It turns out Jonathan Stonier has a lot more going than your average CS guy. Before the Wunderman and Aqua merger, Jono worked at Wunderman for seven years and rated Aqua as one of the best digital agencies in the country. Some research and a digital company audit later, he discovered that Aqua was rated as number one, which led to Wunderman merging with Aqua.

It's almost inexplicable how at Aqua the excitement has been building since the red meeting room mysteriously plastered itself with blackout paper and colleagues started disappearing for days, coming out looking weary but confident.

Aqua’s new corporate identity had to be a well thought out process; it needed time and unrivalled concentration. It needed Aqua’s brains trust. It needed the two rams of creativity and business bashing ideas like skulls until the impressive idea was born. We all knew that this couldn’t have happened at the office, or in Johannesburg for that matter, so off to Magaliesberg we went. Isolation in collaboration was a half-truth; we wanted to be far away and in touch with anything but the hustle and bustle of the city, buzzing phones and the ding of incoming emails.

Ant Solomon is one of Aqua’s longest standing employees, going on 13 years now, and I was excited to chat to him about his recent promotion to chief technology officer. Ant is a dynamic man, and whether you spent two minutes or two hours talking technology to him, it’s immediately obvious how passionate he is on his discipline.

When you get the time to sit with designers here at Aqua, you use that opportunity. After chatting with Dane Bowen for a couple of minutes, I found his thoughts to be insightful, and they gave me a better understanding of his role and design in general.