Most of Winnipeg’s design studios are concentrated in the historic Exchange District, just north of Portage and Main. But when the principals of Guppy Graphic Design decided to find a new space three years ago, they chose an empty storefront in the city’s rundown core. “Downtown Winnipeg has had a huge problem with crime and businesses moving away, but we feel downtown is fantastic,” says Craig Medwyduk, one of the studio’s founding partners. Not only did the location keep the studio’s overhead low, it kept it close to city’s arts organizations, which were some of its earliest clients. With more companies moving back downtown today, including the likes of Rogers and Manitoba Hydro, Medwyduk says Guppy is well placed for the future. “A lot of larger businesses are starting to move down here, and I think they like that we’re downtown, too.”

When Medwyduk and partners Bill Crossman and Dave Champion-Taylor decided to open Guppy in 2000, they were less concerned with real estate than with getting face time with their clients, which was lacking in their work at one of the city’s bigger studios. “It was that whole middle person, who had no background in arts or anything, that just wasn’t working for us,” says Medwyduk. Today, the studio employs six young designers and three support staff, which is as big as the partners want to get. “We’ve seen the great studios in the city get really big and fall apart. We’re at a really great, manageable size right now. We can output a huge amount of work in a really short time because of our fantastic team.”

Guppy is a full-service studio that focuses on creating simple, colourful work that is alive and fun. “It’s about not filling [your design] with a bunch of useless stuff that has nothing to do with the end message. It’s keeping it totally on target and knowing who people are trying to speak to,” explains Medwyduk. Being small and working in a small market such as Winnipeg enables the designers to also take risks, which is why they do a lot of their own copywriting and photography. “If somebody asks if you can do something, you say yes. And then you get on the phone to ask somebody how you do it,” says Medwyduk.

One of the studio’s recent experiments was to open a retail shop, selling shirts, hats and patches. “We have these graphics that we’d just do on our own. So we’d do shirts and give them away at holidays, and people would be like, ‘I’ve got a buddy who wants to buy one,’” says Medwyduk. He says response has been good so far and work has already begun on a fall line of hoodies and jackets. He says the freedom to be able to experiment and try new things is what makes Guppy stand out from the crowd when wooing big clients. “It makes you hungry, working here,” he says. “When we work with a Toronto client, we’re like, ‘Let’s fuckin’ give it everything and put those Toronto firms to shame.’”