Winter 2025
Michael Wolff, seagull
Michael Wolff
Wolff Olins
NB Studio
Alan Dye
Olly St John
Book design
Brand madness
Front matter
He recruited birds and foxes into branding. Now his close collaborators have made a book of his work. By Simon Esterson
Michael Wolff (b.1933), was the co-founder of pioneering London branding agency Wolff Olins, but there has never been a book of his work and life. For fifteen years, while working on projects together, Wolff and NB Studio partner Alan Dye have talked about making a book.
‘He’d come in with an envelope of stuff and we would have a cup of tea and talk,’ says Dye of their working method.
When NB, Wolff and editor Tom Lynham started talking to potential publishers – who had very different views about the content – and assembling material, they realised they would prefer to make the book under their full control; and that self-publishing through a Kickstarter campaign was the best route to raise the funds. By 2023 they had raised more than £44,000 from 495 backers.
In 1960s Britain, Wolff Olins won multiple D&AD awards and changed the way clients and designers thought about branding, with identities for companies such as Hadfields paints, Bowyers and BOC (British Oxygen Company).
Top. Cover by Charles Barsotti (1933-2014), New Yorker cartoonist and long-time Wolff collaborator.
Right: Wolff Olins painted BOC’s tankers red with a hazard stripe, 1964. ‘The trucks were their most visible asset,’ says Wolff.
Far more than just a logo and a ‘house style’, their designs had warmth. Their strategy emphasised that every aspect of a company’s actions was ‘branding’. Standard thinking now, Wolff Olins explored these ideas with Wolff as creative director and Wally Olins as managing director. ‘Wally was the business leader, I was the get it done genius,’ says Wolff. They had different personalities, ‘the seagull and the duck’, as Wolff describes their characters in the book, and that difference was the agency’s secret weapon until the differences became too much and they parted ways
[…]
Simon Esterson, art director of Eye, London
Read the full article in Eye no. 107 vol. 27, 2025
Wolff Olins created the Hadfields fox, seen on stationery, vans and their paint cans, 1967. ‘Animals … [are] more relatable than abstract symbols. They have an uncomplicated magnetism,’ says Wolff.
Bowyers made pies; Wolff Olins gave them a pop pie man, 1968. Illustration by Tony Meeuwissen (See ‘Chasing perfection’, Eye 89).
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