How Studio Dial turns tactile generative experiments into brand tools — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Studio Dial bridges physical craft and digital tools to make identities, campaigns and experimental websites, working as a small, collaborative team that treats code as a tactile medium. The London-based practice draws on both sides of founder Natalia Witwicka’s experience, including branding at Pentagram and global AI campaigns with Google Creative Lab and DeepMind. In this interview, we talk about how freelancing led to starting the studio faster than she anticipated, how the team lets mistakes bring a human quality into digital work, why she is drawn to designers with unconventional portfolios that sit on the margins of traditional design, and what it means to run a female-led practice.

TBI Hi Natalia, how are things?

NW Thanks so much for having me! It’s been great, I really enjoy London around this time of year, and we’ve got some very cool projects coming up that we’re excited to share. Always busy, but better to be busy at midnight than free at noon.

We live in a world searching for a human, tactile touch.

TBI How would you sum up what Studio Dial does and what it stands for?

NW Studio Dial is a space to research and experiment with making generative tools that become brands and seeing how far we can push it, while making things that feel unique, human and tech-forward at the same time. By generative, we don’t just mean code, TouchDesigner or AI. We also mean working in systematic methods by hand.

Our work ranges from fully strategy and research-grounded brand identities to seasonal campaigns to experimental websites – always playful, unafraid to mix media, moving seamlessly between making by hand and digitally.

More than ever, we live in a world searching for a human, tactile touch, even as our digital lives grow more intertwined with it. As the generation that grew up on the internet, it feels really natural to mix the two. What excites us is the space where neither side, hand-making nor generative technology, could exist without the other, like a sharp vector meeting a handmade, painterly texture, and then glitching, and where the habits of prototyping by hand carry over into how we make things digitally.

TBI Before Studio Dial, you built your career inside other people’s studios and teams. What did you take from those years into your own practice?

NW My two biggest roles were at Pentagram and Google. That mix is exactly why I started Studio Dial – it lives somewhere between those two worlds. I couldn’t choose between the world of branding and the world of technology.

Pentagram gave me solid grounding in building timeless brands, and I learned so much about craft from Marina Willer, who let me experiment with different ways of making rather than a traditional branding process.

Working with Google, things move super fast, with campaigns lasting a year at most, demanding flexibility and quick thinking, working in sprints and quickly prototyping. With DeepMind, we are constantly testing new tools and being encouraged to use AI as a superpower for creatives, which made us really good at working with it and trying to push the boundaries of what’s possible, making things that a couple of years back just wouldn’t have been feasible to execute.

TBI What made this the right moment to start something of your own?

NW While freelancing, I kept landing direct-client projects and loved the freedom to fold my own experimental practice into the work. I kept choosing those opportunities over agency work, always with the aim to eventually be independent, but that happened naturally, faster than I anticipated. I never said no to any opportunities. I ended up needing help, and that’s when I found Nikita Steinberg late last year while reviewing portfolios at Creative Lives in Progress. She turned out to be the best collaborator, sharing my interest in working between fine art and technology, and she was our first full-time hire at Studio Dial.

TBI The studio builds flexible frameworks for the brands it works with. What does one of those look like in practice?

NW On a recent project for Google DeepMind, AI.Exchange, the Google team needed their own identity while also hosting exhibitions that needed to feel separate but still branded. We built a tool with such a wide range of outputs that we created a literal slider, from exhibition-led to brand-led. The tool is wide enough to experiment with and make fresh content for years to come, but can also snap back precisely and sophisticatedly to be more brand-led when needed. Inspired by the Rubik’s Cube and the Exquisite Corpse game, we were able to make something that wouldn’t be possible without both hands-on prototyping, code and AI. The brand we made can scale, take the shape of exhibitions, functions like a little universe that you can zoom in and out of to view specific parts of it. Without the coded tool, it wouldn’t be possible to easily create these 3D assets by anyone from their marketing team, which needs it often for mundane things such as invites and decks. So the tool helps to maintain the identity easily after launch, almost as a digital keepsake with brand guidelines built in.

