Oil Often’s two partners are Philippa Baile and Duncan Youel, former members of the Clerkenwell design collective M2. The studio is based in the south London Borough of Croydon, where the town centre’s transformation from riot-torn town into “London’s Third City” continues at a startling pace.

The Company works across several design disciplines for various market sectors and has recently completed award-winning book designs for Moseley Road Inc. in New York, and museum display projects for Tamworth Castle and Shugborough Hall with Museums Consultant Tyra Till. Other recent projects of note have been the Sensing Sculpture show for Wolverhampton Art Gallery with curator Carol Thompson; publicity materials for ex-VTOL choreographer Mark Murphy; major tour publicity for East End composer Tony Haynes’s Grand Union Orchestra; branding and marketing materials for various urban renewal projects with Regeneration Consultant Juneed Asad, notably the Opportunity Sutton and Green Sector Network conferences in the London Borough of Sutton and City Hall London, respectively; and The Power of Story, made with photographer and filmmaker Keith Lillis—a series of intimate film shorts featuring psychiatric nurses working at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

With books for Thunder Bay, Portland Press and Weldon Owen on the West Coast of the United States, Elephant Book Company in Spitalfields, Heinemann in Oxford and Heritage Editorial in Cambridge, our client base has a broad geographical distribution. Other display shows have included the Stanley Kubrick Season at the Barbican Centre, The Excitement of Time at the Royal Society, and two permanent exhibitions, the Gladstone Potteries Museum and The Changing Face of Walsall, these last three in collaboration with Tyra Till.

Older projects that retain a special significance for us are the successful branding and exhibition displays for the newly-built Thiepval Visitor Centre on the Somme; our Somme90 book and DVD pack, published worldwide by Dorling Kindersley in 2006; our vox pop film shorts for the Urbis Museum in Manchester; London Waste Plc corporate branding and livery; publication and magazine design for the University of the Arts London; and VTOL Dance Company tour publicity. Most of these can be found on the site.