Hand Drawn Pixels
Originally from South Yorkshire, Tom Pitts is a dyed-in-the-wool Sheffield United fan – but we won’t hold that against him.
Especially since he’s pulled off one of the great World Cup shocks, ostensibly from behind a desk at Hand Drawn Pixels, his design company based over at Wharfebank Mills.
In collaboration with Global Scarves, based just across the hall, Tom and the HDP team have helped put Otley on the global map after being co-commissioned to produce almost 200 official FIFA World Cup 2026 scarf designs for the tournament held across the USA, Canada and Mexico.
And these are not cookie-cutter designs either. Each scarf has its own national visual identity, rather than simply following one standard template. The designs draw on flags, football kit history, cultural patterns, historic figures, artists, architecture and plenty more besides.
Not bad for a project that, for Tom at least, began with a conversation in one of the shared kitchens at Wharfebank Mills.
The scarf designs have definitely put Hand Drawn Pixels in the media spotlight — it’s not every day you find global tournament merchandise starting life in a former textile mill, after all — but there is much more to the studio than football scarves.
Their portfolio includes work for Universal Music, The Piece Hall Summer Concert Season and Leeds City Museum, with Tom and the team — project manager Georgie and associate developer Chris — helping clients take ideas from scratch and turn them into strong visual identities, campaigns, websites and merchandise across brand, print and digital.
And it all starts, as the name implies, with that most traditional of creative tools: a pencil.
- Listing ID: 5711