W Conran Design’s graphic design for last year’s Paris Olympics has won D&AD’s highest accolade. The Black Pencil is reserved for “truly groundbreaking work” and some years none are given out. But this year’s juries awarded three Black Pencils, including the Paris games’ visual identity. The judges called it a “breakthrough for traditional sports marketing aesthetics” and praised the design for being “playful and scalable, with a unifying but distinctive feel that blends heritage and sport.” W Conran Design co-founder and creative director Gilles Deléris called working on the Olympics and Paralympics, “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a designer.” “We are so proud and honoured by this recognition, which celebrates five years of collaboration with the Paris 2024 Organising Committee teams,” he said. “It was a shared commitment to excellence and a design system that is fresh, joyful, and popular.” W Conran Design’s work for the Paris Olympics It is only the fifth time a graphic design project has won a Black Pencil, joining Johnson Banks’ Fruit and Veg stamps for Royal Mail (2004), the new UK coin designs for the Royal Mint (2005), TBWA’s Trillion Dollar Flyers for the exiled Zimbabwean Newspaper (2010), and Hans Thiessen’s provocative annual report for the Calgary Society for Persons with Disabilities (2012). One rebrand has previously won the top honour – Made Thought’s 2015 work for GF Smith. This year, the Paris design was joined on the Black Pencil podium by A$AP Rocky’s music video Tailor Swif, by Iconoclast LA, and FCB New York’s Spreadbeats, which hacked spreadsheets as a way to promote Spotify’s ad offerings. Its Black Pencil was for digital design, and this award caps a fine couple of weeks for that work, which also cleaned up at the ADC Annual awards, where it was named Best in Show. This year, 11,689 entrants from 86 countries submitted 30,000 pieces of work to the D&AD awards. But JKR global executive creative director Lisa Smith, who is also a D&AD trustee, said that judging was tricky due to a level of creative sameness. “Too many entries follow the same established design codes and trends, making everything start to look and feel alike, regardless of category,” she said. “The work that stood out – and was ultimately awarded – was the kind that breaks away from the expected: inspiring, well-crafted, and truly fit for purpose.” The Yellow Pencil is the highest award in each category. There were 48 in total, 11 of which went to the main design categories. These were: Brand Identity Refresh: Porto Rocha’s Nike Run rebrand Porto Rocha’s work for Nike Run New Brand Identity: Meat Studio for Pangmei Deserts Meat Studio’s work for Pangmei Desserts New Brand Identity: Scholz & Friends Berlin for the Tiroler Festspiele Scholz & Friends Berlin’s work for the Tiroler Festspiele New Brand Identity: Angelina Pischikova and Karina Zhukovskaya for mud Angelina Pischikova and Karina Zhukovskaya’s identity for their mud pet care brand. Graphic Design and Packaging Design: Serviceplan Germany’s Price Packs for PENNY Serviceplan Germany’s Price Packs for PENNY Graphic Design and Spatial Design: Circus Grey Peru’s Sightwalks for UNACEM Magazine and Newspaper Design: Uncommon Creative Studio covers for Port Magazine Uncommon Creative Studio’s work for Port Magazine Typography: DutchScot’s work for Danish textile company Tameko DutchScot’s work for Danish textile company Tameko Type Design and Lettering: TypeTogether’s Playwrite for Google TypeTogether’s Playwrite for Google Overall there were 107 pencils awarded in the design categories, led by graphic design (21%), packaging design (17%) and type design and lettering (15%). There were 31 pencils awarded in the branding categories, with double the number of awards in the new brand category (21) compared to brand refresh (10). There were 26 pencils for illustration, 20 for experiential, 12 for typography, and seven for writing for design. Across the board, the winners demonstrate “the power of design not just as a form of art, but as a catalyst for commercial success and behavioural change,” says D&AD CEO, Dara Lynch. “The resurgence of craftsmanship stands as a reminder that in an era of automation, true excellence lies in the thoughtful execution of ideas,” she added. You can see all the D&AD winners here.

22 May, 2025 In our weekly interview series, design leaders answer five questions about design, and five questions about leadership. Julia Beardwood is founder of Beardwood&Co. The New York-based branding and strategy agency works with B2C and B2B clients like Danone, Pottery Barn and Rabble Wine. Design What would your monograph be called? Illuminating Possibilities. Everything we do is about helping clients see opportunities that aren’t obvious. Whether that’s a new take on their category, bringing an unusual perspective informed by experience and insights we’ve uncovered in completely different fields, or a big creative idea with legs to run on for years. What recent design work made you a bit jealous? The Brooklyn Museum identity by Other Means and Brooklyn Museum design team. The interlocking of the double O’s in Brooklyn and two dots bookending the logo together create a distinctive word mark that feels a bit quirky, yet rooted in a rich history, like the borough itself. What impresses me most is the thoroughness of the brand experience, from the t-shirts the staff proudly wear to the exhibit communications. They completely nailed the strategy, which is to be a modern, multi-faceted and thoroughly engaging museum that serves the diverse community of Brooklyn, and attracts visitors from all over the city and the world. The new Brooklyn Museum logo by Other Means and the in-house team What’s an unusual place you get inspiration from? Riding on any kind of public transport gets my mind whirring. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bus, tube, train or ferry. From the incredible variety of people and pets, funny and tawdry ads, to the surprising scenes I see out the window, I find stimulation in observing daily life. It’s a mental game to brainstorm for projects based on what you’re seeing and hearing. Name something that is brilliantly designed, but overlooked. Paper clips – so useful, so simple, so elegant! It’s a miniature work of art that does its job perfectly. I keep a few in my pocket at all times because they’re so multi-purpose, like when I need to pop open my iPhone sim card. What object in your studio best sums up your taste? This wooden owl – designed and made in the UK by Matt Pugh – is our gift for team members on their fifth anniversary with us. Carved from sustainably sourced oak with a painted head, it’s sleek and simple, and a symbol of the uncommon wisdom we seek to bring our clients. It brings me immense pleasure to share these beauts with our team. The wooden owl given to Beardwood&Co staff on their fifth anniversary at the studio. Leadership What feedback felt brutal at the time, but turned out to be useful? It came from a client who I had massive respect for. We’d just finished a major rebrand project and were feeling rightly proud. She said, “We’re thrilled with how this turned out, but the journey to get there was horrible.” That made me realise that the client experience is equally as important as the design work. Now we pay a lot of attention to ensure that every client feels welcomed and appreciated, that communication is crystal clear and transparent, that we are fully aligned, and that meetings are fun and inspiring. Every project should make our clients feel like it was a career highlight to brag about. What’s an underappreciated skill that design leaders need? Translating design into the language of business, so that the people who buy our work understand why it’s so valuable. Designers are not taught this in school, so it’s a skill they often learn on the job. It’s a reason why some of the strongest design leaders have gone to business school. Language matters – you don’t want design to sound esoteric or mysterious. You need your clients to understand it’s all about building brand equity, creating irresistible desire to attract new customers, and instilling insatiable loyalty among your biggest fans. What keeps you up at night? How to ensure AI is serving humanity and not the other way around. It’s a moment for immense change as big as the introduction of the internet. Uncertainty creates anxiety, but also opportunity. We’re all exploring and experimenting to figure out the best uses for AI, and so far, it’s super-helpful. But we know clients expect to reap cost savings from their agencies. You just have to keep demonstrating value and how to use AI to bring efficiency. What trait is non-negotiable in new hires? Telling us what they think. Speaking up with fresh ideas to make us and our clients better. Being brave enough to call out group think. Every individual hire that joins us has the power to change and improve our firm. Silence is not golden – we want and need to hear strong opinions. Complete this sentence, “I wish more clients…” …asked more questions. Clients often feel like they need to know it all, so they don’t ask as many questions as they should because it makes them feel vulnerable to criticism. In my experience, when clients are brave enough to ask more questions, they feel empowered and equipped to make braver choices in the work. Brands in this article What to read next design/leader: F37 founder Rick Banks 17 Apr, 2025 design/leader: Lucky Dip co-founder Katie Cadwell 17 Jan, 2025

V&A Dundee’s new exhibition starts before you get up to the first-floor gallery. As visitors enter the main hall of Kengo Kuma’s 2018 waterfront building, they’re confronted by 11 big white flowers dangling from the double-height ceiling. Called Shylight and created by Amsterdam’s Studio DRIFT, the floral forms slowly rise and fall courtesy of robotics, with their silk petals folding inwards, mimicking those flowers which close up at nightfall. Thought-provoking and visually pleasing, it sets the tone for Garden Futures: Designing With Nature, the exhibition which opened last week and runs until 25 January. It also hints that not everything in the garden (exhibition) is rosy. Beyond horticulture, there’s also technology – starting with those Shylight robotics – and art. That’s quite a juggling act. As a long-standing allotment holder, it was the horticulture content which drew me in. If I hadn’t had that focus, the exhibition could have been overwhelming: so many topics, so many ideas, so many things to take in. This is the touring show’s only UK stop, having debuted at Vitra Design Museum in Germany’s, before appearing across various European venues. Vitra Design Museum’s deputy director Sabrina Handler claims it’s the first major exhibition on the history of modern garden design. An image from Andrew Buurman’s photo project Allotments. An image from Andrew Buurman’s photo project Allotments. The original show comprised 300 objects. V&A Dundee has an extra 200m2 of space to play with, and has added another 130 objects to give it their own spin and highlight some Scottish contributions to the topic. Msoma Architects were brought in to reimagine the show for Dundee, building on Formafantasma’s original concept for the Vitra Design Museum. The graphics were handled by Boris Meister. In terms of the gardens on show here, they vary from productive spaces for work, rest and play, to places representing spiritual, cultural and political ideas. What they have in common is that they’re all designed spaces. Like a virulent form of bindweed, this show is covering a lot of ground. Its material is grouped in sections themed as Paradise, Sanctuary, Retreat and Labour of Love. It’s Paradise that makes the strongest impression – and rightly so – with its ice-cream-pink structure. Garden Futures at the V&A. Photo by Grant Anderson. The overarching aim is to demonstrate how garden design impacts us both functionally – providing food, hence Birmingham’s Uplands Allotments and seed companies – and aesthetically – hence William Morris wallpaper and the naturalistic planting of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. It combines factual photos with artworks, and roams from floral tile panels from 17th Century Persia to a Chinese garden inspired by a video game, and from vast landscapes to hand tools. The two wall displays of the taxonomy of tools will add to the dwell time of any visitors who actually garden or grow. Biome’s Garden installation But for those after interaction, Dundee-based creative studio Biome Collective has created Garden, a video game that allows players to create a virtual musical garden. They’re also behind the Pollinator Pathway digital tool that creates a planting design tailored for the maximum benefit of pollinating insects. And then there’s the smell trail – little wooden boxes whose lids lift to give off a specific scent, such as a cypress tree. The image of Prospect, Derek Jarman’s Dungeness house and garden, might feel over-familiar to some. Likewise architect Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, the residential skyscraper covered in greenery in Milan – but an exhibition like this has to cater to all knowledge levels. Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale Specific V&A Dundee content includes Seeds of Scotland in the Highlands, which produces resilient seeds. The company’s utilitarian packaging sits alongside photos of vegetables and the seeds themselves – another stop to linger for any growers in the audience. There’s also Oban’s Seaweed Gardens, a community-led project, and the garden designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd for cancer patients at Maggie’s Centre, Dundee. On a smaller scale, there are origami-inspired self-watering plant pots made from marine waste, the brainchild of Glasgow-based company POTR. And when it comes to Dundee’s own garden future, things could be looking up. The Eden Project has a scheme to transform a defunct gasholder into a vast glasshouse. It’s got planning permission, and the 2025 model of architecture firm Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios brings the £130million idea to life. POTR’s self-watering plant pots There’s something counter-intuitive about going indoors to experience gardens. But this isn’t the only show tackling that problem. Gardens and gardening are having a moment. The exhibition Soil, which explored soil’s vital role in our planet’s future, finished at London’s Somerset House in April, getting 50,000 visitors in three months. Now Garden Futures is off the ground, V&A Dundee will be thinking about how to spend the £2.6million of government funding which was confirmed in February. The plan is to improve the permanent Scottish galleries. The museum’s director, Leonie Bell says there’s demand for them to be bigger. Her ideas so far include expanding the time frame to go as far back as Skara Brae, the prehistoric village on Orkney, and to explore Scotland’s influence on global design, for example in fashion. Exhibition designers, watch this space. Garden Futures at the V&A. Photo by Grant Anderson. Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s garden for Maggie’s Centre, Dundee.

22 May, 2025 The Type Tasting founder's new podcast shows how visuals intersect with our other senses. She tells Rob Alderson why she thinks this could help save graphic design. Sarah Hyndman has an experiment she has been running at events for several years. She asks people to sniff two bottles of perfume and then say what they smell in each. Both perfumes are identical – only the typography on the bottles is different. And yet 72% of participants, nearly three quarters, describe the perfumes differently. It’s a perfect example of the sorts of insights Hyndman has been sharing through her books, talks, and other projects for the past 12 years. Having worked as a graphic designer – “one of the original Mac monkeys” – and run her own agency, Hyndman started Type Tasting in 2013, inspired by Stefan Sagmeister’s regular client-free sabbaticals. She wanted to research type’s ability to influence our other senses, find evidence to back up her intuition, and bring this knowledge to a broad audience (which she does through Type Safaris, and wine-tasting events among others). Now in her new podcast, Seeing Senses, she is interviewing chefs, psychologists and perfumiers, “to discover how they connect what we see to what we sense and feel.” We sat down with her to find out why she thinks multi-sensory design might help save the industry. Sarah Hyndman’s podcast Seeing Senses How does your podcast build on Type Tasting’s work? From the outset, Type Tasting was always multi-sensory, but I was looking at typography because it was a niche area. Type was just the gateway into the other senses. So we start with what you see, vision. Vision is about what gets your attention – that’s what branding and packaging does. But in my opinion, what we’ve forgotten in design is the follow-through – that senses like smell and sound boost the mood more than vision. So you need to back up the experiences you are designing with all the other senses if you’re going to create an emotional connection, make something feel personal, and create memories. What does that mean for graphic designers and their work? I think graphic design, as a term, is too one-dimensional. The visuals are the flag for your brand, so you can recognise it really quickly. But what does it sound like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? How does your experience of this product change from location, to moment, to experience? I think we need to rewrite our job descriptions, so that we start thinking in a multi-sensory way from the outset. Who cares if it wasn’t in the brief? We need to be the challengers, the rebels that are saying “No, I think you need to think about this differently.” If we keep doing what’s already been done, that’s what AI could do. Our job is to find the gaps, to be the mavericks, and to do the lateral and creative thinking which, at the moment, AI can’t do. That infamous Future of Jobs report, that said graphic design was at risk of becoming extinct, was a wake-up call. That report is based on what business leaders think will be important over the next five years. Why is graphic design not seen as a useful skill? And do we need to talk about what it does in a different way? Yes, absolutely. Leaders need to see designers doing something, or being something, different. It always used to be that clients loved visiting their agencies. Why aren’t businesses excited by designers any more? I think we need to show people something that makes them say, “Oh, we need that.” Rather than showing them something which will win them awards. Type Tasting activations at Adobe Max. Photo by Grant Terzakis. As someone now studying neuroscience, how do you see the relationship between science and creativity? I did science all the way through school. I’ve never studied graphic design, so nobody ever told me I wasn’t allowed to experiment. As designers, we’re given permission to come up with solutions that fit the brief, but we’re not somehow given permission to go out and experiment. And there is a big misconception that science is very rigid, and will take all of your creativity away. Whereas real research is about constantly interrogating every statement. Always asking why, like an annoying five-year-old. And that same curiosity is key to good design as well, right? Exactly. But as designers, I think we’ve lost a bit of bravery to do that. So my thing is – think more like a scientist. Science is about proving yourself wrong, and finding what’s right. The interesting stuff, when it comes to my experiments, are the really weird answers, the outliers. That’s where the magic is – when someone tells you something different, and you discover it’s because they grew up somewhere where that means something else, or they’ve had an experience where that means something else. A lot of your experiments seem to be very fun – is that an important part of designing them? If I want people to take part, I have to make them really understandable. I have to make them fun. And if I’m going to gather your data, I need to give you something – some insight or learning. I did a talk for 1,000 people in Germany not so long ago, where we gave them all pairs of jelly beans, and I played a load of different stimuli, to show how it changed what they tasted. I talked them through the science of what happens, so that everybody could feel for themselves how it worked. A Type Tasting event at London Design Festival. Photo by David Owens. Is there any tension between that sense of fun, that showmanship, and the scientific rigour you are clearly interested in? I like that I sit in the middle. I think as designers, we are basically showmen. Packaging, branding, everything that we do is about showmanship. It’s about catching attention, selling imagination, sensation transference. But then in spaces like FMCG, they have consumer neuroscientists, and everything is measured to an infinite degree. What’s your hope for the podcast, and the new books, you are working on? Hopefully they will help graphic design to keep changing, so this amazing profession can stay alive, but also evolve as it needs to. Type Tasting does wine tasting in London. Photo by David Owens. Design disciplines in this article What to read next

