By Susan Davis

Fourteen years ago, the Attik was a seven-man shop in the not-terribly-famous-town of Huddersfield in northern England. And the firm's clients weren't terribly glamorous: They did creative work, yes, but it was for clients like Dunlop (tennis ball manufacturer) and Riley's (billiard cloth manufacturer), both prominent sports for the Brits, but not, perhaps, the sexiest of subjects.

Now the Attik has added four other studios - in London, New York, Sydney, and San Francisco. Its not-so-terrible clients include HBO, CNN, Newsweek, Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Jackson Mendoza, Puff Daddy, World AIDs Day, GM, Macys.com, EMI, and Tri-Star Columbia Pictures. And its not-so-terrible portfolio includes televised spots, print advertisements, packaging, events, branding, and Web sites. The firm is widely considered one of the hottest, youngest, hippest, and edgiest in the design world today. And it has no plans to stop innovating. All in all, not bad.

The Attik creates a distinct look - lots of fast live action, lots of manipulated photographs, lots of weird background textures, and lots and lots of images - images careening on and off the screen, images rotating madly off in one corner, images zooming in and out of focus, and images blinking on and off so quickly that you barely grasp their presence before you're hurtling into the next nanosecond of visual presentation. In fact, one television public service announcement for Meth.com, the Web site for Partnership for a Drug-Free America, is so scrambled that you can't tell what it is - which was exactly the goal. "We wanted the kids to say, 'Crikes, this looks like a crazy site; let's check it out," explains Travis. "We didn't want them to know up front that it was about the danger of drugs."

Such busy design can seem overpowering at times, and, indeed, a few critics have accused the shop of overstretching itself or "designing for the sake of design." But Travis sees a definite method to the Attik madness. "We put in all these layers to simplify the message," he says. "Alone, each layer means nothing. But as one piece, the message becomes coherent. It's like painting - one paint stroke is nothing. Many paint strokes make a painting."

Besides, he notes, "there's no such thing as 'design for design's sake.' There's always a reason for a design, whether it's personal curiosity or technical exploration. We're engaged in a constant process to get to what's required. We're not just going to the graphic edge, we're coming up with solutions for our clients. We want the audience to be captivated and to discover new elements, each time they see it. We want them to savor it."

Indeed, consumers seem to eat up the Attik look and feel. The studio's cover for Newsweek'sspecial article on Jesus Christ sold more copies than any other Newsweek issue in a year, while other magazines featuring other Christ-as-supermodel covers witnessed no increased sales over normal at all. When the Attik did the branding and design for Puff Daddy's new label, several singles went platinum, and all of the albums went gold (although how much of that success can be attributed to Puff Daddy's talents vs. the Attik's is up for debate).

Travis says the studio "grew up on Photoshop" and uses it in all of its work, "to do manipulations, to make images that weren't something become something, to retouch, transform, build. We work on our files for weeks sometimes and we're constantly wondering what we could do if there were no restrictions." Both Photoshop and ImageReady let the designers put in the multiple layers of images they so enjoy: The greatest number of layers so far, Travis says, is 130 (with ImageReady).

But the boundary-pushing isn't just limited to software applications. It also includes a little moral button pushing - one print ad for Reebok shoes, for instance, shows an old woman's leering face with the following copy: "You kiss your granny and she slips her tongue in." (That ad ran in Europe but was refused by Reebok in the States). And last year the studio hurtled itself into industrial design when it designed the multipurpose dashboard and Internet panel for Ford's 24.7 car, which, when it's manufactured, will include wireless Internet access. "The car is all about convergent media," Travis says, "and about the empowerment of life within the vehicle." The Attik's video promo for the car, which was shown at this year's Detroit Auto Show, is classic Attik: flashing images, pulsing music, and provocative voice-overs.

Of course, flashy computer graphics and layering have gotten popular in the design world today, especially in the so-called "youth market." But Attik prides itself on being able to create ads that also appeal to an older crowd. A televised spot for IBM, which focuses on the Macys.com site, for instance, features a folksy voice-over that elicits a very palpable nostalgia for the glamorous Manhattan of the '40s and '50s. Lines like "the Shangri-la of shopping, the mecca of merchandising, a store so great it has its own parade" underscore this merging of old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar retail with newfangled e-commerce. But the final line: "It's more than a miracle on 34th Street - it's e-business, Macys.com, an IBM e-business" nails the point home. (The spot was done in collaboration with the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather.)

"We're a commercial business," Travis notes. "You can be sure that if we're creating a design for someone like Northern Telecom, where the audience is 40- to 50-year old males and every system costs $1 million, we're not going to create something so wild they don't like it."

Travis knows full well there are plenty of design studios working diligently to cop "the Attik style." But he shrugs off the idea of commercial threats. "By the time they adopt our style, we're on to something else," he says. "We're always pushing the boundaries, opening the questions, trying to affect the market by bringing depth, passion, and energy to it. People may say we're too progressive, but I think if a business isn't progressive it isn't growing."