The instinct to protect process is understandable. You spent years refining how you run discovery, how you structure a brand system, how you present to clients. Why give that away?
DixonBaxi just made the opposite argument — and they made it publicly, at a Nicer Tuesdays talk in London. The studio that built brand identities for Sky, Channel 4, and Amazon has been progressively opening up their process: first the “Be Brave” monograph, then Remix, a 500-page open-source book about how they actually work.
Their argument is not altruism. It is strategy.
Sharing process builds trust faster than showing portfolios
Most agencies compete on portfolio. The problem with portfolios is that every agency can claim credit for a successful rebrand — and clients have no way to evaluate how it happened.
When DixonBaxi published their process openly, something shifted. Prospective clients arrived already understanding how the studio thinks, what a brief should look like, how they handle conflict between strategy and aesthetics. Discovery conversations became shorter. Alignment happened earlier.
The insight: clients hire processes, not portfolios. A portfolio shows what you made. A process shows whether they can trust you to make something for them.
Open-sourcing forces you to actually have a system
There is a discipline that comes from writing things down for public consumption. Vague internal intuitions do not survive documentation. “We do a vibes-based creative review on week three” does not become a chapter in a monograph.
The studios that openly share their methodology tend to have cleaner internal operations — not because sharing improved the operation, but because documenting for an external audience exposed the gaps.
This is why the knowledge-sharing movement in branding is not just about marketing. It is about quality control. When your process is visible, inconsistency becomes visible too.
The single source of truth problem at the studio level
What DixonBaxi is describing at the knowledge level is the same problem that brand managers face with assets. Version drift. Multiple copies of the “real” process living in different people’s heads. New team members learning the wrong version from whoever onboarded them.
Brand agencies suffer from the same fragmentation they solve for clients. The methodology exists — in Slack threads, in old pitch decks, in the institutional memory of senior staff. Open-sourcing forces that knowledge into a single, navigable, shareable form.
The studios that do this well are not just more transparent. They are more consistent. The work they deliver to client number fifty looks more like the work they delivered to client number one.
TL;DR
Open-sourcing your agency knowledge is not giving away competitive advantage. It is converting tacit knowledge into structured, consistent practice — the same thing you do for your clients, applied to yourself.