Sir Jony Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities” to build new products for OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. It comes after the company bought io, a hardware start-up Ive founded with fellow Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan in 2024. The long-term plan was seemingly always to merge with OpenAI. The deal is reported to be worth $6.5 billion, and although Ive will not join OpenAI himself, his LoveFrom studio will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” Bloomberg reports. The first products are expected to launch in 2026, although there are no details yet as to what they will be. “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment,” Ive said. “While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important collaboration.” A statement posted on the OpenAI website said that founder Sam Altman started working with LoveFrom – co-founded by Ive, Marc Newson and Peter Saville – two years ago. “Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs,” the statement says. “The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile. They reminded us of a time when we celebrated human achievement, grateful for new tools that helped us learn, explore and create.” “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment.” This led to the realisation that OpenAI’s “ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company” and this led to the creation of io. “AI is an incredible technology, but great tools require work at the intersection of technology, design, and understanding people and the world,” Altman said. “No-one can do this like Jony and his team; the amount of care they put into every aspect of the process is extraordinary. “What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.” OpenAI also released a ten-minute video announcing the new partnership. In the film, Altman says he believes, “they have an opportunity to completely re-imagine what it means to use a computer.” io’s team of hardware and software engineers, physicists, researchers and manufacturing experts have already produced the first prototype. Altman says Ive called it “the best work he had ever done” while Altman thinks it will be “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” So far, AI-enabled products like the Rabbit R1 companion and the Humane AI Pin have been underwhelming – tech blogger Marques Brownlee called the latter, “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.” But Altman is clearly confident that their products will buck this trend. In the film, Ive points out that the hardware people use to work with AI comes from a different era. “The products that we are using to connect us to unimaginable technology, they’re decades old,” he says. “And so it’s just common sense to at least think, surely there’s something beyond these legacy products.” Altman agrees. “I think this technology deserves something so much better,” he says. When he appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs programme in February, Ive said that society needed “healthy discussions” about AI and in particular “the rate of change” which he feared was not yet being fully grasped. In the same interview, he also admitted that he was troubled by the iPhone’s legacy. “The nature of innovation is there will be unpredicted consequences,” he told host Lauren Laverne. “I celebrate, and am encouraged by, the very positive contribution, the empowerment and the liberty it has provided to so many people, in so many ways.” And while what he calls “the not-so-positive consequences” were unintended, “that doesn’t matter relative to how I feel responsible,” Ive said. “That weighs, and is a contributor to decisions that I have made since, and decisions I am making in the future.” In the OpenAI film, Altman says the pair bonded over “shared values about what technology should be, when technology’s been really good, when it’s gone wrong.” “Our motivations and values are completely the same,” Ive adds. Ive also has previous experience working with a visionary but controversial founder, in Steve Jobs. In a review of tech journalist Karen Hao’s new book, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination, The Guardian described Altman as, “depending how you view him, the villain who has put humanity on the path to mass extinction, or the visionary utopian who will bring us cures for diseases and a revolution in how we work.” Speaking on Desert Island Discs, Ive complained about the “absurd anecdotes and stories” about Jobs and his leadership style, which Ive insisted had been taken out of context.

When How&How was commissioned to rebrand e-commerce platform Big Cartel, one thing was made crystal clear – the logo had to stay the same. “The idea of changing the logo was categorically vetoed in the original scope,” co-founder Cat How explains. “It’s a designer’s nightmare,” How&How creative director Chris Clayton says. “It makes you question the client’s appetite for change. And how will a new brand system fit with the old logo? But I think we also see it a massive challenge.” That’s because the team has learned – through many rebrands with different clients – that the logo probably is up for grabs. “In the past we would take it as gospel,” Cat How says. “Now we nod our heads, and smile. Because in our experience, that’s never really going to be it.” The previous Big Cartel logo The main reason clients warn designers off changing the logo is that they believe it has brand equity which they don’t want to lose. But, as Rog How explains, this is often overstated. “For a very mature brand that everyone knows, where they do genuinely have that equity, change has to be more incremental. You’d probably struggle to get Tiffany to change their turquoise. “But most of the companies we work with are either in a scrappy scale-up phase, or they’ve hit a bit of a plateau and need to unlock that next bit of growth.” There can also be personal issues in the mix – logos designed by the founder, or a family member, which come with emotional baggage. “We once had to tell a client that their logo – which had been designed by his wife – was really ugly and didn’t suit the brand at all.” In this scenario, the agency commissioned research to point out where the current logo was falling short. The point is that any brand asset – a logo, typeface, brand colours – needs to work within the broader whole. “The logo always seems like the biggest deal, but in all honesty it is just one part of the bigger brand system,” Clayton explains. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/BC-Reel-how-agency.mp4 Any good brand positioning work will interrogate who that company is and what it stands for. It all begins with that strategic work, and most of the time, an old logo won’t work as part of a new strategy. “The logo has to represent the character of the company and if you have refined the positioning, it will usually have a knock-on effect on the logo,” Rog How explains. For its work for Big Cartel, the strategy was designed to give the company, which has been around since 2005,  a “new lease of life.” The new positioning was built around the idea “Goodbye caution” to highlight the platform as “the go-to for entrepreneurs taking the leap.” The How&How team presented the client with various routes, some of which included the old logo, some of which didn’t. The idea was to start a conversation about whether the new direction needed a new logo too. The designers were convinced it did, but they needed the client to get there themselves. “When you show people the brand evolution with the old logo, and then a new logo, nine times out of ten they agree that the new one is way better,” Rog How says. “They can see it’s been considered as part of the whole system.” How&How’s new identity for Big Cartel The new visual direction is deliberately scrappy, from its use of illustration to risograph textures and a punchy tone of voice. “The new logo needed to preserve the independent spirit that made the original so meaningful to the team,” Clayton says. “Our goal was to evolve it – not replace it – capturing the same attitude and scrappy energy that of the new brand.” Once they showed the client the hand-drawn new logo in the context of the rest of the design work, it was a no-brainer. “It was impossible to argue with,” Clayton says. “The brand felt so distinctive but all the elements lived in perfect harmony with each other.” In fact, when How&How sent the client their case study and press materials one main request came back – they wanted to make more of the logo redesign. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/BigCartel-7-Website-how-agency.mp4 The key to all of this, Cat How says, is trust. If you build the right relationship with a client, you gain the permission to push and challenge them, however adamantly they rule out certain things at the start. “It’s a very gradual dance,” she explains. “I think clients, and it’s not their fault, come to us thinking they know what they want. It’s our responsibility to show them what they could have, and what they don’t know they need yet. “It’s not about getting smaller and self-referencing – it’s about showing them how to take a creative leap based on emotion, and strategy, and language. How&How’s new identity for Big Cartel How&How’s new identity for Big Cartel

21 May, 2025 Clare Dowdy finds out about the excitement, and challenges, that come with working with an early-stage company. “Culturally, working with founders is intense, in the best possible way,” says Kelly Mackenzie, founder and creative director of White Bear. The London and Dublin based branding agency has form working with founder-led companies, including Tom Parker Creamery and chocolate brand Luvli. “The business isn’t just what they do, it’s often wrapped up in their identity, sense of self-worth and purpose,” Mackenzie explains. And because of this intensity, the agency becomes almost as invested as the client. “When we’re asked to evolve or build their brand, we often tell them that it’s like being asked to mind their child,” Mackenzie says. “Naming that emotional connection early builds trust. It helps them feel safe in a process they’ve often never experienced before.” Many designers talk of going on a journey with these clients. “You have a very close relationship with the founders, and get to know them very deeply,” says Hijinks co-founder Marc Allenby. “Their idea is usually based on passion, and you – as a designer – are fuelled by that passion. That energy is self-motivating, you really care about what you’re creating.” The WeRepresent logo and wordmark designed by Hijinks When Hijinks presented the founder of talent agency WeRepresent with their logo, she burst into tears, which isn’t standard practice when presenting to bigger clients. But Hijinks had created an animated version that “breathed” – a nod to the founder’s traumatic experience of being in a coma on a ventilator with Covid. A moving approach, in more ways than one. The entrepreneurial spirit found in start-ups can be infectious. “Rather than being jaded, they have a youthful energy, and that attracts us,” says Russell Potter, the co-founder of architecture and design firm SODA, whose many hospitality start-up clients include the Instagram-beloved crumble shop, Humble Crumble. Then there’s the potential for creative freedom. “It’s a blank canvas. We’re creating something from nothing,” says Allenby at Hijinks, in contrast to a more mature brand that will come with its own baggage. But these clients may not have worked with a design studio before process, and inevitably there’s a lot of hand-holding. Dundee-based Agency of None branded the start-up QuickBlock “Start-ups by their nature, are often a very small group of people, all trying to cover many roles. So the role of the designer is often as an educator, as much as a designer,” says Lyall Bruce, director of Dundee-based Agency of None, whose start-up clients include QuickBlock, a sustainable building block made from recycled food packaging, and coffee roaster Bryte. As a consequence of this inexperience, the brief is rarely formal. It might be a loose deck, a stream-of-consciousness call, or a rough vision, according to Mackenzie. “And throughout, there will be extra calls to talk through thinking, being available on WhatsApp or Slack, and giving reassurance at each step.” That naivety is both beautiful and brilliant, says Potter at SODA. But if you’re not careful, you can get dragged into a lot of business decisions. “We’re often asked to comment above our pay grade – we can’t always have the answers,” he says. “Someone client side has to have a leap of faith and make a decision.” Inevitably budgets are tight, and agencies often need to explain the value of effective design, “Once they see the link between strong branding and commercial outcomes, budget conversations become much easier,” says Mackenzie at White Bear. Although, as several designers pointed out, this challenge is not unique to start-up clients.But for start-ups, agencies often break down payment into smaller chunks, as a way of protecting themselves. The interior of the new Crunch sandwich shop in London’s Soho designed by KIDZ KIDZ, which has offices in Amsterdam, Belgrade, Dubai and Paris, designed the new Crunch sandwich shop in London’s Soho. “Working with early-stage companies inevitably involves risk — timelines can shift, priorities may change, or funding may fall through,” says KIDZ co-founder Dmitrii Mironov. “To protect our team and ensure a smooth process, we break the work into smaller, clearly defined stages. We require prepayment for each stage; keep written records of all agreements, even when communication is fast and informal; limit the number of revisions and fix the scope of work for each stage; and withhold certain deliverables until full payment is received.” They’ve had a few cases where a project wasn’t completed because the client pivoted or changed direction unexpectedly. “While that’s never ideal, it’s part of the reality of working with start-ups,” he adds. And sometimes it makes sense to rethink payment completely. In lieu of fees from a business consultancy, Hijinks did a skills swap. Meanwhile, when Run for the Hills designed a third site for restaurant chain Cricket in London’s White City, they threw in a £5,000 bar bill to make up for the smaller fee. That allowed the agency to take the team out, thereby boosting morale, and host clients, thereby showcasing their work. The interior of one of the Humble Crumble shops, designed by SODA studio In 2015, SODA had a start-up client in the hospitality sector who offered to pay part of the fee in Bitcoin. “We ummed and ahhed, but decided to take the £19,000 in money,” Potter says. Some years later, it would have been worth over £1 million, though Potter points out that they would have sold it before then. Then there’s the gamble of a profit share, where you’re investing in their business in lieu of partial payment. At a former agency, product designer Jake Weir occasionally ended up doing sweat equity to help out, “so you’re basically partners.” When a hairdresser with limited funding came to him wanting to develop a new hair curler, the agency was given shares in the company for their design input. “We were incentivised to make it work,” Weir says. The product was a success – ultimately sold to BaByliss for “millions.” But even when budgets are low, these jobs are still worth doing sometimes. “We’ll do them as a passion project as they’re quick turnaround and they give younger guys in the studio more on-site experience,” Potter says. What happens when the client’s dream is never going to make it? MAP Project Office was once asked to design a very specific backpack. “We wondered if there was a market for this,” says MAP’s creative director, Weir. When people are pouring their life savings into a project, there’s a responsibility to warn them of the risks. Regardless, founders often have their mind set on these things. In these circumstances, MAP will look for a way to “dial the founders’ single-mindedness down,” Weirs says. “If you relax the concept a little bit, you can make it less niche and more accessible, especially for a first product.” White Bear’s work with the Tom Parker Creamery brand And experienced designers in this sector get good at spotting the jobs to avoid. Start-ups have a reputation for being short-lived. It’s commonly said that 90% of them fail, although the source for this stat is not at all clear. Harvard Business Review puts it more modestly, claiming that more than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. The food and beverage sector, in particular, is full of such tragedies, according to The Grocer. But these potential risks shouldn’t be a reason not to take on a start-up. “The reason the project fails is not because of the design,” says Trotman at Run for the Hills, “unless the client has shittified it.” A fish restaurant that Run for the Hills worked on in London had great interiors and a cool brand, Trotman says. “But it failed on the food, and we can’t do anything about the food.” Conversely, when they do well, the agency is part of that success story. In 2005, Big Fish named and branded start-up chocolate puddings company Gü, cleverly persuading its founder to ditch his name, The Belgian Chocolate Company. Just seven later, it was sold for £32.5m. And because the agency is so embedded – it’s personal, remember – the work takes on real significance. “You really get the chance to make a lasting impact and build a long-term working relationship,” says Bruce at Agency of None. And better still for the broader industry. “The experience they have here will set up the relationship with design forever.” Design disciplines in this article Brands in this article What to read next More human resources – designers brand new workplace apps Brand Identity 15 Apr, 2025

Google announced a host of AI-powered updates to its Search products yesterday, with a major focus on “richer and more vivid” designs. “We’ve been working really hard to up the level of craftsmanship within Google search,” said Rhiannon Bell, Google’s VP of Search UX. At its annual I/O developer conference in California, CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled what he called “a total re-imaging of Search” which with 8.5 billion daily enquiries, brings “AI to more people than any other product in the world.” The new tools announced yesterday include: AI mode and Deep Search, which allow deeper queries, follow-up questions, and let users create “an expert-level fully-cited report” in minutes. Search Live which lets users talk back-and-forth with Search in real time through your camera. AI agents to help with tasks like booking tickets. A data visualisation tool which uses AI Mode to “analyse complex datasets and create graphics that bring them to life.” These will allow users to create custom-built charts and graphs and will roll-out first for sports and finance queries – to compare two stock prices over time, or two teams’ win ratios, for example. The new AI tools are available from today in the US, but Google couldn’t yet confirm when they will be available in the UK. Bell, a British design leader who has been based in San Francisco for the past two decades, said it was a big moment for the brand. “This technology is allowing us to do things that we could have only dreamed of before,” she says. “Bringing the Search product and the AI capabilities together is a phenomenal product and design opportunity.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Deep-Search-AI-Mode.mp4 But she explained, there are also a raft of design challenges her team must consider when implementing AI into Google’s product suite. “This technology is incredibly powerful and we are bringing that power into people’s lives,” Bell explained. “I think we have a responsibility to make sure that it is really accessible. “We’re moving so fast, and this technology can do so many things, I do worry sometimes that we’ll over-complicate things. And so we have protocols around making sure we’re keeping certain aspects of what Google’s really good at – at in terms of its core simplicity – as sacred as possible.” Bell said there was “a constant dialogue” between the design leaders to ensure they are “staying true” to the Google Search product. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Complex-Analysis-Data-Visualization-AI-Mode.mp4 Alongside this simplicity, Bell also explained the team was focused on creating more crafted UX across the new tools. “I really wanted to make sure that we were bringing the vividness, the variety, and the visual richness of the open web to the foreground,” she said. This will show up in the way images are displayed and organised, Bell said, as well as new shopping experiences and specific design elements like the eclipse – a new waveform that appears when users are speaking with the AI tools. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Search-Live-AI-Mode.mp4 The wave goes up when people speak to their device, and down when the AI model is responding, and Bell says it’s designed to create “synergy” across different touchpoints in a visually pleasing way. More broadly, Bell says she understands designers’ anxiety around AI and what it might mean for the profession. But she is optimistic around the opportunities for skilled designers to translate AI into usable, and exciting, interfaces. “I feel like UX is actually having a bit of a moment,” she says. “Our role in shepherding this technology to people everywhere is so important. It’s not going to happen without us. “AI is changing our discipline, but I think it’ making us more capable. And I think the nuances of user experience design, and that dialogue with users, are very hard to replicate.” Other announcements at I/O included Google Flow, a new AI filmmaking tool, and a new version of its image-generation tool Imagen. The new model is said to be “significantly better at spelling and typography.” Google also unveiled its new Google Glasses, which use Android extended reality (XR). The tech giant will partner with eyewear brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker to design glasses that people “want to wear all day.” The move echoes Meta’s collaboration with Ray-Ban on its XR glasses. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Agentic-Capabilities-AI-Mode.mp4

