Reflecting on 2021 at O/M

2022 will be our ninth year as a company.

As we say goodbye to 2021 and welcome a new year at O/M, we can’t help but reflect on how far we’ve come together over the last 12 months. Though there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of concerns to be had or problems to solve, we’re still hopeful for this next year and believe that the long arm of time bends towards progress. It’s with those feelings of tempered optimism that we returned to work this month, excited to continue creating helpful products together that solve important problems.

Reflecting on last year, we were able to accomplish quite a lot with our partners. There’s far too much to cover here, but here are a few highlights that stand out for our team:

1. We partnered with NCX (formerly SilviaTerra) to help democratize carbon offsets and limit deforestation on privately owned lands across the country. Our team designed an interface that enables landowners to enroll their forests and sell carbon credits by agreeing to leave their trees standing. Our hope is that this will greatly increase the positive impact NCX is able to have on climate change.
2. We partnered with Airbnb to improve the lives of Airbnb Ambassadors who are the first line of support for the company’s millions of hosts and guests. These Ambassadors are true heroes, fielding and solving an enormous variety of potential challenges for people who are trying to make the best of a tricky pandemic. Our work with Airbnb has sought to simplify vital workflows and improve accessibility through a carefully reworked design system.
3. We reunited with FLYR, whom we partnered with in 2020 to design their initial product offering to airlines, to launch their new website as they continue to grow exponentially. FLYR is bringing smarter data and analytics to airline pricing so that these companies can more effectively price and manage their flights, which creates more equitable fares for consumers and helps airlines reduce vital waste.
4. We teamed up with the talented folks at Firebrand Creative and ViacomCBS to release the world’s first Mental Health Media Guide, a set of standards and guidelines created by a coalition of mental health experts and media leaders, for media professionals to use when creating television shows and feature films. The guide has been instrumental in helping industry professionals meet their goals of exhibiting positive mental health representation in the media they create.
5. We partnered with Asana to explore new ways that users interact with and input information on their platform. Our work focused on designing more robust tools for users which would allow them to create tasks and comments in the way they want to, not just the ways they are allowed to.

These are just a few of the projects and clients that we’re grateful to have been able to work with over the last year. We’d be remiss if we didn’t also mention Instagram, Google, Google X, and Grasshopper as partners that we were lucky enough to partner with over the last 12 or so months.

2021 wasn’t just about the work though, it was about staying connected as a team and using our successes this year to invest back into the design community. Our designers at O/M formed new internal organizations to both support our BIPOC folx through a newly formed ERG called “Voices”. Our design team also created a mentorship program, in partnership with “Where Are the Black Designers,” called Office Hours which is designed to support underrepresented groups of design professionals outside our company who are trying to grow in their careers. We also met together as a company for the first time in years in Palm Springs to celebrate our successes together.

Lastly, we donated 1% of our company profits for the year to Dent Education, a non-profit organization that “promotes equity by empowering under-resourced youth to discover and develop their innate creative potential to shape the world around them.” It was just the start of our partnership with Dent Education, and we’re looking forward to working with them throughout this year.

That’s all for now. Stay safe. Take care of yourself and those around you. Get vaccinated or boosted, and we’ll see you all again soon.