TBI As you see it, working with technology doesn’t have to produce work that looks ‘techy.’ How do you keep an imperfect human touch in the work?

NW Sometimes we make things by hand and manipulate them with generative technology like code, TouchDesigner, AI, to make something fresh; other times fully digital work is built through a process that feels like a stream of consciousness, allowing mistakes to bring in that human quality. It’s a dialogue between us and technology, a constant push and pull that’s built around creative friction and responding to it. That dialogue leaves a trail of humanness – an unmistakable error, something neither we nor the computer could have made alone – like a handmade texture applied to a digital sculpture. And then it becomes even more interesting when you encounter an issue, a glitch or make a mistake and find new solutions you hadn’t thought of before.

TBI The studio treats code as a tactile medium and mixes it with analogue processes. How does that play out on a project?

NW For Swift Bars, we made ink drawings representing each flavour in an almost synesthetic way, then digitised them into coded 3D swirls, creating something completely new out of the original hand-drawn marks. For Azra, research into traditional Afghan textiles and the cloud-band motif led to a generative tool that keeps producing new textile-inspired patterns. For our Case for Cities project, experiments visually portraying growth resolved into skyline silhouettes with gradients like an evolving sunset. It’s always a push and pull between making by hand and making digitally, then applying our strategic and technical knowledge on how to make great brands and systematising it.

TBI How do you work out which new tools are worth keeping?

NW All of them are worth keeping. We hold a giant library of half-baked experiments that later become stepping stones toward something new because keeping every experiment is how we learn. Every tool is also custom to the client: when building an identity, we usually present multiple routes, each with a different generative visual approach. That’s the kind of branding we want to make – an identity that can constantly reinvent itself, never be the same and is never boring. The process is incremental – start with an idea, build toward it step by step, and sometimes allow happy accidents to shape the way there.

There aren’t enough women in this industry, especially in leadership.

TBI Studio Dial is a female-led practice. What does that mean for the way you run it?

NW There aren’t enough women in this industry, especially in leadership. I was very lucky to always work for amazing women leaders like Marina Willer at Pentagram and Gaby Pearl at Google DeepMind, but that’s not common and something I consciously sought out. When people push back and say there are plenty of women in leadership in design, I ask how many female-founded businesses they’ve worked for in their career.

TBI When it comes to freelancers and colleagues, how do you decide who to bring in on a project?

NW We want to deliberately hire people from different backgrounds and with different skills – from 3D modelling to projection mapping, because collaborating with people unlike yourselves makes work you couldn’t make alone. Beyond that, good taste is the standard. Craft can be taught, but an aesthetic eye can’t. It comes from passion, from always observing and looking closely at design. Something I have noticed recently is that the most interesting portfolios are, to me, the ones that have been rejected by other studios for not being perfect for the industry, a little bit too artistic and not enough pure traditional design skill. It’s easy to imagine someone with a portfolio full of branding and typography as part of your team. But what happens when you hire the people who remained at the peripheries of communication design through portfolios of sculptures, games, film or performance art? They are often the strongest conceptual thinkers, so when you then give them the tools to make things digitally and structure it in the form of a branding/design delivery, you land on something very special.

Craft can be taught, but an aesthetic eye can’t.

TBI What would you like Studio Dial to look like in five years?

NW Growing the team, taking on bigger projects, and continuing to play with technology to find new, unconventional ways of making things, merging research and client work even further to push into that flex between human imperfection and generative technology. I’d love to work with more brands that are cultural but techy at the same time – fashion and music especially. Really, it all comes back to wanting to make great work with innovative companies who are open to new ways of working and don’t want bland design that looks like everything else. That tension is the whole purpose of Studio Dial, and five years from now I want us leaning into it more, not less.