When How&How was commissioned to rebrand e-commerce platform Big Cartel, one thing was made crystal clear – the logo had to stay the same. “The idea of changing the logo was categorically vetoed in the original scope,” co-founder Cat How explains. “It’s a designer’s nightmare,” How&How creative director Chris Clayton says. “It makes you question the client’s appetite for change. And how will a new brand system fit with the old logo? But I think we also see it a massive challenge.” That’s because the team has learned – through many rebrands with different clients – that the logo probably is up for grabs. “In the past we would take it as gospel,” Cat How says. “Now we nod our heads, and smile. Because in our experience, it’s never really going to be it.” The previous Big Cartel logo The main reason clients warn designers off changing the logo is that they believe it has brand equity which they don’t want to lose. But, as Rog How explains, this is often overstated. “For a very mature brand that everyone knows, where they do genuinely have that equity, change has to be more incremental. You’d probably struggle to get Tiffany to change their turquoise. “But most of the companies we work with are either in a scrappy scale-up phase, or they’ve hit a bit of a plateau and need to unlock that next bit of growth.” There can also be personal issues in the mix – logos designed by the founder, or a family member, which come with emotional baggage. “We once had to tell a client that their logo – which had been designed by his wife – was really ugly and didn’t suit the brand at all.” In this scenario, the agency commissioned research to point out where the current logo was falling short. The point is that any brand asset – a logo, typeface, brand colours – needs to work within the broader whole. “The logo always seems like the biggest deal, but in all honesty it is just one part of the bigger brand system,” Clayton explains. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/BC-Reel-how-agency.mp4 Any good brand positioning work will interrogate who that company is and what it stands for. It all begins with that strategic work, and most of the time, an old logo won’t work as part of a new strategy. “The logo has to represent the character of the company and if you have refined the positioning, it will usually have a knock-on effect on the logo,” Rog How explains. For its work for Big Cartel, the strategy was designed to give the company, which has been around since 2005,  a “new lease of life.” The new positioning was built around the idea “Goodbye caution” to highlight the platform as “the go-to for entrepreneurs taking the leap.” The How&How team presented the client with various routes, some of which included the old logo, some of which didn’t. The idea was to start a conversation about whether the new direction needed a new logo too. The designers were convinced it did, but they needed the client to get there themselves. “When you show people the brand evolution with the old logo, and then a new logo, nine times out of ten they agree that the new one is way better,” Rog How says. “They can see it’s been considered as part of the whole system.” How&How’s new identity for Big Cartel The new visual direction is deliberately scrappy, from its use of illustration to risograph textures and a punchy tone of voice. “The new logo needed to preserve the independent spirit that made the original so meaningful to the team,” Clayton says. “Our goal was to evolve it – not replace it – capturing the same attitude and scrappy energy that of the new brand.” Once they showed the client the hand-drawn new logo in the context of the rest of the design work, it was a no-brainer. “It was impossible to argue with,” Clayton says. “The brand felt so distinctive but all the elements lived in perfect harmony with each other.” In fact, when How&How sent the client their case study and press materials one main request came back – they wanted to make more of the logo redesign. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/BigCartel-7-Website-how-agency.mp4 The key to all of this, Cat How says, is trust. If you build the right relationship with a client, you gain the permission to push and challenge them, however adamantly they rule out certain things at the start. “It’s a very gradual dance,” she explains. “I think clients, and it’s not their fault, come to us thinking they know what they want. It’s our responsibility to show them what they could have, and what they don’t know they need yet. “It’s not about getting smaller and self-referencing – it’s about showing them how to take a creative leap based on emotion, and strategy, and language. How&How’s new identity for Big Cartel How&How’s new identity for Big Cartel

When we launched Badberries a year ago, I thought I understood what challenges we’d face. Finding clients. Creating standout work. Building our reputation. Yes, these were true. But what I’ve come to realise is that the heart of all these challenges revolves around a single question: where do we invest our time? The invisible client that never sleeps Every agency has two distinct sides that constantly compete for attention. The first is client delivery – the work that pays bills and builds reputation. The second is the business itself – operations, growth, and longevity. I’ve started thinking of this second side as our “invisible client.” Like any client, it has deadlines, demands, and deliverables. But unlike external clients, this one never stops needing attention, never wraps a project, and never takes a holiday. The challenge? If you neglect client work, you have no income. If you neglect the invisible client, you have no future. Complementary founders as strategic advantage Recognising this tension early was crucial to our survival. As managing director with a background in complex agency projects, I bring planning and operational expertise. Meanwhile Dani Wolf, our creative director and my co-founder, ensures our output remains distinctive and compelling. Together, we lead a team of designers who execute our vision for clients. This complementary partnership has been fundamental to our success. When we first discussed starting the studio, Dani appreciated my approach, recognising how proper structure could give the creative work room to flourish. He saw how systems would help us be more efficient, meet deadlines consistently, improve collaboration and help the creative process flow better. This balance allows us to serve both our visible and invisible clients more effectively than either of us could alone. When urgent client needs arise, we can divide and conquer, one of us focusing on delivery while the other keeps our business moving forward. Time as investment currency In a service business where we essentially buy time – from ourselves and our team – and sell it to clients, we’ve learnt to think of time allocation as investment decisions. This may sound very dry, but it’s necessity to recognise it. In the creative industry, there are typically two pricing approaches: value-based and time-based. Value-based pricing operates on the principle that the worth of the work transcends the time invested in creating it. There’s a famous anecdote about Paula Scher, the legendary Pentagram designer, who reportedly designed the Citibank logo during a meeting on a napkin. As she famously said, “It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.” “The main question isn’t how to manage time, it’s how to invest it wisely.” As a new business, we made the conscious decision to adopt time-based pricing. Not because we don’t value our work, but because it creates transparency with clients while protecting us from scope creep. It’s given us the clarity and flexibility needed in our first year, allowing us to be agile while maintaining healthy margins. More importantly, it’s forced us to be intentional about where we invest non-billable hours. When you track time meticulously, you quickly see which activities generate returns and which don’t. The art of delegation One of our biggest time management lessons has been understanding what to outsource and what to handle ourselves. The equation isn’t simply about cost, it’s about strategic focus. We quickly outsourced accounting and legal services, areas where mistakes would be costly and specialised expertise is essential. This decision, while an investment, freed mental space and reduced stress considerably. For marketing, our approach has evolved. We initially outsourced social media management but brought it back in-house when we realised we were still finding our voice. Conversely, hiring a PR specialist to build brand awareness has been transformative precisely because it’s a specialised skill neither of us possesses. The question isn’t what can we afford to outsource? It’s what can we afford not to outsource if we want to grow? Beyond billable hours Six months into our journey, we faced an uncomfortable truth – while we were steadily winning client work, these projects had limited portfolio potential. This realisation sparked a multi-pronged approach. First, we became more intentional about which client projects we pursued, weighing creative potential alongside financial return. Sometimes a smaller budget project with greater creative freedom became a better long-term investment than a larger but creatively constrained opportunity. Second, we carved out specific time for “studio projects” – self-initiated work that might not generate immediate revenue but would demonstrate our capabilities, showcase our passions as a business, and attract the type of clients we ultimately wanted. Fluid time allocation What we’ve ultimately learnt is that time allocation isn’t about rigid formulas, it’s about maintaining a fluid, responsive approach while never losing sight of both sides of the business. Our approach continues to mature. Some weeks demand intense focus on client delivery; others allow more investment in the invisible client. The key isn’t perfect balance in any given week, but ensuring that neither side gets neglected over the longer term. This fluidity extends to how we work as founders and how we blend our work and personal lives. Dani, a morning person, starts early when he’s most energised. As a night owl, I often put in hours after my son’s bedtime. We’ve even started taking a couple of weekend hours to plan the week ahead, as we found weekdays often began with immediate client needs that left no space for strategic thinking. I’m not advocating for poor boundaries. But as founders, finding the rhythm that works for your life circumstances is essential. Another lesson our invisible client has taught us. Looking forward A year in, we’re still refining this balance. But we’ve learned that the main question isn’t how to manage time, it’s how to invest it wisely across both sides of our business. For those starting their own creative venture, recognise early that your invisible client demands as much strategic thinking as any external project. Build systems that acknowledge both sides need nurturing, be intentional about outsourcing, and remember that sometimes the most valuable hours you spend won’t appear on any client invoice. Natasha Szczerb is managing director and co-founder of design and branding studio Badberries. Industries in this article Recent Jobs

Design Bridge and Partners have created a kintsugi-inspired new look for Gen-All, a charity that promotes intergenerational work and best practice. Gen-All co-founder Judith Ish-Horowicz has run a nursery within a care home since 2017. She received lottery funding to create a new body bringing together different organisations in the space to share best practice. “We were aware that there was a lot of intergenerational work going on, but there was no understanding of what was actually impactful,” she explains. The new Gen-All logo by Design Bridge and Partners Ish-Horowicz worked with the Beth Johnson Foundation to revive the Centre of Intergenerational Practice and Research and Development (CIPRD). She met Design Bridge and Partners’ Chief Strategy Officer Matt Boffey because his daughter attended her nursery and he offered to work on the project pro bono. “Everyone recognises that stronger relationships between the generations create some really positive outcomes for society, especially in this moment where we’ve got demographic change and stretched resources,” Boffey says. “We wanted to create a compelling brand that people could get behind, so it could become a beacon to attract different partners.” Design Bridge and Partners’ visuals for Gen-All Boffey and his team felt the name CIRP “took a lot of unpacking” while Ish-Horowicz is more blunt – “It was a terrible name.” They hit on Gen-All as a simple and immediate way of capturing what the organisation stands for. “Intergenerational work is about all the generations rather than just the extremes of the very young and the very old,” Boffey says, “So we wanted something that could represent that broader sense of inclusivity, and something that wasn’t too abstract.” He says this immediacy was particularly important for a small organisation with limited budgets. They created a simple wordmark using the new name in Hepta Slab, with the hyphen also acting as a visual metaphor bridging the generations, and the various organisations Gen-All wants to unite. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Gen-All_PR_07.mp4 Senior designer Leanne Kitchen explains that the logo was kept deliberately neutral because of the very busy and colourful assets that were developed for the broader identity. This was built on the idea of fragmentation, which applied across generations as well as among the intergenerational practice community itself. “We wanted to translate that into a very clear message and we liked the idea of filling the gap, to bring the generations back together,” Kitchen explains. This led them to kintsugi, or golden joinery, which is the Japanese act of repairing broken objects with a lacquer that reconnects the pieces, but doesn’t hide the fact it has once been broken. “We liked the idea that it creates something new, but embraces the past and its previous fragmentation,” Kitchen explains. “We’re not shying away from where we’ve been, and just trying to glue it back together. Using kintsugi creates a more meaningful whole.” Design Bridge and Partners’ visuals for Gen-All And so the visuals are created from repaired ceramic pieces that represent different generations, with contrasting imagery attached together. There was also a neat historic link to the Beth Johnson foundation, which is based in Stoke, the heart of the Potteries. They held workshops at Ish-Horowicz’ London nursery to create the first pieces, where they also collected stories from participants about how bringing together young and old had benefitted their lives. The team later used AI image generation tools to expand the visual assets and create a broad suite of imagery for Gen-All’s digital channels. And the pottery theme extends into lots of nice touches, such as using stacked plates to create a chart to share key stats in the Gen-All newsletter. Boffey says it’s important for Design Bridge and Partners to take on projects like this alongside its big-name client work. “It’s a great opportunity for us to take the talent we have and create a different type of impact with a different type of partner, which is no less important than furthering the ends of our commercial clients,” he explains. “It’s very motivating to our people, and it gives them an opportunity to stretch themselves in new directions. We get lots of people wanting to be involved and we don’t ever treat these projects as a hobby or a side project.” For Ish-Horowicz, the impact of the rebrand is already being felt, with renewed interest and engagement across the UK, as well as new connections around the world, from the US and Sweden to Israel, India and Turkey. And she is excited for how the new brand will help further this work, which she has committed so much of her life to. “For the first time we are connecting people together, so professionals in this space can support each other and bring the level of impact up,” she says. “It’s no longer coming into care homes and singing at somebody at Christmas. Now we are all singing together, and singing from the same song sheet.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Gen-All_PR_09.mp4

Whichever way you cut it, mix it or remaster it, the Eurovision Song Contest is a deeply weird thing. Not weird in the sense of outlandish outfits, incomprehensible lyrics or fever-dream choreography (although that’s all there if you want it). Nor weird in the sense that a 69-year-old pan-European singing competition has become one of the few remaining water cooler events that pull people outside of their own bubbles and into a shared frame of reference.. But weird on a more fundamental level. An event, and a brand, that is unbelievably hard to pin down. On the one hand, it’s the Euros for people who don’t like football – big, bombastic, slick, chock-full of mini flag icons and low-level national biases. And on the other, it’s this gloriously bizarre exercise in high camp, a joyful gathering of relatively unknown musical acts in such a way that makes the music almost an afterthought. Basically, an excuse for one big, mad, everyone’s-welcome party. In an era where every European country has long-established talent shows; when the music industry is dominated by a handful of transnational mega-stars; when even the notion of “Europe” is itself under strain, it’s hard to understand quite why it still exists. Never mind that it reaches a global audience of 163 million. Its genius lies in how seriously it takes itself. And perhaps it offers a little insight into a much overlooked aspect of brand identity – self-perception. Make no mistake, Eurovision is a serious brand. From visual identity to marketing to international television rights to the experience itself, it’s very aware of the power it wields. It’s the world’s biggest live music event for a reason. But crucially, Eurovision is a brand that feels in on the game it’s playing. It comes brilliantly close to acknowledging how preposterous the whole thing is. Whether that’s including Australia, for the simple fact that it’s really popular 9,000 miles from Europe, or whether it’s the brooding figure of executive supervisor Martin Österdahl, smouldering and saying nothing as he helps count votes. Even the presenters (both on-stage and on our screens) feel in on the joke. Always seemingly one step away from breaking out into an unrecoverable fit of giggles. “Crucially, Eurovision is a brand that feels in on the game it’s playing.” This is exceptional, serious branding. It’s branding that creates just enough space to offer a wry wink at its audience. To say, “We get it. In the grand scheme of things, none of this truly matters, but you might as well enjoy it.” It’s a glint of mischief that simultaneously acknowledges that it’s a confection being broadcast to an audience of consumers, while drawing that same audience sincerely closer, warmer to the brand than before.Eurovision might be an extreme example, but great brands are masters at the glint of mischief. IKEA famously talks about their “twinkle in the eye” – a little dose of irreverence that manages to make the proposition of affordable, self-assembly furniture and aspirational style hold together against the odds. As a consumer, you can’t help but like them, even when the category conventions are pushing you to think the opposite. Method have harnessed the glint through packaging design. Just no-frills and minimalist enough to winkingly call bullshit on the garish, overhyped claims of the cleaning products category; never quite no-frills or minimalist enough to become either a self-parody or budget bleach. Even Ryanair, with its unrepentant take on budget customer service, employs the glint of mischief to make people dislike them that little bit less. How a brand views itself translates to how others view it. And if you view yourself with genuine self-awareness – you understand, however implicitly, that you are a brand, built to sell help sell things, and not a pioneering force for positive change, a cultural disruptor, or an essential part of a lifestyle identity – you can connect with an audience who themselves know, deep down, they are being sold to. A glint of mischief, a twinkle in the eye, a little touch of human self-awareness in a world of extreme creative and strategic self-seriousness. Eurovision gets this better than anyone – perhaps the most serious practitioners in the art of unseriousness out there. For a continent that feels deathly serious most of the time – economically, politically, socially – it might just offer a little dose of genuine mischief we can all relate to. Josh Dickins is head of consulting at Modern Citizens, a modular agency built to solve modern brand problems.

