having a studio to back up the concept. I hired our first employee in 2001, and then kept building the business until it was big enough for Dora to leave her job and come over.”
Today Hybrid Design has a staff of eight. Super7 employs seven more, while Hybrid-Home relies on the skills of the Hybrid Design staff.
Hybrid Design
Hybrid Design creates print, web, retail, and other design projects in addition to helping companies define and implement their brands. Among their recent projects: a redesign of art and culture magazine Juxtapoz; a rebranding of hypebeast.com, an online arbiter of street fashion and culture; and a series of textile designs for Converse shoes.
One of Hybrid Design’s biggest clients is Nike. “We’re working on stuff for them for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing,” says Flynn. “We did the same thing for them four years ago for the Athens Olympics, and in 2006 for the World Cup.”
“We’re also rebranding Nike’s business site,” Drimalas says. “It includes everything from company history to industrial relations stories to careers. If you want to know something about Nike, this is where you go.”
Over the past few years, Nike has also relied on Hybrid Design for annual reports, press kits, retail displays, and numerous branding projects, such as a wordmark for materials featuring Nike endorser LeBron James.
Hybrid-Home
Since 2003, Hybrid-Home has produced thousands of decorative pillows, available in over a dozen designs, plus limited-edition silk-screened prints.
