Frog makes the jump
In choosing its new European base of operations, frog design reduced its shortlist to two creative cities: London and Amsterdam. In the end, Amsterdam won out because of its affordability. Today, the frog office occupies the top storey of the city’s Y-tech building, a beautifully restored industrial landmark.
“The real strength of this location wasn’t apparent until we got down to business here,” says Cees van Dok, executive creative director and joint head of frog design Europe. “Our clients come to us with complex innovation problems. In order to tackle those projects, you have to be working in an environment that challenges you to take things to the limit. Amsterdam does that.”
Designing experiences
Frog founder Hartmut Esslinger originally set up his company in Germany, but moved to San Francisco on the eve of the digital revolution. He quickly met Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who invited the industrial designer to develop a design language for his brand. “Basically, that’s the design DNA of a product series,” Van Dok explains. “Digitisation brought an important new dimension to design.”
For many of today’s products, the user interface and software determine the customer experience. Van Dok describes frog’s work as developing “the interfaces between what technology can do, what the user can handle, and what the manufacturer wants the design to convey in terms of emotional brand perception.” So frog’s 550 people develop plural interfaces for products from clients like HP, Logitech, Microsoft, Yahoo! and MTV. They include industrial and graphic designers, software developers, technicians, psychologists, sociologists and trend researchers.
The next Google?
Two years ago, frog decided it needed a northern European base to add to its Munich and Milan offices. Amsterdam has a good concentration of European and head offices, so offers an excellent business network. From Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, the rest of the world is within easy reach. Moreover, frog design is at the centre of a growing cluster of user-experience design specialists in the Amsterdam Area. Adaptive Path, Amsterdam Living Lab, Backbase and Designlink are among the other local and international companies active in this area.
“We have numerous requests from companies in the user experience market that want to get in on the game here,” says Marco de Vries of amsterdam inbusiness. He names the local knowledge infrastructure as a key driver of this trend. Frog’s Cees van Dok notes that Amsterdam has all the ingredients required to produce “the next Google”. Meanwhile, his own office here is exceeding growth expectations. “I’d estimate that our operations here will double in both scale and turnover within a couple of years,” he says.
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