Bronwen Westrip is executive creative director of Denomination, a female-founded branding agency which specialises in the wine and spirits sector. Design What would your monograph be called? Design is cheap, ideas are priceless. With AI advancing, creativity remains our most valuable asset. Trends come and go, but a great idea stands the test of time. From a brand design perspective, the real currency lies in original thinking, not just aesthetics. What recent design work made you a bit jealous? I loved a conceptual piece done by Muuv that I thought was super clever and so on point – a collaboration between Absolut and Italian tomato brand Mutti to make a Bloody Mary. It was a perfect example of jumping on the trend for unusual formats combined with brand mash-ups that felt totally on point, fun and was beautifully considered. I hope Absolut took note! What’s an unusual place you get inspiration from? The New Scientist magazine. My parents were both scientists, so I grew up with its constant presence on the periphery of our home. It is full of the most amazing stories, from tiny new fluorescent life forms to mind-blowing photography in deepest space, that pull me out of my usual frame of visual reference into a world of the micro and macro. Name something that is brilliantly designed, but overlooked. Worcestershire sauce – a little gem of history, hiding in plain sight. It carries the same energy as Angostura Bitters – brilliant yet often uncredited. Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, first invented and sold in 1837, has remained virtually unchanged for over a century, with its bottle, label, and secret recipe standing as a testament to enduring design. A quirky Victorian staple that has stood the test of time, it’s an unsung hero of FMCG branding – instantly recognisable, reliably familiar, and likely found in almost every household. What object in your studio best sums up your taste? It’s an unusual one. In the 1970s, my mum, a research scientist, took an evening class in resin casting. While others preserved dried flowers or lace, she embedded a rat embryo, its translucent body revealing purple bones and pink veins. To most, it might seem unsettling, but to her, it was beautiful – a fusion of science and art. That perspective shaped my creativity too – finding beauty where others might not. The rat embryo, forever suspended in resin, is more than an object – it’s a reminder of how design, like science, is about seeing the world differently and finding beauty in unexpected places. Bronwen Westrip’s rat embryo Leadership What feedback felt brutal at the time, but turned out to be useful? That I care too much… it wasn’t doing me any favours. Initially I was confused that something which had propelled me up the ranks and ensured I delivered could be seen as a bad thing. I’ve worked incredibly hard over the years, and when you reach a certain level that can lead to burnout and set a bad example to those below. It took me a while to realise that a pinch of chill goes a long way to being a better creative director, having a better perspective on projects and personal balance. What’s an under-appreciated skill that design leaders need? The ability to have fun. Our industry is hard work and often feels unrewarding when projects go on for extended periods or clients don’t share your vision. Covid and Zoom calls have meant it’s much harder to build a culture that’s enjoyable beyond the work, but it’s important as it’s why most of us joined the industry in the first place. What keeps you up at night? The search for a better idea. Whether it’s a project I’m working on or just a thought experiment, I’m always asking – what’s the best possible way to do this? Recently, Ian Ritchie, former owner of JKR, told me a story about the Fosbury Flop – how for decades, athletes high-jumped by going sideways over the bar until Dick Fosbury flipped the approach, quite literally, by going over backwards. It changed the sport forever. That challenge – what’s my Fosbury Flop? – is what runs through my head at night. The left-field idea that isn’t just different, but fundamentally better. What trait is non-negotiable in new hires? A work ethic. I can’t tolerate those who aren’t in for the team effort and the propensity to put in the extra when needed. Creativity isn’t a clock-in and clock-out business. Complete this sentence, “I wish more clients…” … trusted their agencies more. Short-term marketing can lead to risk-averse decisions that tick boxes in research, or placating consumers rather than inspiring them. We always push our clients to be braver – when done intelligently it leads to higher commercial gains, but also category defining work, whether that be radical re-invention or simply protecting a treasure. Brands in this article

14 May, 2025 In London and Los Angeles, Rob Alderson speaks with Teo Connor about Airbnb's new direction, her career, and the enduring influence of the girl guides. About an hour after CEO Brian Chesky unveiled the new Airbnb app to the world, Teo Connor, the company’s VP of design, takes a moment to reflect on the 18-month project. It’s a key move for Airbnb, which is beefing up its experiences and adding services, so people can book a private chef or a massage through the app. And it was an enormous design challenge for Connor and her team, who had to introduce a dizzying new array of options and information into the UX. “Yeah it was a bit nuts,” she laughs. “But I am really proud that we have been able to make something that feels both familiar and new. It feels magical to pull these three things into an app that people are used to using for one thing.” Teo Connor A big piece of the puzzle was to create the right building blocks that would work for both users and hosts – unglamorous but vital work to create scalable design structures. But for a company that has design woven in its DNA – both Chesky and co-founder Joe Gebbia studied at the Rhode Island School of Design – they also had to create something that looked great too. “We had to be able to condense all this information into three new tabs on the homescreen without it becoming overwhelming,” Connor explains. “How do you do that at scale, and at such density? But also with beauty – we had a lot of conversations about that.” Sitting through Chesky’s presentation on a massive high-definition screen, every pixel of the new app was blown up for everyone to scrutinise. But Connor is clearly satisfied with what she, and everyone else, saw. “We are having to educate people and change their behaviour, so that is a huge challenge,” she says. “But what I love is that when you look at it, it sort of feels inevitable.” We’re changing travel again Rewind a couple of hours and Brian Chesky strides onto the stage to the strains of Ini Kamoze’s Here Comes the Hotstepper. Airbnb has pioneered a way of working that focuses the whole company on a single product calendar, and the summer release is the moment when its new additions are shared with the public. In the past, these changes and updates have been smaller, and sometimes very technical. But this announcement fundamentally changes what Airbnb is, and does. The tagline used in the official release is, “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.” The audience in Los Angeles includes journalists, influencers, a phalanx of Airbnb staff and a smattering of celebrities (who a nice lady from People magazine identifies for me). Chesky – whom it feels relevant to note is ripped – speaks for about an hour, explaining the company’s origin story, and the travails of the pandemic, when they lost 80% of their business in eight weeks (“Is this the end of Airbnb?” asked Wired in 2020). This context sets up the company’s new direction. “17 years ago we changed the way people travel, and today we are changing travel again,” he explains. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/All-new-app-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 While Airbnb was launched as a more interesting alternative to bland hotels, he acknowledges that hotels provide a range of useful things that people need when they are travelling, from haircuts to massages. Airbnb Services is an attempt to replicate those offerings on the app – the icon is a bell like those you find on hotel reception desks. It launched across 260 cities with ten categories – chefs, prepared meals, catering, photography, personal training, massages, spa treatments, hair styling, make-up and nails. Airbnb Experiences, which first launched in 2016, has been “reimagined from the ground up” to offer people local experiences “hosted” by people who know their cities best. It launched across 650 cities with five categories – history and culture, food and drink, nature and outdoors, art and design, and fitness and wellness. They are also rolling out Airbnb Originals – one-off events often with a celebrity host (Megan Thee Stallion, Sabrina Carpenter and American football star Patrick Mahomes are all signed up to host their own experiences). One of the biggest shifts is that Airbnb wants these new categories to be used by people in their own cities as well as visitors, heralding a move from being a travel app to an experience, or community, platform. And all of this needs a whole new design system, which is where Connor and her team of 200 designers come in. A series of design challenges There was an overarching design challenge – to bring these new elements into the Airbnb ecosystem in a way that felt integrated and exciting, but didn’t overshadow the accommodation offering, on which the company has built an $85 billion business. But below that, there were a series of “really fun design challenges” to create the spaces and interfaces that would support this new direction. These included the new homescreen, a new profile page, a new itinerary page (which now had to incorporate timelines broken into hours as well as days) and product description pages, or PDPs, which capture these myriad experiences, from historic tours to wine tasting, and bring them to life in a clear and engaging way. “Brian really wanted the PDPs to tell a story, so you could go from the top to the bottom and really quickly discern what this thing was about,” Connor explains. “For a really long time we were talking about having video. But you have to sit back and watch a video, and it can be quite passive.” The solution was a 2×2 grid which quickly communicates the key information, and then a design structure that allows for scanning. Elsewhere, carousels are used to help users browse the broader range of things they can get via the app. The new Experiences flow in the app The designs needed to strike a fine a balance – to demonstrate breadth and abundance, without sacrificing ease-of-use. “We want people to get the information they need and then get back to doing life,” Connor says. “That’s a big thing for us when we’re designing.” That begins, she explains, with an obsession with simplicity that underpins every design review. “We are constantly asking, do people need this? Do they want it? If no, then take it away.” But the team also thinks a lot about the platform’s personality, “using craft and care to make the experience feel delightful.” Chesky talked in his presentation of bringing more depth and vibrancy back to the app, moving away from the flat, and sometimes soulless, big tech experience. (One commenter praised the new design’s “Web 1.0” sensibility). There are lots of nice touches – when you press the hot air balloon icon for Experiences it belches fire, when you hit the Services bell it shakes as if summoning a concierge. “It’s not about creating pretty things just because we can,” Connor says. “The delightful moments always have a utility behind them.” So on the itinerary page, the check-in time has an icon showing an open door with the lights on behind; the check-out time is accompanied by a closed door with a darkened space behind it. How did this happen? Rewind again, and I sit down with Connor in Airbnb’s London office about six weeks before the new app goes live. You wouldn’t know that they are at the business end of such a huge project; Connor is calm and self-reflective. I first met her back in the early 2010s, when she ran her own graphic design studio in London. She joined Apple in 2016 as a human interface designer, and moved to Airbnb in 2021. Was this – working for some of the biggest design-led companies in technology – always the plan? “Not at all,” she laughs. “It’s surprising and magical to me that this small-time graphic designer from London ended up here. I often ask myself – how did this happen?” The answer, she says, involves luck and timing. But it also speaks to her willingness to say yes to new opportunities, an approach she adopted after once saying no. During an internship at a London ad agency, someone offered Connor the chance to design flyers for a local club night. “I got totally freaked out and ghosted the opportunity,” she says. “I’ve always regretted that, not just saying yes and seeing how it went.” She’d always been interested in creativity, often being taken as a kid to London’s museums where she would happily sketch for hours. “I loved and admired artists,” she says. “But deep inside I knew I wasn’t one. I was a bit of a girl scout, a bit practical. I liked making things, and solving things, and helping people.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Trips-itinerary-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 Connor says her career has been a mix of “going with the flow and wanting to drive the flow.” She did an art foundation course because someone she worked with doing Saturday shifts in a supermarket was doing one, and she thought it sounded interesting. The course was “a real awakening” and introduced her to graphic design, which she’d go on to study at the University of Middlesex. “I did bumble through life a bit, but I am driven to be good at what I’m doing,” she says. “So even though I might fall into something, once I fall into it, I want to do it the best I can.” She admits to being “bamboozled” when Apple first got in touch. “The email felt like spam,” she laughs, “it was from hello@apple or something.” The new Guest Profile page While she had worked on websites before, she wasn’t a digital product designer. And she was happy in London, running her own studio amid the strong creative community that blossomed in the city at that time. “There were all these small agencies doing really cool work and sharing resources. It was an environment I thrived in, and felt comfortable in. So the idea of leaving all that behind, and going to America where I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t know how things worked, was very nerve-wracking.” But the memory of the club night flyers spurred her on. “I didn’t want to be the person who says no and regrets it. So I went, and it was the best thing I ever did.” Although she hadn’t had much exposure to digital product design, she found that her experience in wayfinding proved very useful. “With wayfinding you are thinking about how to move people though a space, with visuals and graphics, in a way that tells a story. A lot of that thinking is very similar in digital products.” A defining time Connor spent five years at Apple and moved to Airbnb in 2021, initially as senior director of design, before becoming a VP the following year. She saw in Airbnb what appeared to be a very rare opportunity. “It felt like this was going to be a defining time for the company, and that we would really be able to shape something,” she says. It was also exciting to work for someone who was a designer before he was a founder. “I am fortunate to have a leader who understands the value of design,” Connor says. “For a lot of my peers who work at organisations of this scale, a lot of their job is translation, advocating for design, and trying to get a seat at the table. I never need to advocate for design with Brian – he has made space for the design team to be at the heart of the company.” But once a designer, always a designer. Does he often give feedback on specific design details? “Oh 100%,” Connor laughs. “He has this deep knowledge, and this great perspective, because he is looking at the whole company all of the time. But he’s always in the pixels too, asking about the radius of a button or something.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Services-browse-book-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 Overseeing 200 designers can be challenging, but she sees the fundamentals as being similar to leading much smaller teams. “I don’t think there’s a huge difference between managing five designers or managing 200, when you break it down,” she says. “The ability to build trust, to empower teams, and to be decisive, these all scale up.” She has built a culture which revolves around courage, and says she is drawn to people who, like her, “have a point of view and speak up for what’s right.” “I think that goes back to the Girl Guide thing again,” she says. In a company like Airbnb, where design and business are very intertwined, does she expect her designers to understand the commercial impact of their work? “I expect them to be curious about it, and want to learn,” Connor says. She tries to encourage this commercial awareness through, for example, inviting other teams in the business to share their insights with the design team, and mandating that project reviews include a discussion of the impact created. “We want to make it easy for the team to understand why these things are linked, and why they’re important,” Connor explains. More senior roles are expected to have more of this business acumen, but she doesn’t miss the days when designers often felt like they needed to have an MBA, to speak the right language. “I want our designers to be designers, first and foremost,” she says. Day one Back at the Airbnb launch event, I ask Connor what happens now. “Well, we’re going to have a really good party,” she says. “But I think we are excited to build on all this work now. “I actually think today is like day one,” she says. “I think that’s how it feels for the company.” Design disciplines in this article Industries in this article Brands in this article What to read next The Guardian unveils redesigned app and homepage Digital Design 7 May, 2025 Aad creates guide to more sustainable digital design Digital Design 4 Feb, 2025 How Ragged Edge gamified credit scores for Checkmyfile Digital Design 26 Nov, 2024

93FT has created the playful interiors of Starwood Hotels’ second UK branch of its Treehouse brand. With chalk boards, patchwork quilts and tree stump furniture, the hotel leans into childhood nostalgia and creative freedom. Aimed at 25 to 45-year-olds, this Treehouse Hotel is housed in a 1970s concrete building in Manchester’s city centre. It started life as an office block, but more recently operated as a Renaissance Hotel. The building started life as an office block This iteration was designed by Sheffield-based 93FT in collaboration with Starwood Hotels’ international design team. “Throughout the project we have followed our brand ethos of ‘carefreedom’ whereby we want to transport guests back to a time when they were children, more carefree and able to explore their world creatively,” says Neil Andrew, Starwood’s vice president, design – EMEA. 93FT co-founder Nick Clark echoes this sentiment. “Treehouses are about escaping. They’re about a sense of nostalgia, and feeling young again.” This extends to every design detail – Barry Sternlicht, the hotel group’s founder wanted these hotels to feel like “a kid had made them,” says Amber Addison, 93FT senior interior designer. The team worked to strike a careful balance and meet health & safety standards The challenge was to make this playful environment also be commercial, comfortable and meet health and safety standards, she explains. And aesthetically, the team had to strike a balance between the designs looking not too ramshackle, but not too polished either. The agency brought in a mishmash of vintage items from different sources including salvage company Retrouvious, plus reclaimed building materials and a variety of fabrics, to capture that spontaneity of children’s creativity. Glass Onion created bespoke cushion covers for all 224 bedrooms, using denim off-cuts For example, vintage clothing business, Glass Onion, which has a store in Sheffield, made cushion covers from denim off-cuts for each of the 224 bedrooms. “A treehouse can be made of things that your mum doesn’t want in the lounge anymore,” Addison says. Hence in the restaurant, Pip, there are eclectic lampshades, and one wall is filled with shelves of rainbow glass bottles of different shapes and sizes, which are intended to conjure up the intuitive collecting habits of children. Meanwhile, the bedrooms are furnished with individually made patchwork quilts, asymmetrical door handles, handmade furniture and larch cladding. Chalkboards lean into childhood nostalgia and creative freedom In the entrance, a mix of reclaimed and handmade windows make up the lobby walls. And some of the chairs are made from tree stumps, with old tool handles embedded in them to form a back rest. This sourcing came easily to 93FT, which brought in 1,400 items for its redesign of London’s Pilgrim Hotel. Other playful elements include chalkboards, which guests are inviting to doodle on, or they can carve their name on small pieces of wood, which are then hung in the lift lobby as an alternative guestbook. The agency initially came up with some strong ideas to bring the treehouse concept to life. “We loved the idea of a treehouse in a Treehouse,” Clark says. “We were going to cut some big shapes into the floorplates, and add a big tree with a treehouse at the top.” Another idea was to have a big swing in the entrance, but neither of these ideas turned out to be feasible. Existing columns are clad in timber, to give them a tree-like appearance They were able to install a big artificial tree clad in real bark, which reaches up through the ceiling of the dark, lower-ground reception. Also on this level, the timber walkway is bathed in dappled light in reference to a forest floor. The effect was created by cutting out organic shapes in the ceiling and carefully placing lighting there. A second tree made of reclaimed timber stands on the mezzanine with a bench at its base. For phase two of the build, 93FT is designing a presidential suite, and Blacksheep in London is designing a rooftop bar. In the UK, Manchester Treehouse follows on from Treehouse London in Marylebone designed by Birmingham agency Keane. It is also a transformation of an existing hotel, and that outpost has city-specific elements including Paddington Bear references and London-centric souvenirs. Further Treehouse locations in the works include Brickell in Miami by Rockwell Group; Riyadh in Saudi Arabia by Blacksheep; and Adelaide in Australia by Woods Bagot. The glass bottles are intended to conjure up the intuitive collecting habits of children The bar area features an eclectic mix of light fittings, adding character and visual interest to the space

