Sometimes when you put something in brackets (or parentheses in this case, for the pedants) it’s a way of marking it out as a digression; an interesting little nugget nested within a longer sentence. (As happened in the previous sentence.) (Woah – it’s just happened again.) It’s like a low voice getting your attention in a noisy room, and I don’t mind that.

No, I’m not Swedish. I’ve only recently met my first genuine Swedes, and they were very impressive, let me tell you.

I picked it for the name partly because it’s a fun word in the Australian context. A bit daggy in a Dapto RSL way. When we redesigned the logo in 2024, we dropped the diacritical marks to be more faithful to the Australian way of using the word, rather than the Swedish which had become a bit of a red herring.

But it’s also a good word because it suggests the idea of choice; that out of a whole range of design capabilities we offer, clients are able to pick and choose what is appropriate for their needs. And these days ‘smorgasbord’ also references the wide cast of skilled collaborators we work with, whose talents we call on from project to project.

Our Smorgasborders are what you could call a ‘distributed’ workforce. They’re specialists. They live all over the place. But some of them do live nearby, and they’re the ones who come to the studio. Working face-to-face whenever possible is important. The same goes for working with clients. It adds so much more.

Watch this space. As a side note, I’m looking forward to having an opportunity to exploit the artificiality of AI imagery once the right brief comes along. Something that makes use of AI’s talent for pastiche.

We ran one recently for the global team of a tech company at an island resort off the coast of Queensland. It was a real challenge to plan: how do you take a process that’s usually only run with about 8 people and scale it up so it runs successfully for 66? (The answer: be clever about balancing individual input with tasks that can be handled by smaller teams.)

We’re good at helping business owners discover what’s unique about what they’re doing, and then translating that into the best visual assets and messages. The attention economy is very real. We help them stand out in today’s sea of ‘shiny beige’, so potential customers and potential talent will notice them.

We’re not bound by the constraints that hobble the bigger brand agencies. We don’t only talk to marketing departments – we know how face-to-face business gets done. We know what works.

And we keep doing it because nothing is as special as the best moments. Like when a presentation we’ve designed lands a client a big chunk of work. Or hearing the snap of the plastic wrap coming off their first ever box of business cards. That smell of fresh ink. The twinkle in their eye. There’s just nothing like it.