You’ve Seen Studio Round’s Work – Even if You Didn’t Realise It

It’s difficult to walk around inner-city Melbourne without passing something Studio Round has touched. Cumulus Inc, Gimlet, Marion and the rest of Trader House’s venues. Etta, Baker Bleu, Koko Black. The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Theatre Company, Lido Cinemas. The Fitzroy-based design practice has shaped the visual identity of some of Melbourne’s most recognisable restaurants and arts institutions.

Founded in 2002 by partners in work and life Michaela Webb and Robert Nudds, Round has grown into one of Melbourne’s most influential creative studios, combining design and strategy.

“We’ve both worked in different places in the design industry where [only] one of those assets was really strong,” Webb tells Broadsheet. “We wanted to create something where both of those things actually had equal weighting.”

Originally from New Zealand, the pair spent five years working in London before setting up their own practice in Melbourne. Nudds says they “literally knew one person in Melbourne at that time”. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh my god that was so naive’ – thinking that we could come to a new place and start our own studio,” Webb adds. But success came fast.

The studio landed the NGV as its first major client, rebranding the international gallery on St Kilda Road while it was closed ahead of Fed Square’s opening. The business went “from two people who had no work to two people who employed seven other people,” Nudds says. The studio now has a team of 20 working from a swish factory-turned-office in Fitzroy. At any one time, it takes on about 15 to 20 projects.

Round’s focus on art and hospitality is a natural mix of Webb and Nudds’s respective passions and expertise. In London, Webb worked at global design giant Wolff Olins on the identity of all the Tate galleries, along with other arts projects. Nudds trained as a chef, ran his own restaurant in New Zealand and then moved into strategy for retail food businesses.

For many venues, Round develops an “experience philosophy”, which Nudds refers to as “a playbook that can help them codify how they want to operate as a restaurant or as a brand”.

“What is the experience we want to create for food, for drinks, for service, for the environment? How do we want people to feel? We’ll articulate all of that and put it together so that there’s a kind of bible,” Webb explains.

At Brunswick East wine bar Etta , that playbook, created more than 10 years ago, still guides the operation today. “We were talking to Hannah [Green] the other day as we’re working on Daphne ,” Webb says, referring to Green’s new venue. “I looked at that early document where [we’d] done the whole philosophy of what the place was going to be about and what the strategy was going to be – [they] really haven’t deviated.”

Many of Studio Round’s clients have been on the books for more than two decades, including restaurateur Andrew McConnell, who first worked with the pair in 2005 on the now-closed restaurant Three, One, Two.

Over 20 years, Webb and Nudds have collaborated with McConnell on the naming, brand identity, campaign signage, wayfinding, packaging and digital output of his entire stable of venues. In some instances, like that of seminal Flinders Lane diner Cumulus Inc , the duo worked on the proposal and tender to get the site before the venue even had a name.

Similarly, for CBD hotel Melbourne Place (now Hyde Melbourne Place), Round was involved at the earliest stages of conception, from working on room and lighting mock-ups to the design of funding documents to help secure capital. Elements like signage, staff uniforms and room merchandise were “the last tiny little bit, but the visible part,” Nudds notes.

More recently, Round led the design and development of the brand and communications for Chadstone’s new $485 million Market Pavilion , a five-year project for the studio that entailed positioning strategy and developing leasing presentations and consumer campaigns, along with brand identity and other marketing assets.

“As markets have become more competitive, clients are far more aware of the need for better brand positioning and better brand storytelling,” Nudds says. “When we first started out, brand identities were basically 2D. Now brands have a much clearer voice and need to move across a greater variety of channels all the time.”

Up next? The team is working on the identity of McConnell’s new restaurant on Crossley Street in the old Becco site, and two new Melbourne hotels, including a pod concept designed by Flack Studio.

round.com.au