This self-generated project came about after the ad agency’s joint managing partner Hannah Penn was diagnosed with skin cancer, which she has since recovered from. Penn became determined to raise awareness of the dangers of UV, particularly in the construction industry. In the UK, construction workers comprise 8% of the workforce, but account for 44% of occupational melanoma skin cancer deaths, according to research published by the National Library of Medicine. However, unlike most cancers, skin cancer is preventable. “So with the right interventions and awareness, we can save hundreds if not thousands of lives,” says Penn. According to Statista, there are 2.14m people employed in the construction sector in the UK. Construction workers account for 44% of occupational melanoma skin cancer deaths in the UK The agency started to explore ways of communicating this. Posters weren’t going to work for workers up on a roof, says Dan Norris, who joined Pablo London along with Ray Shaughnessy as joint managing creative directors 18 months ago. Instead, the team developed the idea of making the mandatory safety vest responsive to UV (ultraviolet) radiation, so that it would warn the wearer when UV levels got dangerously high. Early ideas included applying UV stickers that change colour, but their quality deteriorates quickly. LEDs lights were also considered, but they are heavy and would need to be recharged. The change in colour alerts the wearer and fellow workers to apply sunscreen and take precautions Pablo London’s then hit upon the idea of a logo made of wearable tech. The jackets’ breast pocket have a silicon logo filled with a long-lasting UV-sensitive material. As the sun’s UV level intensifies, the logo changes from white to pink to red, alerting the wearer and fellow workers to apply sunscreen and take precautions. This tech needed a brand that would engage the target audience. Young builders are into grooming and looking after themselves, says Norris. “The big problem is awareness, if you talk about it, what are you asking them to do?” “We deliberately communicated everything towards the construction industry,” says Shaughnessy. “At the heart of it, is the idea that you are deserving of this level of protection.” Pablo London came up with UV-U-SEE, an initials-heavy name which informed the tone of the communications. Stylistically, the brand sits between the iconography of safety signage typically found on a building site, and a cool, design-conscious brand, says Norris. “The look also borrows from the world of 1960s trademarks.” “If it’s too much in a health space it feels like a real turn-off,” Shaughnessy says. The branding draws inspiration from the world of 1960s trademarks The logo design captures the simple idea of making the unseen, seen, Norris says. “Drawing on the graphic language of informative symbols, the design uses a triangle warning shape and a simple inverse masking effect to reveal something hidden in the sun’s rays,” he adds. Pablo London designer, Rodrigo Castellari, worked on the visuals. The idea of making the invisible visible is articulated on the website as the utilitarian symbols disappear to be replaced by letters and words. The symbols were designed in-house from a Helvetica base. The Higher-Vis vests can be bought with bespoke logos through the UV-U-SEE website. Also on sale is UV-U-SEE branded sunscreen dispensers and sunscreen made by LifeJacket, which produces high-performance non-greasy sunscreen for the army. The brand is supported by The National Federation of Builders and Considerate Constructors Scheme. But Penn’s vision is for it to have a life beyond the construction industry, suggesting it could even be applied to prams or children’s hats. While this is not intended as a money-making scheme for Pablo London, it has a value for the agency. “When we talk to our paying clients we can show them there’s more ways to solve a problem that to write an ad,” Norris says. The brand is supported by The National Federation of Builders and Considerate Constructors Scheme Branded sunscreen dispenser designed to be available on a construction site

Taxi Studio has created a new visual and verbal identity for smart insurance platform Yoloh. The start-up, which currently offers home and car insurance, has adopted a new brand built around the idea of “dejumbling insurance” and its team credits the rebrand with a 10-fold surge in its valuation, leading to seed funding from investors across Europe, the Middle East and the US. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/01.Yoloh_Intro.mp4 CMO Manish Bhatt had previously worked with the Bristol-based studio on the Airbus rebrand, and he saw a similar opportunity to shake up a conservative industry. “I have no insurance experience,” Bhatt explains, “so the idea was that Taxi and I could both come to this with a fresh perspective, to add value and create a brand that’s going to make a lasting impact.” The company had previously been called Smartsurance, and originally the founders wanted to change the name to Yolo, to reflect its mission to “to ensure people spend time living, not form-filling.” But having been quoted $15million to buy the website domain, they landed instead on Yoloh (the extra letter stands for happiness). The old identity had been built around a dog mascot called Simba. Bhatt pointed out that they may well get a lawsuit from Disney if they persisted with that character, and, given that animals are a common visual trope in the sector, he convinced them that they needed to do something different. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/04.-TaxiStudio_Typefaces.mp4 “We wanted to disrupt the industry,” Bhatt explains. “Insurance is historically seen as a tax, so how could we flip that narrative around, and build a brand that can scale and resonate? We are trying to innovate, and so the new identity had to reflect that.” For Martin Fresle, Taxi’s associate creative director, the idea of dejumbling insurance – a world most people find complex and confusing – was the perfect foundation on which to build the identity. The team knew early on that they wanted to inject more playfulness, but they were also conscious that people feel very seriously about their finances. “You can only disrupt to a certain point,” Fresle says. “We had to be credible and trustworthy, and not make it seem too out-there.” Another challenge was the very broad target audience. Yoloh wants to build a multi-generational client base, from young people saving for their first home, to older people planning their retirement, and there is also a B2B market of banks and other lenders that are onboarded onto the platform. Starting with the brandmark, Taxi turned Yoloh into an ambigram, with the first ‘y’ and the final ‘h’ mirroring each other, so it can be read both ways, and flipped round in its motion design form. This was accompanied with the strapline, “Making life easier, whichever way you look at it.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/07.-TaxiStudio_Yoloh_Andi_Hands.mp4 Taxi also created Andi, a four-fingered hand that interacts with the other visual assets to, “make complex insurance terms and concepts easier to understand.” “Andi was designed to add that human touch,” Fresle explains. “That’s really lacking across other insurance providers and big banks, who use a lot of stock imagery.” Both the typography and the colour palette were chosen to balance trust and playfulness. For the fonts, Jokker bought a more serious sensibility while Bunch Bold added what Fresle calls “a curvy fluid bounce” that mirrors Andi’s angles. And the navy blue much used in the financial industries is offset with pops of brighter colours. Another challenge was to create an identity that could still convey its personality in the scaled-down space of an app, which is where most people would encounter it. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/11.TaxiStudio_Yoloh_IphoneUX.mp4 Language played a big part in maximising the new brand’s impact. Taxi worked with brand writer Nick Carson to create a “warm, witty, and accessible tone of voice” in keeping with its mission. Working with start-ups can have its challenges, but Fresle says the pace of decision-making and direct access to key people makes these collaborations particularly dynamic. And for Bhatt, the new brand has already proved its worth in driving clear financial impact. He draws a very direct line between the identity and the company’s recent seed investment. “Securing seed funding was a pivotal moment for Yoloh, and our new brand identity played a key role in getting us there. Taxi Studio didn’t just give us a brand, they gave us a bold, ownable story that helped investors instantly ‘get’ what we’re about. “Now we are able to take this brand and scale it to any market around the world, which is very exciting,” he says. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/05.TaxiStudio_Yoloh_Logo.mp4 https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/10.TaxiStudio_Yoloh_Icons-and-phone.mp4

13 May, 2025 Clare Dowdy finds out how the iconic car brand taps into the appetite for personalisation among the super-rich, and the incredible range of options these customers can decide on. At Rolls-Royce’s site in West Sussex, visitors are asked to put on a purple overall-style jacket. Nothing unusual there, it’s routine at manufacturing facilities to be handed a coat. But this jacket is made by Norton & Sons of Savile Row. If you weren’t picked up from the station in a Roller and driven up the drive past the 65 box-cut lime trees to the factory’s front door (as I was), then the jacket might be your first whiff that things are done differently here. A constellation of the night sky picked out in tiny lights on the headliner (ceiling) of a new car This factory has cornered the – admittedly niche – market in bespoke one-off motor cars, an object that is becoming increasingly desired by the very wealthy. From the welcoming reception desk to the pristine production line, from the embroidery workshop to the private dining room, the atmosphere is deferential. These people know their target audience. At Rolls-Royce, it’s all about making customers feel special. For example, staff know customers like to mark important anniversaries. So a customer can decide to celebrate the day they made their first billion by having the exact constellation of that night sky picked out in tiny lights on the headliner (ceiling) of their new car. This makes particular sense if you have a chauffeur, as you get a great view of the headliner from the back seat. That service isn’t on offer to off-the-peg Rolls-Royce customers, but to those who pay the extra to have their car personalised. The home of Rolls-Royce at Goodwood, outside Chichester And though it takes around three years to make an individualised car, demand is going up. Called Bespoke and Coachbuild, this service provides customers with a one-off Rolls-Royce, as they can choose their own detailing, materials, marquetry, patterns and paint colour. With Coachbuild, they can even dictate the shape of the car. That’s a four-year process. There was a surge in bespoke commissioning during the pandemic, when billionaires, like the rest of us, were twiddling their thumbs at home. These hand-crafted projects are increasingly complex, high-value and – all-importantly – high-margin. Meaning they need a lot of design input. So in January, Rolls-Royce earmarked £300million to extend its Bespoke and Coachbuild capabilities at Goodwood, outside Chichester. “Clients want more intriguing levels of bespoke, so we needed more space,” the RR spokesperson explains on my visit. Hence the new facility. Production takes place at the Goodwood site, designed by Grimshaw Architects, and opened in 2003 When RR’s Goodwood site, designed by Grimshaw Architects, opened in 2003, 300 staff made just one car a day. Now there are 2,500 staff at the site, producing 28 cars a day. Rolls-Royce was founded in the UK in 1904. Since 2003 it’s been part of BMW Group, when the German company acquired the Rolls-Royce Motor Cars marque. And that’s where Martina Starke comes in. Having joined BMW in 2001, she left her role as head of BMW Designworks’ Munich studio to become general manager of RR’s Bespoke Design in Goodwood in 2024. She oversees more than 30 designers, who collaborate with the engineers, craftspeople and artisans of Bespoke. These designers have backgrounds in 3D, colour trim, textiles, fashion, automotive and industrial design. Three designers work in the accessory design team, which can include creating anything from chess sets to picnic hampers “They not only create products, they create experiences and moments of wonder for our clients,” she says of the team. “I guide and support them as they look into the lifestyle of our clients to understand and capture their personal taste – so we can curate their beautiful masterpieces with material, colours and craftmanship.” She describes the work of Bespoke as storytelling. “My job is to nurture these stories as they come alive. They ask for something emotional and made for them – it’s a personal product.” But first the client must settle on the brief. This is either discussed at Goodwood, or with a designer and salesperson based at one of the company’s private offices in New York, Seoul, Dubai and Shanghai. The Middle East is the largest Bespoke region by average value per motor car, closely followed by North America and Europe. The ambition is to have a private office in every region, as having designers based in these key markets allows RR to react fast, Starke adds. These designers have a four-month induction course at Goodwood before they go into the field. Customers can choose their own design to have embroidered onto seats “There’s a conversation with the customer to understand what the idea is,” Starke says. So apart from headliners depicting the night sky, a customer might ask for a particular rose from their garden embroidered into the headliner, “or the face of your child, or dog, or horse painted in your vehicle so you have the loved ones with you in the car.” While imagination is limitless, the engineers need to confirm that it’s feasible. “If it’s possible, we might do several iterations. In the end we visualise the perfect wish,” Starke says. The fruits of this process include solid 18-carat gold sculptures, mother-of-pearl artworks, and holographic paint finishes. One client in Japan is having a cherry blossom design embroidered onto their headliner with 250,000 stitches. And when it comes to colour options, RR has 44,000 to choose from. But if the client can’t find the one they want, RR can make it up for them. This service was invaluable for the client who wanted the car exterior to match the colour of their dog’s fur. The private office at the Rolls-Royce site in Goodwood “What they really like is that we bring together the design and the craftmanship,” Starke says. “When they come to Goodwood and look at the woodwork or leather shop, they can touch, experience and understand it. When you have this high level of craftmanship it’s a different connection to people. It connects you to the makers.” This type of customisation is sought by clients who define luxury as something deeply personal to them, she adds. Starke’s department includes a three-strong accessory design team. “We’re not competing with other car brands, we’re competing with other luxury brands,” the spokesperson explains. Pieces in the accessories range include pens, luggage and dog leads Accessories designer Nick Abrams shows us a new magnetic chess set, which will sit along other pieces in the accessories range including pens, luggage and dog leads. This chess set costs €29,000, pre-tax. But of course, the client could customise it. All these opportunities for what Starke calls meaningful personal expression tap into a global trend. “Individualisation is growing because people want the storytelling. It’s self-expression, encapsulating your taste and philosophy,” she says. The exterior of Phantom Goldfinger, created to honour the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger Timandra Harkness is a broadcaster and author of Technology is Not the Problem explains why hyper-personalisation is a trend that’s still growing. “We live in an age increasingly obsessed with identity: consumers want what they buy to express who they are.” Now, mass production means most people in advanced economies can afford nice things, so merely wearing tall boots or gold lace isn’t enough, according to Harkness. “Standing out from the crowd today means buying things that only a few people can have, because they are artisanal, or limited-edition, or personalised. “Because mass production has put even luxury products within reach of the mass market, personalisation offers a way to stand out from the crowd,” she says. The interior of the Rolls-Royce Phantom Scintilla What does that mean for the top end of the market? “Bespoke products have added value: customers will pay a premium to own a commodity that nobody else owns, and that says something about them.” In 2024, RR’s one-off Arcadia Droptail was reported as costing its anonymous buyer $31million. 100 years ago, merely owning a car was a sign of wealth and status – and probably meant you could afford to employ a driver, Harkness points out. “Today it’s not even enough to drive a top-of-the-range car, so the wealthiest consumers need other ways to look – and feel – special. And feeling special is as important as outward signals,” she adds. “Nobody else will know this car matches your dog’s fur, but you will, and that will remind you every time you see it that nothing is too good for you, or your dog.” With the expansion of its personalisation capabilities, RR is betting on the continuation of this trend. If they’re right, then that will be good for the company and good for its designers. The interior of the Rolls-Royce Phantom Goldfinger Design disciplines in this article Industries in this article Brands in this article What to read next The car after the storm – Jaguar unveils new concept EV Automotive Design 3 Dec, 2024

Templo has created designs inspired by tectonic plates for the British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The London-based studio worked on the visual identity, exhibition graphics, global marketing campaign and digital content for the pavilion, which has been commissioned by the British Council since 1937. It’s the third pavilion Templo has worked on, after they came through what Joanne Jolley, the British Council’s head of marketing, arts, called a “robust procurement process,” which included a paid creative pitch. “Templo stood out from the very beginning for their clear understanding of, and sensitivity to, the issues around the 2023 pavilion, which explored the everyday rituals of diaspora communities,” she says. “They know how to communicate these complicated subjects, but also bring joy into them through their designs.” Each year’s identity is treated as a new project, because the themes of each pavilion are very different, as is the level of input each curatorial team wants and expects into the process. For this year’s pavilion, commissioner Sevra Davis wanted to bring the British Council’s overarching mission – to foster ”cross cultural connection and collaboration”– into its Venice presence. “It struck me that this was a way to use the pavilion to celebrate what the British Council does in every other way, which is to connect across cultures to build trust, build connection, and build understanding,” Davis says. “I got a lot of flack for it, because people thought I had narrowed it down too much. But I think it’s incredibly exciting, the process of working together with the team in Kenya and other people all around the world. That’s what the British Council is all about, and so this becomes an exemplar of that.” Templo’s identity for this year’s British pavilion at the Venice Biennale Produced as part of the British Council’s UK/Kenya season of culture, this year’s exhibition looks “to examine the relationship between architecture and colonisation as parallel, interconnected systems.” GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair takes inspiration from the pavilion’s location on an axis that links the UK to Kenya and the Rift Valley, raising questions about power, politics, and identity. Installations include maps of the night sky above London and Nairobi the day Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963, a bronze cast of the Rift Valley, and a room that explores how salvage materials could be used to rebuild war-torn Gaza. For Templo’s Pali Palavathanan and Anoushka Rodda, the approach spoke to many of their personal and professional interests. “Myself being Sri Lankan, and Anoushka’s family coming from Lebanon, which is the start of the Rift Valley, there were a lot of connections to who we are as a studio, and what we’re drawn to,” Palavathanan explains. This year’s British pavilion with its veil of beads This year’s British pavilion with its veil of beads The design approach was inspired by the veil of beads, made from agricultural waste and clay, which covers the angular British pavilion. The covering “softens and curves out this harsh imperial building,” Palavathanan says. They took a similar approach to the typeface, choosing Lithic for its angular, imperial sensibility and then using a “bevel effect to round off its harsh edges.” The secondary font is Flexa, chosen for its practical legibility. The red, green and black colour palette is taken from the Kenyan flag – despite Palavathanan’s initial misgivings that it would look “chaotic” – and the motion design is built on geological references. “Originally it was quite linear, but then we made it more like tectonic plates, like a rock formation converging with one another, or pulling apart. It all ties back to those themes of rift and repair.” The result is a thrillingly unusual combination of rhythms and patterns that feels very organic. And it speaks to one of Templo’s biggest challenges – to reflect the weighty subject matter of this year’s pavilion without making it feel too sombre. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/02-Geology-of-Britannic-Repair-teaser.mp4 “It’s an incredibly serious exhibition,” Palavathanan says. “It’s dealing with difficult things, but we want to be optimistic and playful in some ways, and the visual identity helps us to do that.” For Rodda, the fact that they know the British Council team so well gives them the confidence to push the creative direction. “The nice thing about these ongoing relationships is that you get a really good feel for what they prioritise, and what they find significant.” “That trust helps us push the boundaries more,” Jolley agrees. Exhibition graphics at this year’s British pavilion. Photo by Chris Lane. While around 80% of visitors to the Biennale will attend the UK exhibition, for Jolley and her team, a major focus is on the much bigger audience who won’t see the pavilion in person. Templo created a flythrough video so people can get a sense of how the exhibition unfolds, and they are also working with Kenyan influencers to create content that responds to this year’s themes. “We have to think a bit differently about how we can enrich the experience for people who won’t go to the exhibition,” Rodda says. “I think this the first time the British Council has done this, handing over control of part of the campaign.” Templo’s identity for this year’s British pavilion at the Venice Biennale Templo’s identity for this year’s British pavilion at the Venice Biennale Templo’s identity for this year’s British pavilion at the Venice Biennale Templo’s identity for this year’s British pavilion at the Venice Biennale

