A four-person studio can spend a surprising amount of energy trying to look like one person. Same tone. Same references. Same visual reflexes. OnePlus Studio is built around almost the opposite move.
Its four members met at university. Their loose collective gradually became a studio, but their references never collapsed into one approved taste. In a direct interview with Creative Boom, they point to hip-hop, graffiti, arthouse film, records, travel and individual obsessions as material that keeps entering the work.1
The useful part is what they refuse to do with that mixture. Rather than filing it down into a single house style, they describe an interest in the collision between those worlds, and in a degree of healthy friction inside the team.1
That structure also shapes the beginning of projects. The studio describes a deliberately slower phase of digging into the client’s story before rushing to produce forms. This is not presented as workshop theatre. It is a way to avoid solving the wrong problem too quickly.1
For the identity of tapas restaurant Balay, the studio says it valued being able to treat branding as a complete system rather than a logo plus a template. It connects that freedom directly to the space it was given to investigate first.1
It would be easy to turn this into the vague rule that disagreement makes design better. The interview does not prove that. It documents something narrower and more useful: OnePlus has designed its process so differences between collaborators are not removed too early.
Many small teams create coherence by subtraction. Anything that feels too unlike the rest gets shaved off until a recognizable voice remains. Here, coherence seems to come from a shared protocol instead: look for longer, argue, mix the references, then decide together what survives.
The direction still exists. It simply appears after the materials have collided, not before.