Practice

Identities, strategy, sites, and print

Plan, Design, Build, Maintain.

DLN creates Identities, marketing strategies, brand redesigns and facelifts, websites and design for print.

Our Practice

We are a small, fiercely independent creative and technical practice operating from an old border farm situated between England and Scotland in the true Border Riever; Debateable Lands. We don’t work from a sleek city agency, and we don’t subscribe to fashionable group-think. Instead, we live mostly off-grid, maintain our own land, and build world-class digital infrastructure for both local and global businesses from the ground up.

The Landscape & The Graft

Our studio is surrounded by a working agricultural community. This environment dictates how we think and act. We live mostly off the grid, which means we design, manage, and maintain our own power and living systems. When you are largely responsible for your own energy and infrastructure, you develop a deep, uncompromising respect for logic, efficiency, and system architecture. We bring that exact same accountability to the global websites we build and host.

We believe in being active participants in our community, not observers. Every season, we roll up our sleeves to help our neighbours with lambing and land maintenance. Ewan combines his digital expertise with life as a farm worker, climber, and cook. This dual reality keeps our feet firmly on the ground. We don’t hide behind agency buzzwords or over-complicate strategy. We treat business challenges the same way we treat a broken fence or a long night in the lambing shed: you diagnose the problem, you prepare the right tools, and you get on with the job.

Right now, we are in the middle of renovating our old farm barn into a dedicated creative retreat—a space designed for deep focus, clear thinking, and strategic collaboration, watched over by our studio Labrador, Storm.

Tested Resilience

Our practice isn’t just shaped by the land; it has been tested by real-life adversity. A catastrophic accident nearly resulted in the loss of sight in a right eye. What followed was a gruelling series of major operations, a long recovery, and a choice.

Design Lab North’s rebirth is the definitive product of that fight back.

When we tell our clients, particularly fast-moving, high-stakes US businesses, that we are resilient, it isn’t a marketing tagline. We have stared down a life-altering crisis and built our way out of it. That unbreakable fighting spirit is exactly what we bring to defending, scaling, and securing your brand’s digital presence. When deadlines are tight and deployments are complex, we do not fold.

Wired to the World

There is a powerful contrast at the heart of our practice. While our daily lives are rooted in the soil, our work operates at the absolute forefront of global brand identity system expertise. As evidenced by four years working at the forefront of digital adoption.

We are award-winning designers and marketeers who lead high-stakes digital transformations, primarily for US organisations. Our clients choose us because our small size makes us agile, our academic rigour keeps us leading-edge, and our Northern remote-community attitude makes us exceptionally reliable. They get world-class design for print, packaging, and screen, married to an ironclad technical infrastructure—delivered with absolute transparency and zero fluff.

Dave Kirkwood

Dave Kirkwood

Co-Founder | Award-Winning Designer & Marketeer

Woodsman, dog trainer and conservationist

Dave’s career began in London, cutting his teeth at elite design institutions Peter Leonard Associates and Cartlidge Levene. Moving to Manchester, he founded his own successful practice before dedicating time to passing on the craft. As a qualified educator, he taught graphic design and built an industry-recognized type design and brand identity curriculum from the ground up.

His deep commercial acuity was solidified as a Partner at a prominent Manchester marketing agency, where he specialised in designing and scaling new businesses, including the rapid acceleration of major digital platforms like LateRooms.

Driven by a desire to return home, Dave brought his practice back North to the Anglo-Scottish border. Over his career, his work has secured prestigious design and marketing awards, earned industry publication, and seen him commissioned by bodies like Lancashire County Council to provide strategic brand and marketing expertise to fast-growth startups. A respected voice in design philosophy, Dave has lectured extensively, hosted major creative events, and spoken at numerous international symposiums.

Today, Dave channels this lifetime of high-stakes strategy, academic rigour, and award-winning design experience into leading cutting-edge digital adoption for global and US clients, directly from his off-grid border studio.

Ewan Kirkwood

Ewan Kirkwood

Co-Founder | Lead Developer & Technical Architect

Outdoorsman still helping with lambing once a year

Ewan is a driven, self-taught technical expert whose capability is rooted in real-world problem solving. He built his reputation from the ground up, engineering robust online presences and high-performance e-commerce engines for independent businesses and regional organisations. Known for his meticulous attention to detail, Ewan specialises in building intuitive, frictionless user interfaces (UI/UX) backed by exceptionally secure, high-utility backend dashboards.

Bringing this deep, practical development expertise into the family practice, Ewan transformed Design Lab North’s technical capabilities. He translates complex brand and business goals into flawless, reliable digital execution, ensuring every website and online store is engineered for absolute resilience.

Selected Experience

We maintain deep, long-term relationships with organisations that value straight talking and technical precision. Our practice spans global enterprises in the world of fast-scaling US tech firms (largely under NDA), and boundary-pushing, local and national, independent brands.

The work

For the last ten years that work has sat directly with businesses, organisations, and multi-nationals — and with their agencies, under NDA — on brand strategy and how the brand behaves online. Further detail can be given under NDA.