13 May, 2025 We asked a range of designers to share their most deeply-held design belief, and their responses ranged from designing feelings to embracing mistakes. Every designer has deeply held beliefs that shape the way they think, and the way they work. We asked a range of designers what is their absolute non-negotiable when it comes to their profession, and they provided an enjoyably eclectic set of answers. Pete Hawkins – “Print it out, mock it up” Design hills can be lonely places. And truthfully, I’ve made sacrifices, this is a service industry after all. But my “hill” is more of a range. At the summit is, ‘Unique, relevant ideas, executed with artistry.” It’s the guiding principle, the DNA of every project, shaped by everything I’ve learned from colleagues to role models who’ve inspired me. But let’s face it, that sentiment isn’t rare. So I’ll stake my flag a little lower. In the foundational foothills of composition, colour and typography lies the forgotten Mount Piomiu which stands for, “Print it out, mock it up.” A modest peak, often overlooked, but vital. And I’ll defend this one with conviction! Pete Hawkins is creative director of Chase Design Group. Leon-Anthony Smith – “Make it work, then make it shine” Most users just want to get something done. If someone can move from A to B without swearing, squinting, or solving a puzzle, that’s good design. The impact isn’t in big reveals or clever flourishes – it’s in the boring stuff actually working. Set the bar at clarity first. Respect people’s time, reduce noise, and make the path obvious. Then, if there’s room, add the charm. Stop designing for awards. Design for real people doing real things, that’s what actually impresses. Leon-Anthony Smith is head of design at Atomic. Brigid McMullen – “Walk away if the trust isn’t there” Powerful brand strategy is profound. Brand definition captured in a matter of words, not pages. No fluff. No filler. Distilled to its very core. Meaningful. Creatively loaded. When it lands, everything else flows. When it doesn’t, it’s literally just blah. And essential to any significant brand programme is client and designer’s genuine openness to ideas, challenges, & uncomfortable conversations. Brave organisations are open-minded with their agency. Their trust deserves care, so our job is to guide, not bulldoze. Transformation demands collective curiosity, cut-and-thrust debate, plus a willingness to be wrong in pursuit of what’s right. Great brand design isn’t born from ego or tunnel vision but intellectual rigour, honesty and the courage to walk away if trust isn’t there. Sacred cows? Off the table. Preconceptions? Questioned. Every. Time.Brigid McMullen is founder and managing director of The Workroom. Tassia Swulinska – ”Make mistakes and embrace the chaos” I like making mistakes on purpose. I’ve always believed that creativity needs space to be messy. Something designed within an inch of its life risks becoming sterile – overworked and lifeless. The approach may seem chaotic from a distance, but that chaos weaves together spontaneous connections and unexpected moments. You have to short-circuit the rational brain to tap into instinct. Design it, kill it, remix it, then place it in a random space to give it new meaning. Let it break and glitch, then refine it. I think there’s something vital in the mess. Creativity isn’t a clean process because we are not robots – it’s intuitive, looping, non-linear. Embrace the mistakes and trust that your gut and taste will get you to the sweet spot. That’s a beautiful, chaotic design hill I’d happily lay to rest on, and watch the flowers grow across my perfectly typeset gravestone. Tassia Swulinska is design director at DixonBaxi. Bobby Burrage – “Always strive for simplicity” “Get rid of everything that doesn’t need to be there.” I find myself saying this a lot as a creative director. This isn’t an indulgent pursuit of pretentious minimalism – it’s about revealing what truly matters: the idea. What’s the design hill I would die on? Fighting against decoration, embellishment and the all-too-common over-designing that weakens brand impact. As creatives, we’re tempted to include multiple thoughts, references and elements in our work. The real skill is knowing how much to leave in versus remove. Deciding on what’s important and what’s just noise is a battle. This requires confidence and conviction – there’s a fine line between a clever twist and a forced concept. In branding, clarity cuts through noise. The most powerful message is often the simplest one. Simple is complicated!Bobby Burrage is creative director of The Click. Sarah Fairhurst – “Design should make life better” As designers, we could and should pub-rant every design detail. Vertical type? Only runs from top to bottom. Drop shadows? Should be illegal. Faux neon? Incomparable to the real thing. For none of these would I “die on a design hill.” Deep down I’m motivated by the belief that design should make life better, on purpose. Be transformational and uplifting! We don’t need more vanilla-coloured so-so, or so-what. We all need design for a better, lighter life – be that easier, more colourful, engaging, simpler or smilier. Design is a powerful weapon, and I’m fighting for more smiles. Sarah Fairhurst is creative director at Dalziel & Pow. Richard Taylor – “Don’t get caught up in the craft” My first love affair with design was born from something that fell off the back of a car. I was 16, and the Porsche 911 Carrera badge had fallen off and landed on the road. It was the most beautiful curvaceous type I’d ever seen. That badge was Blu Tacked to my bedroom wall for years. Skip forward to today, and I use design as a tool to achieve a commercial objective; to bring brands closer to the people they serve and drive transformational growth. As an industry, we often get caught up in the craft and can lose sight of the idea. But ideas and design are like yin and yang. Form and function. They need to be good bedfellows to truly move people, to break us humans out of our ritualistic buying habits. Whilst my passion for beautifully crafted typography will never wane, design thinking is what motivates me. And it should you. Richard Taylor is founder and CEO of Brandon Consultants. Lucy McKenzie – “Aesthetics are felt, not seen” The design hill I’d die on is that aesthetics are felt, not seen. Design isn’t just visual – it’s sensorial. Form, shape, and colour don’t just communicate; they provoke, they influence how we interact with the world and feel. These elements can spark something deeper and more innate – they evoke the senses and emotional responses that live in our subconscious, bypassing what’s rational. Like David Lynch builds feeling before story, design should evoke something intrinsic to the human condition before igniting a meaning that is something deep and relatable within us that we can all connect to. Working on a haircare brand, we weren’t just designing for function — we were designing for feeling. A sensorial experience demonstrating how the product smelled, flowed from the bottle, and felt on the scalp and hand. This mattered just as much as how it performed. Ultimately, design is not just about what a product does or enables us to do or how it fits within the cultural zeitgeist, but how it makes you feel. The design I believe in goes beyond what is in vogue, to something visceral and human, to something that is memorable and lasting. Lucy McKenzie is associate director of forpeople. Lee Roberts – “Fight the good fight for the guest experience” Although it is imperative that design is efficient and functional, the absolute priority has to be the user experience. At Zebra, we work extensively in the hospitality sector and there is often pressure to compromise on customer space for the operational aspect of a facility. Sometimes this is unavoidable, however I will always fight for the guest to ensure their overall experience is not diminished. The customer journey, from order to seating should always be exemplary – we strive to never have a bad seat in the house! Lee Roberts is creative director at Zebra Projects. Industries in this article What to read next

A cafe near where I live has started selling fish finger croissants. Something about that combination shortcircuits my brain, leaving me slack-jawed and twitchy, greedy and confused. Objectively, both of these things on their own are great. Croissants suffused my suburban Midlands upbringing with a Parisian elan, a gateway drug to Camus novels and a best-forgotten beret phase. Fish fingers sit in the sweet spot of a perfect Venn diagram – nostalgic comfort food and lazy parent lunch plan. But smashing them together feels sacrilegious – a baffling creative over-reach, like remixing a Vivaldi symphony with Khia’s My Neck, My Back. All of which is to say, I find Design LinkedIn similarly fascinating. Both design and LinkedIn, on their own, are brilliant. I’ve written before about my deep-seated, and inescapable, love of designers. I am also a big fan of LinkedIn. I know why people hate it, but I find it genuinely vibrant – a churning cavalcade of ideas, people, and work that I find interesting and engaging. But together? Can Design LinkedIn fill the void left by Design Twitter? People still reminisce about those glory days and wonder where the same connection, conversation and energy can be found today. Design LinkedIn is certainly gaining traction. And as it continues to grow and develop, we’re seeing some specific archetypes emerge. So whether you’re ready to take your first tentative steps into LinkedIn, or you’re already well-acquainted with the game, it’s useful to be aware (wary?) of some of the stranger players. The Grim Reaper Grids are dead. Kerning is dead. Fonts are dead. Adobe is dead. Agencies are dead. Eyeballs are dead. The concept of death is dead. This guy (and yep, always a guy) roams LinkedIn looking to pronounce death as far and as wide as possible. He has no room for nuance, no interest in discussion. The old world is gone, and you’re an idiot if you’re still trying to cling onto it. Whatever shiny new thing is the future – from AI, to blockchain to those weird pictures of monkeys that somehow became currency (check this before publishing). The strange thing is not that these morbid weirdos exist. It’s that they seem to be incredibly popular. You’re wrong This one’s sort of a second cousin to the guy above, trafficking as they do in provocative condescension. The playbook is simple – they start with a recent piece of design work that’s been garnering a lot of attention. “Lots of people have been sharing XYZ Studio’s work for Reebok.” Here it comes… “But everyone is massively missing what makes it so good.” Here they will either: 1. Share something that absolutely hasn’t been missed, and will have been praised in multiple articles/social posts, which they would know if they did even four minutes of superficial research. or 2. Pick out something so insanely marginal/convoluted that you will need to read it five or six times to make sure what you’re reading is as ludicrous as it first appeared. I heart Figma Lots of people like Figma. But this guy is all-in. He likes every post from the official Figma account. He posts giddy selfies from Config. Adds comments on every uttering from Figma’s senior leaders and reposts their updates with cheerleading comments like, “This team. Soo proud of everyone who made this happen.” One day, out of idle curiosity, you go to see what his role is at Figma. And everything slows down. The call is coming from inside the house. They don’t work at Figma. Never have. The world turned upside down. The Grudger Meet the designer’s designer. A deep thinker and a master craftsperson, they quietly built an impressive client list and a portfolio of brilliant work. But now the game has changed, and they’ve been told they need a personal brand to stave off professional extinction. Under duress, they learned to Instagram. And though they’d never admit it, they came to enjoy that platform, where images reign supreme and every post attracted a waterfall of admiring comments. They had to surreptitiously Google what it meant when young designers called them the GOAT, but they glowed when they found out. Now they’ve been railroaded onto LinkedIn and every post drips with a sense that this is a step too far. They don’t understand the game, and even if they did, they don’t want to play it. The easiest way to spot these people is that their posts start with the phrase, “I’ve been told I need to post more on here…” But there are other telltale signs. Incredibly short captions. An aversion to using paragraphs. And, most clearly, a boom and bust approach to the platform, characterised by manic bursts of 17 posts in three days, followed by four months of silence. Question time There is a tonne of advice out there about how to game the LinkedIn algorithm. While some of it is clearly out of date by the time it’s published – and/or insane – some of it seems to be fairly helpful. Unfortunately it shapes how many people post on the platform, most notably with the rise of broetry. Short staccarto sentences. Where everything seems to be meaningful. Weighty. Game-changing. Even when it’s clearly. Not. Somewhere along the line, these how-to guides went hard on recommending that people ask questions in their posts. And my goodness did people take that to heart. Now whole posts are constructed in this way? Even if it makes no sense? Do you like this logo? Does this strategy resonate with you? What is love (baby don’t hurt me)? It makes everyone sound Australian? Which might be a bit annoying? Or maybe it’s just me? The AI commenter Simply, and objectively, the worst. Recent Jobs

The directors of the Northern Design Festival (NDF) say the design industry needs more honesty to move forward. The NDF kicks off this weekend in Lancaster, and speakers include Claire Parker of The Chase, Simon Dixon of DixonBaxi and Hondo Studio. There will also be panel discussions, workshops and portfolio reviews. Co-directors Niamh Cartwright and Antonia Arbova say this year’s theme – transparency – is inspired by their experiences in the industry so far. They both graduated from Lancaster University in 2024 and so they know first-hand how confusing it can be to navigate the industry as a young designer. “It’s one of the reasons why we began the festival,” Cartwright says. “We didn’t know who to talk to, where to turn, where to begin even. And so we thought, let’s start a festival to create a space to ask these questions” she explains. “We weren’t finding the answers any other way. “The more we started these conversations, the more we engaged with students and agencies, the more we heard that something like this needs to happen.” While the design industry can feel very glamorous from the outside, Arbova says that for young people starting out on their careers, it can feel “cliquey” and opaque. “That can be very isolating,” she says. Antonia Arbova (left) and Niamh Cartwright One of this year’s speakers, designer David Sedgwick who runs Manchester-based Studio DBD, agrees with Cartwright and Arbova that a more transparent design industry benefits everyone. “It would create more equality and trust across the industry,” Sedgwick says. “When we’re honest with our clients, our collaborators and ourselves it levels the playing field. It helps people understand the value of the work, the realities behind it and the people doing it. That kind of openness builds better relationships, stronger teams, and ultimately, better design.” he says that there has been some progress in recent years, with more discussion around issues like mental health and working hours. But he thinks there is still some way to go, and he thinks the need for honesty comes down to “two age-old topics” – time, and money. “First, we need to be more upfront with clients about how long good design really takes,” he explains. “The rise of AI and automation has warped people’s expectations. It’s created this idea that everything can and should be done instantly. But proper craft takes time. Good design needs thinking, testing, refining. We should feel more confident telling clients that. “Second, we still avoid talking about money. Agencies, freelancers, studios and everyone in between. Pricing remains a kind of taboo, even among peers. If more experienced studios were open about fees and project costs, it would help younger designers navigate the industry with more confidence and help clients understand the true value of creative work.” The 2025 Northern Design Festival identity This year’s NDF will explore finances, from salaries to freelance fees. And while they are not asking design leaders to “show us their payroll lists” the team does want to start specific conversations about the practicalities of running a design business. “Let’s say you’re doing your first project as a studio, and you’ve been given £5,000,” Arbova says. “How do you share that, so that you’re not living day-to-day or worrying about bills?” But, the team explains, transparency extends into many of the design world’s main discussions, from how work is developed to paths into the industry. They hope, for example, this year’s festival will demonstrate that design careers are “not linear” and highlight some of the lesser-known ways in. And, as Cartwright points out, an issue like unpaid internships touches on both finances and career progression. These placements still shape many pathways into design jobs, and Cartwright says we need to be “open and honest” about how that system works, and what impact it has on young designers. In the run-up to this year’s event, the team has collected anonymous transparency stories from people at all levels of the industry. These are used across the visual identity and will be on display at the festival itself. One of the 2025 Northern Design Festival’s Transparency Stories One of the 2025 Northern Design Festival’s Transparency Stories One of the 2025 Northern Design Festival’s Transparency Stories Arbova hopes they will encourage people to be vulnerable and share their own insights and experiences. “I think they will help create more personal connections people have with the festival itself, and the community around it,” she says. To build that culture, the NDF co-directors have clearly thought carefully about creating spaces that change the sorts of conversations that usually happen at design conferences. “We want more opportunities for people to talk to each other,” Cartwright says. So there is a session where design leaders from northern agencies like Hotfoot, SUN and LOVE Creative, will speak with attendees in an intimate one-to-one setting, to allow for more honest discussions, “Our hope is that people will say things they wouldn’t necessarily say on a panel,” Cartwright says. “It will be a bit more raw, and a bit more honest, creating a safe space to talk about the real issues.” Both are quick to point out their own relative inexperience – “We have no clue what we’re doing,” Arbova laughs But in many ways, their self-confessed “naivety” allows them to ask questions about how the design industry works, and suggest ways it could, and should, change. And they agree that it’s hard for people who’ve been in the design industry for a long time to see some of its shortcomings. “We don’t know the politics of the industry, all the ins and outs,” Cartwright says. “Everyone is the same in our eyes.” Beyond the festival, the plan is to extend NDF’s influence and impact throughout the year. They want to hold more regular events across the North, starting in Manchester and then Leeds, Newcastle and York. “We’re creating a community to create opportunities,” Cartwright says, and their main objective remains very focused, “There is a narrative that you need to go down South for a job. We want to show that’s not true – the North is such an amazing creative place, and we want to keep telling that story.” A workshop Northern Design Festival ran with FUSE in Manchester

12 May, 2025 Columnist Nicolas Roope says the imminent introduction of DPPs gives designers "interesting problems to solve and opportunities to innovate." I want to talk about DPP, which is short for Digital Product Passport. At this point, you’re probably already glazing over. Another highly structured EU legislative measure to squeeze a little more joy out of the design process. And hey, we’re not even in the EU anymore! Wasn’t escaping needless bureaucracy meant to be at least some payback for all the sacrifices imposed by Brexit? But wait. DPP exists for good reason. It gives designers new and interesting problems to solve, and opportunities to innovate. The DPP is a central part of the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). Its aim is to improve transparency, traceability, and sustainability across product value chains by providing standardised, digital records for nearly every product sold in the EU. Each DPP includes details about a product’s origin, materials, environmental impact, repairability, and end-of-life options, all accessible via a unique identifier like a QR code. A monumental shift On the surface, it doesn’t sound like a big change. Barcodes have been around since the late ’60s, identifying products at an SKU level and triggering trillions of checkout beeps worldwide. So why is taking it one step further – down to the individual product – such a monumental shift? It’s because this isn’t just about the code, but what that code unlocks. Barcodes were merely identifiers. The DPP, by contrast, is legally required to link to information about materials and sourcing, reliable data that lets consumers go far deeper than what can be crammed into a cramped product label. Information like raw materials, manufacturers, distributors, safety instructions, and guidance on resale, recycling and disposal. And yes, user manuals – a no-brainer for anyone who’s chucked away the manual with the original box and is stuck with a problem and an internet full of lousy answers. DPP will be rolled out in stages, starting with textiles, footwear, and electronics, with full implementation expected by 2027. Anyone looking to access Europe’s broader markets will need to comply. Clearly, there’s a major job to do on the technology side, gathering and presenting all that data, but there’s also a key role for designers. From shaping the UX journeys that make DPP work, to rethinking products so they can take advantage of many new possible features, there are plenty of design problems to solve and new phenomena to spin up. Many years ago, my old agency Poke pitched Diesel with a DPP-like concept. We proposed giving each pair of jeans in a new collection a unique identifier. The label would invite users to “sign in” to their jeans and link them to their social profiles. Posts featuring the jeans would be aggregated to build a kind of evolving social history scrapbook. If the jeans were passed on, the story would continue with the life of the new owner. You’d end up with a rich history, and the value of each pair may change depending on those histories and the list of previous owners. The client didn’t bite, but there are similar opportunities in play with the DPP. “Brands should see DPP as a great opportunity to build valuable intelligence and revenue lines.” We can start thinking beyond the functional and informational benefits, and ask more interesting questions, like, how might this change the customer’s relationship with products? For starters, clear material and supply chain data gives conscious consumers more confidence in what they’re buying, so no more getting greenwashed. How luxury brands are already investing For high-value items, DPPs offer proof of authenticity, which is why luxury brands have been among the early adopters. Brands spend big to create direct links with consumers, cutting marketing costs and gaining valuable insights. DPP strengthens the unique bond between a customer and a product. It can be helpful (user manuals), entertaining, or even delightful. Take Dior’s B33 Sneakers. Their DPPs offer authenticity certificates, detailed production info, exclusive gifts, and sneak peeks at future collections, turning the DPP into a loyalty and engagement platform. Breitling uses them to manage repair tracking, insurance, and warranties. Ulé by Shiseido built DPPs into their serum products, giving customers not just traceability but personalised services, event invites, and gift vouchers. Pinko added NFC “birth certificates” to garments made from upcycled materials, allowing consumers to verify sustainability claims. All of these examples need new kinds of apps, digital experiences, and backend systems. But the consequences go far beyond information sharing. When consumers can truly see where a product comes from and judge its credentials, will they change how they buy? Will brands need to genuinely embrace sustainability, rather than hide behind vague messaging? I work with CLUBZERO who track every single item across their distribution of reusable food packaging. Beyond the operation requirements, this also provides valuable insight into inventory flows and demand patterns, a new treasure trove of data garnered by maintaining the connection between brand and product beyond the sale. So brands should see DPP as not another inconvenience, but a great opportunity to build valuable intelligence and revenue lines. A key role for designers Designers can also play a crucial role in embedding circularity using the feature. With DPP enabling resale and end-of-life management, products can be designed for durability and to tell evolving stories of ownership. PANGAIA, for example, uses QR-based DPPs on garments connected to the ReWear platform. When scanned, product details are pulled automatically, making resale seamless, and supporting circularity. This ease fosters a different kind of ownership – one that’s more temporary and fluid. This also calls for a rethink in retail, both online and in-store. Traditionally, brands had little obligation to a product once its warranty expired. But soon, there’ll be strong incentives to maintain relationships with whoever currently owns the item. If you’re designing for this landscape, your brief will look very different. Yes, there’s complexity, but don’t assume that’s going to stall change. Early adopters are already running with it, and consumers are starting to feel the benefits. Designers now have an amazing opportunity to drive positive change, and grow their commercial value in the process. Nicolas Roope is a designer, creative technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded Poke, Plumen and The Lovie Awards. Brands in this article What to read next

8 May, 2025 Ahead of London Craft Week, the founder of the Future Icons Selects showcase tells Molly Baker why the industry needs to work together more. Against a troubling backdrop of rising costs and factory closures, London Craft Week (LCW) comes to the capital from Monday. For Louisa Pacifico, it’s an opportunity for the industry to come together and tackle the threats facing craft makers across the country. Her agency, Future Icons, supports the growth of craft-led artisans, and its annual showcase, Future Icons Selects, is set to be one of the largest gathering of artisans at LCW. The free show has relocated to a new venue in Shoreditch for its third outing this year. It will display the work of over 50 craft makers from a range of disciplines, including ceramics, textiles, metalwork and fine art. “Other craft events are either gallery focused or it’s like a booth where you’re selling your wares,” explains Pacifico. “My show isn’t about selling wares – if they make sales, that’s brilliant – but it’s a showcase of their contemporary collection.” Catalin Filip’s Melo Lamps, part of this year’s Future Icons Selects. Photo by Jorge Antony Stride. The showcase takes place against a difficult backdrop for the craft industry, with multiple closures in recent years. Royal Stafford, a pottery firm in Stoke-on-Trent with over 200 years of manufacturing history, went into liquidation in February. This followed other closures in the Potteries, including Dudson in 2019, Wade Ceramics in 2023, and Johnson Tiles last year. “We need to educate interior designers and brands that these craft makers aren’t just jobbing craftspeople,” Pacifico explains. “They’ll often get people coming to them asking, ‘Can you make me X amount of vases like this?’ when that’s not their design. “So the loss of those factories – where they can accommodate those very specific designs – is going to have a knock-on effect for the craftspeople, because they’re artists in their own right.” These closures are concerning for the craft world, but they’re a sign of wider threats facing the industry, such as the turbulent economy and the unstable costs of materials. “It’s really hard for jewellers, for example, because the price of gold fluctuates all the time, so galleries can’t afford to buy them wholesale,” Pacifico explains. “The jeweller has to purchase it, make it, put it in a shop, and hopefully sell it within six months.” Amid these struggles, Pacifico hopes to support craft makers by offering a space for craft makers to show their designs, and attract private collectors, galleries, brands, and interior designers. Selfish Customs’ Owlet Stool, part of this year’s Future Icons Selects Selfish Customs’ Pink Chair, part of this year’s Future Icons Selects Selfish Customs’ Owlet Stool, part of this year’s Future Icons Selects The showcase is kept affordable as Pacifico works with venues that “understand her ethos” and provide support. But the whole industry needs to do more, Pacifico believes, to uplift each other. She thinks the solutions begin at the grassroots level, and craft communities should be offering more support to their peers. This could take the form of big brands donating space in their showrooms, or woodworkers or leather sellers giving material for people to experiment with. “It’s easy to say, ‘We need more funding for everything.’ But we as a community should start working together, and start collaborating and doing more affordable shows in the right time period,” she explains. “Let’s work together first, rather than appeal for money from the government, because the government’s stretched,” she says. “And together we could work out solutions to make these businesses financially sustainable.” This support isn’t only essential for up-and-coming craft makers – even established artisans are feeling the pressure. “When I set up Future Icons, I saw there were a lot of people 10 to 30 years in the industry that weren’t getting any support from anywhere, which is really tricky for them,” Pacifico says. 2023’s Future Icon’s Selects. Photo by Dan Weill. Pacifico believes that taking part in shows like Future Icons Selects leads to private commissions and brand work. Fung+Bedford, for example, a design studio which creates architectural origami paper installations, went on to work with a leading Danish lighting brand after taking part in a showcase. Other clients have recently completed projects with brands like Penhaligon, Diptyque, and Molton Brown. Pacifico says she supports the 50+ artisans she works with by, “listening to them, finding out who they are, and what’s going on in their lives.” The key, she says, is to respond to those specific concerns and challenges, “rather than just saying, ‘This is what you need to do’.” “We should all just be working a bit more closely together as organisations, and putting the artists first,” she says. This community spirit, and creating an affordable and accessible environment for craft makers, is what drives Pacifico. “You can’t just crack a whip and say – keep making, keep sharing, keep spending money,” Pacifico says. “Let’s do it a little bit more sustainably.” Future Icons Selects runs from 15 to 18 May. The Marchmont Workshop’s Canopy Chair, part of this year’s Future Icons Selects 2023’s Future Icon’s Selects. Photo by Dan Weill. 2023’s Future Icon’s Selects. Photo by Dan Weill. Victoria Loyola’s ceramic lamps, part of this year’s Future Icons Selects. What to read next Design firms step up as Saudi beauty industry booms Brand Identity 26 Feb, 2025

Kate Mooney is founder and principal of OCCA, a Glasgow-based studio that works on hotel interiors and branding. Its clients include major hotel groups like Hilton, Marriott and Ramada as well as independent hospitality projects. Design What would your monograph be called? Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. From the earliest stages, working in this industry has never felt like work to me – it’s a passion, and a way of thinking that I find intriguing, challenging and compelling. Of course there can be (very!) long days and very tough times, but when you genuinely love what you do, the energy and drive to do it – and succeed at it – is second nature. This is a philosophy I share with my team, family and friends frequently – find joy in what you do, and you will be world class at it. What recent design work made you a bit jealous? BLINK Design Studio’s Six Senses in Kyoto is a masterclass in serene, contemporary luxury that deeply respects its cultural surroundings. I love the balance of minimalism and warmth – it’s modern but not cold, luxurious but not excessive. The hotel blends into its surroundings while the design captures the essence of Kyoto’s traditions though natural materials, elegant lighting, and a seamless indoor-outdoor approach. And of course, what’s not to love about the wabi-sabi principles?! What’s an unusual place you get inspiration from? The Mackintosh Building, or The Mac, at the Glasgow School of Art was formative for me – not just for its architecture, but for its philosophy. Mackintosh designed with purpose, he effortlessly blended architecture and interior design, creating spaces where structure and decoration were not separate entities but a singular, harmonious vision. The tragedy of losing it to fire twice, leaving it in rubble, has only made me appreciate its influence more. Name something that is brilliantly designed, but overlooked. The lightbulb – not just for its function but for its evolution in design. From Edison’s first filament bulb to sculptural LED fixtures, it’s a perfect example of how necessity drives innovation, blending engineering, aesthetics, and sustainability into an object we rarely stop to appreciate. What object in your studio best sums up your taste? The Vitra LCW Plywood chair designed by Charles & Ray Eames has been a key feature in OCCA studios though the ages – with the black and white cow hide finish. It is a design icon but took years of effort and experiments by the Eames to develop back in 1945. It is a perfectly considered and designed chair that conforms to the shape of the human body, even 80 years after it was first designed. I’ve not met anyone that doesn’t find it incredibly comfortable. The black and white cowhide finish creates a striking and slightly humorous finish and is a great conversation piece. Timelessness right there! The Vitra LCW Plywood in the OCCA studio Leadership What feedback felt brutal at the time, but turned out to be useful? “If you’re pregnant again you can’t be serious about your job.” The 1990’s were properly brutal! However, instead of letting it define me, I used it to define the kind of business I wanted to build one day. It made me think about what a truly supportive, inclusive, and high-performing workplace should look like. One that encourages excellence but doesn’t force people to choose between their careers and their lives. That statement/experience taught me that great talent thrives in environments that are flexible, trusting, and empowering – not ones built on outdated assumptions. What’s an underappreciated skill that design leaders need? Decisiveness. Creativity thrives on curiosity and exploration, but at some point, commitment is necessary. In hospitality design particularly, indecision kills momentum. A good designer knows when to refine, when to push, and when to make the call. What keeps you up at night? Apart from my husband’s snoring?! Now that my children are all adults and figuring things out for themselves, what keeps me up occasionally is focussing on controlling the controllables – in this crazy world that we’re currently living in, that’s a bit of challenge! But then, I’ll give in to thinking about the evolution of OCCA and the team. The industry is shifting with AI; sustainability; guest expectations; staying ahead of the next best thing. It is both exciting and relentless. I have a vivid imagination, and it’s always thinking about where we go next. What trait is non-negotiable in new hires? Curiosity, because skills can be taught, experience can be gained, but being open minded with the hunger to learn, to challenge, to push boundaries—that’s what makes a designer great. And collaboration because the ability to work seamlessly with colleagues, clients, and suppliers – listening, contributing, and problem-solving together – is key to delivering the best work. No egos, just great teamwork. Complete this sentence, “I wish more clients…” … were as good as our current clients! Design disciplines in this article Brands in this article Recent Jobs

Minding our manners is something most of us do automatically – even when speaking to AI, it seems. But saying “please” and “thank you” to AI is costing us, and our planet, as revealed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman recently responded to a question on X asking how much money Open AI loses because of people using please and thank you in their prompts. “Tens of millions of dollars,” he replied. But it’s not just the cost that’s the issue – AI is having a direct and detrimental effect on the environment. The International Energy Agency’s electricity report revealed a request to ChatGPT consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google search, and the 2024 Google environmental report revealed its greenhouse gas emission levels had risen by 48% since 2019, directly attributing this rise to the energy demand from AI centres. Jeremy Kahn, AI editor at Fortune magazine and author of Mastering AI: A survival guide to our superpowered future, spoke to BBC Radio 4’s The Briefing Room about the threat AI poses to our planet. He said that the average data centre uses 200 megawatts in a year – approximately the same amount of energy used to power 200,000 UK homes, or 10 NHS hospitals. And that’s just one data centre. He also said that OpenAI has discussed opening a data centre which uses five gigawatts per year, or the amount of energy needed to power Miami. “It’s really adding up,” AI scientist Sasha Luccioni told the BBC’s Tech Life. “This incremental usage and switching from good old-fashioned AI to generative AI is causing a sort of ripple effect on energy grids and data centre usage. We hear a lot about AI in regard to creativity and independent thinking, ownership and whether it’s coming to take our jobs (which it is, according to Fiver CEO Micha Kaufman). These are all valid concerns. But there’s a whole other side to AI which is just as scary, and still isn’t being talked about enough in the design world. “Creatives shape the soul of society, so watching creative leaders bow down unquestioningly to AI should have us all worried.” Sustainability has become one of the design’s main concerns, thanks to the pioneering work of studios like Thomas Matthews and the Design Council, which is hosting the World Design Congress this September around its “design for planet” theme. But up until now, the focus has largely been on physical design – on materials and carbon emissions and recyclability. The Dublin-based studio Aad recently launched its Digital Sustainability Resource to highlight the importance of digital designers prioritising sustainability in their work too. It wanted to help designers understand the scale of the problem, and think more carefully about the impact their work has, as well as providing practical tips and advice. With the rise of AI, and its increasing prevalence in the digital design space, it’s important for design studios to fully and honestly consider the sustainability of their work, and push back against environmentally damaging practices. “Designers have a unique responsibility,” explains Cat Robertson, Aad’s sustainability and brand lead. “As AI tools look to democratise design and content creation, designers face a kind of dual challenge: adapting to these tools while also guiding their responsible, environmentally sustainable use.” She recommends designers push for transparency from AI developers on their environmental footprint, and establish professional standards for sustainable, ethical AI usage within design practices. “The future of design isn’t just about what we create, but how consciously we create it,” Robertson says. “Our responsibility extends beyond aesthetics to include the full lifecycle impact of our work – especially as these impacts scale through technologies like AI.” If designers care about the future of the planet, they can’t ignore what AI is doing to the environment. “Creatives shape the soul of society, so watching creative leaders bow down unquestioningly to AI should have us all worried,” says Sana Iqbal, founder of Studio Sana. “This isn’t about adapting with the times, but ensuring the AI transition isn’t exploitative and is fair to all,” she continues. “Transparency will ensure brands are meeting their regulatory requirements and not green-washing.” Designers have a responsibility to promote ethical and sustainable practices in their work – both the process, and the output. They need to be aware of how AI impacts the environment, and use it mindfully. Skipping “please” and “thank you” is a start. But we may need a more impolite conversation on what AI means for our sustainable design future.

NOT Wieden+Kennedy has created a state-of-the-heart visual identity system for the 69th Eurovision, which kicks off this weekend. It was made in partnership with Eurovision art director Artur Deyneuve for Swiss broadcaster SRG SSR. Deyneuve was an art director at Wieden + Kennedy in London from 2013 to 2017. NOT Wieden+Kennedy, which was set up by W+K London in January 2023 as its design and branding arm, won the work after a creds presentation. Deyneuve wanted a design that made people feel heard and valued. He and the team took inspiration from the Swiss tradition of direct democracy, which revolves around open dialogue, and focused on listening as the branding guiding theme. “The concept emerged from a simple yet powerful visual insight: when two ears are placed side by side, they form a heart,” he says. “This became our metaphor for unity through listening, an act that transcends hearing to become a gesture of empathy, connection and love.” The stage design is by production designer Florian Wieder The Eurovision heart logo was designed by London-based agency JM Enternational in 2004, as a symbol to be used consistently from one contest to the next. Since then, it has been refined and is brought to life in a different way every year. NOT W+K took the heart logo and transformed it into many small pulsating Eurovision hearts. These are choreographed to make up elements including images, typography and flags. At the same time, they’re intended to represent the contest’s many viewers. According to The European Broadcasting Union, Eurovision 2024 reached 163 million people over its three live shows. To articulate this audience, Deyneuve posed the question: What happens when millions of people come together? “From that question, the grid was born, a modular, scalable design system that empowers every touchpoint,” he adds. The headline typeface is serif, with sans serif in a supporting role NOT W+K head of creative & design Adam Rix didn’t want to create an homage to Swiss design, with Helvetica or a similar typeface. “We wanted to create something more flexible and joyful,” he explains. The grid of hearts system had three roles. First, it needed to create a feeling – that Eurovision is “a brilliant party with amazing outlandish acts” with patterns that reflected that sense of fun. Secondly, it needed to bring things to life, from flags to mountains. Thirdly, it had to work for broadcast elements such as the transitions from live footage to pre-recorded elements and graphics. The vibrant colour palette and typeface were designed by typographer Ian Party, CEO of Swiss type studio Newglyph, which worked on the recent redesign of the Swiss passport. The headline typeface is serif, with sans serif in a supporting role. “It was really important, thinking about the Swiss heritage in typography,” says Rix. “We didn’t want to fall into tropes, hence the left turn to serif.” The identity will appear at the series of Eurovision events which starts with the opening ceremony on Sunday and ends with the grand finale a week on Saturday. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Euro-identity.mp4 Design guidelines have been given to local council, stage design and event partner teams. These will be translated into the dressing of Basel itself including local landmarks, and tram wraps, as well as the stadium itself, broadcast graphics, social media content and the interactive voting systems. Deyneuve believes this year’s design thinking is unlike anything done for previous Eurovisions. Traditionally, the visual identity has been applied uniformly across all platforms, with little variation between city branding, stage design and media assets. “We set out to change that,” he explains. “This year, every touchpoint, from city dressing to digital channels, has been designed with its own flavour, yet all remain connected by a shared visual language,” he says. For the first time, each country was given the tools and freedom to localise the identity through the grid-based system. “This system enables true creative autonomy within a coherent framework, something never before attempted at this scale in Eurovision’s history. “It’s a design approach that embodies Swiss values: structure with freedom, individuality with unity,” he adds. Meanwhile, the stage design is by Florian Wieder – the eighth time he has overseen the production. For this year’s event at the St Jakobshalle, Wieder took inspiration from the Swiss mountains and the country’s linguistic diversity. The identity will be found across a number of different touchpoints including on social media NOT Wieden + Kennedy recreated the Swiss mountains with tiny hearts

The Guardian has unveiled a new global homepage and a redesigned app which combine mobile-first UX with print-inspired art direction. The changes rolled out today after a year-long design, development, and testing process, and Guardian Media Group’s executive creative director Alex Breuer called it a “pivotal moment” for the media brand’s design. It’s the first time The Guardian has substantially changed its website since it introduced its responsive site ten years ago. With 75% of its digital audience now visiting on their phones, the redesign focuses on mobile, and some of the previous desktop designs have been simplified to better serve that audience. Breuer says the design work started with the app, because of The Guardian’s reader-funded revenue model and the importance of its most loyal readers. The app currently has one million daily active users and the average app user clocks up 15 times more pageviews than the average web user. The new Guardian app The new app has a dedicated puzzles section with a playful new illustrative identity, a newly-designed in-app audio player for the platform’s podcasts and a My Guardian tab where readers can personalise their feed, by following specific topics or individual reporters. Both the app and the homepage – which will appear across the website in the US, UK, Australia and Europe – are designed to feel less overwhelming and help readers access the sections they want. A masthead carousel appears at the top of both the homepage and the app’s home screen, with an eclectic range of stories that provide alternatives to the main news of the day. Meanwhile, different sections have different lay-outs and typographic weights to help readers find what they’re interested in, and skip past what they’re not. “The Guardian readership is a very broad group of people – there are really multiple Guardians for different people in different moments in their lives,” Breuer explains. “With these changes I think we are closer to answering those different needs more effectively than we were able to do before.” Breuer said that he sat down with editor-in-chief Kath Viner at the beginning of the process, and they spoke about which parts of the Guardian portfolio – across print and digital – best reflected the breadth and scope of its journalism. They both agreed it was the physical newspaper, where design elements signposted different kinds of stories, and readers could literally pull it apart to focus on the bits they were most interested in – or “disaggregate” as Breuer puts it. The new Guardian homepage The team set about trying to recreate this “layering” in the digital platforms, which had previously functioned like an index of stories with a set, and somewhat staid, hierarchy. “Our website was a bit like a newspaper where we made you look at every single page,” Breuer says. “There was very little light and shade.” The new designs give editors and designers much more flexibility in how they present the homepage, thematic sections, and even individual stories. For example, the new system allows pictures to be displayed in different formats – moving away from the traditional landscape approach – and articles can be published without a picture if there is nothing suitable or engaging to use. There are also options to embed video more creatively, including vertical video. “Previously the use of images was defined not by what the image was, but by the space it was fitting in,” Breuer says. “It’s much more dynamic now.” Breuer believes this level of control and design discretion, which echoes the craft involved in page lay-outs in print design’s heyday, is a significant step in The Guardian’s visual history. “It’s quite a pivotal moment,” he says. ”When news websites started, you basically just dragged a bunch of stories into a CMS and it displayed them the way it always displays them. “Now, from minute to minute, we can say, oh that picture is really good, let’s make it bigger, or let’s use some looping video there because that’s going to tell the story better. There is such a rich array of options. “For the first time we get a level of art direction across our digital experience that has been the preserve of print.” The Guardian’s new digital designs for its app and homepage These options do, Breuer concedes, make the site “slightly more complex” and he says that a major part of the project was developing the “tooling and responsive patterns” so that changes made by editors are reflected properly across the website and app. During the design process, Breuer says the team drew on a broad range of references, from other news organisations like the BBC and The New York Times, to aggregators like Apple News, streaming services like Spotify and Amazon Prime, and retail sites. They also looked at social media, in particular Instagram. Breuer says at one stage the team considered an infinite feed where every story was presented in the same size and format. They decided against that because they felt The Guardian, and its curation, is more of a brand than the social platforms, which take a back seat as containers for users’ content. Another challenge was to create a richer experience for readers while not reinventing the wheel – so for example the new audio app borrows familiar elements from other music and podcast providers. Breuer knows, as a designer and user, that change can feel disorienting, but he is excited to hear what people make of the new designs. “I love the design literacy of Guardian readers – it’s a real compliment that they care so much,” he says. “We always take time to respond to people who email us and explain what we’re trying to do as best we can. “And if something really doesn’t work, we will change it. With a complex content model like the one we have, that’s so dynamic, it will always challenge the design in a way that we didn’t expect.” The new Guardian app The Guardian’s new digital designs for its app and homepage

7 May, 2025 We asked design recruiters about the current state of the job market, and what they wish designers knew to help them secure their next role. For many designers, the job market feels quite broken right now. Applicants seem to be up, openings seem to be down, and the hiring process is fraught with controversy, from unpaid – and sometimes extensive – design tests in interviews, to being ghosted, sometimes after multiple interviews. We spoke with three recruiters – one agency, one in-house and one independent – to find out what they wish designers knew. What is the main thing designers should understand about the job market right now? The main thing all of the recruiters stress is that it is a really tough time to be job hunting right now. “The main thing I’d like to make clear is that the lack of work people are experiencing is not a reflection of their abilities,” says Naomi Dacosta, who runs boutique recruitment consultancy NDC Creative. “There are so many factors at play here – the economy, the rise of AI, the tech layoffs – all had a significant impact. I speak to so many designers who have lost so much confidence and are questioning themselves, their ability and their skills.” Shaun Stephen, who leads recruitment for Sky’s in-house Creative and Studios teams agrees. “It’s saturated and slow,” he says. “There are a lot of amazing people looking for work and if you’re struggling to find something, it’s not because you aren’t good at what you do. He understands that looking for a job can feel like a full-time job and the current market makes that especially tough. “Be kind to yourself and network,” he says. “Whilst not the sexiest platform, LinkedIn is your friend.” Koto’s talent director Kerrie Rayner says that while it might not feel like it, agencies are hiring and she encourages applicants to think about how the wider context of any new job opening. “It’s important to remember that when looking to recruit, agencies are ultimately hiring to solve business problems, whether that be turnover or growth. If you are the person who presents themselves as a solution, you’re in with a great chance regardless of the level of competition out there.” The key to presenting yourself is to do your research, so you can “talk about your work in a way which can be paralleled to the process and deliverables of where you’re interviewing,” Rayner explains. There is a lot of easily available material, she points out, from company values to case studies and an agency’s social feeds. “Use this to your advantage as much as you can,” she says. How important is a designer’s personal brand, as opposed to something like their portfolio? The answer to this seems to depend on the type of recruiter you ask. For the in-house roles Shaun Stephen oversees at Sky, a personal brand is “not particularly” significant. “Whilst we don’t want to recruit clones, we’re looking for bodies of work that showcase a craft and conceptual thinking that we can see working for our brand,” he explains. “We’re looking for a skillset that has the ability to push us into new directions with the ever changing landscape and customer demands.” Koto’s Kerrie Rayner agrees that the work comes first – as demonstrated in a “well-presented, relevant and curated folio.” “That needs to pique my interest before I decide whether to investigate elsewhere, particularly at a time like this when volumes of applicants are high.” But she says, personal brand is “more important than ever.” “It’s never the case that I wouldn’t progress someone if their LinkedIn or Instagram don’t blow me away – you just gain a little advantage if you’ve done it well.” “Clients want to see more commercial awareness, not just that you created something beautiful.” Naomi Dacosta admits to having “mixed feelings” on this question of personal brand vs portfolio. “There are so many great designers just beavering away quietly creating greatness without fanfare,” she says. “However, a personal brand gives you a voice, a space in this tough-to-navigate market. It helps ‘your people’ to find you.” And she says the more she can learn about someone from their socials, the better able she is to understand if they’d be a good fit for a role. “A good recruiter will do the digging,” she explains. “We’re tenacious, curious, and not afraid to make noise to build a full picture of you. But if you’ve already crafted that story yourself, it makes the process way smoother.” What is a common mistake designers make in interviews? Naomi Dacosta has noticed an uptick in hiring managers say that designers, “struggle to relate how their design solved a business communication challenge.” “Clients want to see more commercial awareness, not just that you created something beautiful,” she explains. “They want to know how you got to that final design, what insights guided that journey. Also what did you learn, and what might you have done differently? Koto’s Kerrie Rayner makes a similar point – she says designers should discuss their work with more depth. “People can often skip on detail with the process undertaken while talking through projects. Storytelling is a hugely valued skill in our world and should be interwoven into the work and in turn the presentation: it’s a waste not to demonstrate it. “We want to know about your interaction with the clients from brief, the designers around you, the strategy team,” Rayner says. “It often strikes me that the value of depth of thought is underestimated by candidates in our industry and an interview is the ultimate opportunity to show this off.” For Sky’s Shaun Stephen there is a very simple thing designers often overlook. “They don’t ask if there’s anything that’s been discussed or shown that would prevent us proceeding to the next stage,” he says. “Doing so makes us give a direct answer and the candidate the opportunity to answer/challenge there and then.” For those hiring designers, what are their biggest recruitment challenges right now? Despite it feeling like a hirer’s market, Koto’s Kerrie Rayner has a different view. “The pool of relevant candidates is much smaller than you might initially think,” she says. Brand work, she points out, encompasses “different experiences which require different approaches and often different skill sets” and this makes finding the right people extremely tricky. And, Rayner explains, “ the higher you go up the ladder, the shallower the pool gets. “For example, a studio can’t take as much of a calculated risk on a creative director, who will immediately lead projects with a confidence that the team can get behind, as we could a sparky, smart mid with bags of potential.” For Naomi Dacosta, the biggest challenge is the “sheer volume of applicants.” And many of those are almost immediately discounted. “I cannot tell you the amount of messages I get that just say ‘hi’ and have a link to their work,” she says. “Or the message says they’d be great for this role, but doesn’t tell me why. “For me the ones that stand out are those who can tell a focused story about their work, the projects they have worked on, its impact and how that relates to the role they have applied for.” Shaun Stephen agrees that the numbers make things tricky – “high volumes, low matches,” as he puts it. “If you’re applying for a role that pivots from your background, tailor your application and include a short cover letter that acknowledges the difference and assures us by outlining transferable skills,” he recommends. What is the worst thing a designer can say to a recruiter? Naomi Dacosta – “‘What do you know, you’re not even a designer.’ A common response when I give feedback on why their application has not been successful.” Shaun Stephen – “‘Hi, any roles?’ Be more specific about what you do and what you’re looking for so we don’t have to do all the work for you. “We love when candidates show excitement and a love of design for their own as well as other people’s work, just like we do. In interviews, we’re not just interested in what you think about us, we want to hear your thoughts on what others are doing.” Kerrie Rayner – “Just leave any negative energy at the door. “In every industry, it’s a well-known fact that you shouldn’t speak badly of past employers during an interview process and I understand that in a time of recent redundancies it could be easy to trip up on the subject. This makes it even more important to be super careful – be real, be you, but please don’t show you’re dwelling on something which has stung you in the past.” Industries in this article Brands in this article What to read next

What would the late Rodney Fitch have made of IKEA’s debut on London’s Oxford Street? One of the stores the retail designer extraordinaire was best known for was surely Top Shop at Oxford Circus. Opening in 1994 in the Grade II listed building, it was a mecca for teenage girls and young women until it closed in 2021. The latest occupant of this site is hoping to attract pilgrims of a different stripe, but not that different. The Swedish furniture giant has been instrumental in changing our attitudes to home décor. Who buys with a view to family heirlooms these days? Furniture has long been treated as fashion. Perhaps not fast fashion, à la Top Shop and its online usurpers Shein and Temu, but seasonal none the less. This 5,800sqm IKEA City store has been much anticipated, not least because its opening was delayed by 18 months because of a leak. It’s the work of Building Design Partnership, who designed the similarly sized but not-quite-central-London Hammersmith branch in 2022. In design and branding terms, the excitement is two-pronged: how will IKEA do bijou, and will it “rescue” Oxford Street? IKEA’s new Oxford Street store On Tuesday this week, I dropped in to see for myself. At seven minutes past its opening time of 10am, there was no queue behind the velvet rope, nor was there one when I left at 11am. Has the hullaballoo died down in less than a week? The ground floor is not what you’d expect, because it’s the smallest of the three floors. One of IKEA’s famous FRAKTA shopping bags stands by the door, recreated in matte blue balloons. When balloons are employed by adults around shop doorways to signify celebration, my heart sinks and I retrace my steps pronto. But this was a bag, not an arch, and it’s on brand, so it kind of made sense. The main attraction is a low, cordoned-off stage in the entrance featuring a handful of different products, all labelled “new.” So far, so pleasing. To the right are some mobile shelving racks stacked to the gills with those candles in glasses and other necessities. Now we’re in familiar territory. But the real action is downstairs, where the room sets are laid out. All of a sudden, I was reminded of being in an airport duty free area. No natural light, and arrows and lines on the floor nudging you in certain directions. Actually, IKEA is trying something different here, getting real Londoners to dress their own “shop.” One such participant is queer cabaret performer, Carrot, who describes themself as camp, colourful and glamorous. In the language of soft furnishing, this translates as stripy pink cushions. Anyway, hats off to Carrot and the other local residents for distracting us from the regimented piles of tea-towels and rows of lamps. Because with 6,000 product lines on display, which is a lot to take in. Inside IKEA’s new Oxford Street store Is it just me, or does browsing homewares drain everyone of the will to live? Initial enthusiasm for looking at lots of nice stuff quickly dissolves. Around 3,500 products are available for immediate take-away. As this was an assignment, I tested this by buying two essential items, a bag of salted liquorice and a wheel of Knäckebröd (aka circular Ryvita). I am happy to report I could takeaway both, as they fitted handily in my cycle panniers. This retail therapy pulled me out of my consumer slump and allowed me to focus on the design details: exposed ceilings, yellow columns, and a long black and white table in the 130-seater restaurant area. BDP has said this is light-touch renovation. Meaning, of course, it’s all about the products. But, oh dear, it’s the abundance of products, many of them variations on each other, that were yet again getting me down. The experience simply confirmed that in certain circumstances, I don’t make a great customer. Enough about me. To answer those two earlier questions: bijou works here, because there’s enough room to stock a lot of smaller goods, which city centre pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport users can easily take away with them. Inside IKEA’s new Oxford Street store What about IKEA as the saviour of Oxford Street? The retailer itself seems to be in denial about the street’s sorry state – the Swedes see it as “one of the world’s most dynamic shopping streets,” according to the press release. Hmmm. Us Londoners know that we need a fresh reason to go to Oxford Street. At the moment, it feels like IKEA could be that reason. As for Fitch, like anyone in retail design, he would surely be thrilled that a big site that’s stood empty for three years is again in the business of peddling product and pulling in punters. And perhaps that’s the point of this IKEA, because what’s good for Oxford Street should be good for the design industry. Space NK is to open its biggest flagship next door later this year. That’s another piece of good news for retail design.