In early-stage start-ups, the pitch deck is often the first thing investors see. Sometimes, it’s the only thing. And yet, it rarely gets the same attention as the website or the socials. Most decks are pulled together last minute, with slides that feel rushed, messy, or just off. That’s where designers can really make a difference. The deck might seem like just another task, but it’s a chance to work on something strategic early on and help shape how the company is understood. It offers a rare opportunity to collaborate closely with copywriters, strategists and the founders to turn their vision into a clear and convincing story. Founders bring the vision, but more and more, design and brand teams are being asked to shape how that vision is told, and sold. So here are five handy things we’ve learned at SIDE ST for the next time you’re asked to design a deck. Think in context Designers stepping into pitch work should begin by understanding the full picture – who the deck is for, what outcomes it’s meant to drive and how it fits into the broader brand and business context. Their role isn’t just to make things look good, but to prioritise clarity over surface-level aesthetics. It’s about getting into the founders’ mindset, shaping visuals and copy around the message, and connecting with the intended audience. Every decision, from slide hierarchy to image selection, should reinforce the business goals behind the deck. Support the narrative Visuals are more subjective than words, and that’s exactly what gives them power. The right image can suggest an idea, reinforce a value, or subtly shift perception without a single word. Whether it’s hinting at accessibility, signalling innovation, or grounding the product in context, design plays a strategic role in how a company is understood. It gives designers the opportunity to take centre stage in the storytelling, shaping how the company is understood through visual choices. But that influence works both ways. Used thoughtlessly, visuals can distort the story, suggesting the wrong market, implying a different stage of maturity, or confusing people about the product itself. When used with care, they become a powerful design tool to sharpen the narrative and spark interest from the very first slide. Keep it real Stock photos can be tempting. They’re high-quality and easy to drop in, especially when the real images a start-up has can be grainy, unfinished, or simply not there yet. But in early-stage pitch decks, they often work against your client. Instead of supporting the story, they flatten it, and rarely reflect the actual team, product, or context. This is your chance as a designer to lean into what’s real, even if it’s a bit rough. Designers can elevate even scrappy assets with thoughtful framing and treatment, turning rough imagery into a strength. In early-stage storytelling, “real” often resonates more than “perfect.” Pay attention to the format Even if you’re brought in just to design the deck, don’t treat it as a standalone piece. It’s often the first brand touchpoint investors will see—but it won’t be the last. They’ll go on to check the website, scroll through social posts, and form an impression based on how it all fits together. Early-stage startups might not have full brand guidelines in place yet, but that doesn’t mean there’s no need for consistency. In fact, it gives designers a unique opportunity to lay the foundation. A strong, thoughtful deck can help shape the early visual language and give the team something to build on as the brand grows. Before you hit export For designers, the deck isn’t just another deliverable. It’s an early tool that shapes and impacts investor perception, internal alignment and founder confidence. It’s a strategic design moment to influence the trajectory of a company before it’s fully formed. Designers who understand the pressure, pace and uncertainty founders face at this stage are better equipped to deliver work that resonates. This is about more than simply polishing slides, it’s about helping early-stage teams tell a sharper, more human story when it matters most. Maor Ofek is founder of SIDE ST, a brand consultancy that works mainly with start-ups. 

12 June, 2025 In our turning points series, design studios share some of the key moments that shaped their business. This week, we meet Accept & Proceed. Accept & Proceed is a London based brand and design studio that works with clients like NASA, Nike and LEGO. Founder David Johnston talks us through some of the decisions that defined his business. In 2006, Johnston took the leap to start his own business, armed with a good name and a willingness to bend the truth about his team… I’d gone through my career learning from big organisations, and one small organisation, and I felt like I wasn’t happy where I was. It was my dad who encouraged me to take a leap of faith and try and go it alone. With nothing more than a month’s wages in the bank and a lot of energy, I decided to go and set up an agency. That really just means giving yourself a name and starting to promote yourself in the world. Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston I think the name itself is a very important thing. I wanted something that was memorable but also layered in meaning. A name that starts with an “a” is very beneficial when you’re being listed in the index of books and things like that. But it became a bit of a compass for the way that we wanted to create work, around accepting the status quo for what it is, but with a continual commitment to proceed nonetheless. Because I didn’t have anyone to work with, in those early months I just made up email addresses of people that didn’t exist. That allowed me to cost projects up for multiple people. That’s obviously a degree of hustle I wouldn’t encourage in everyone, but it meant I was able to charge multiple day rates for projects where I was playing the role of four or five people. Self-initiated projects have long been part of the studio’s DNA and played a key role in building key client relationships. A&P by… was a brief to explore these letterforms without any commercial intent apart from the joy of creative expression. I started reaching out to illustrators and artists and photographers and designers that I really rated, and the things that started coming back were incredible. I was overwhelmed by the amount of energy and passion that people like Mr Bingo and Jason Evans were bringing to this. I think in so many ways, the answer to everything is community. I’ve gone on to work with a lot of the people that created these, and they also became friends. It was an early example of dissolving these illusionary boundaries around what an agency might be, but also expanding and amplifying your potential. The first of Accept & Proceed’s Light Calendars Then in 2006, I was trying to establish our portfolio and I wanted something to send out into the world that would also be an example of how Accept & Proceed thinks about design. I landed on these data visualisations that show the amount of light and darkness that would happen in London in the year ahead. I worked with a freelance designer called Stephen Heath on the first one – he is now our creative director. This kickstarted a 10-year exploration, and they became a rite of passage for new designers that came into the studio, to take that very similar data and express it in completely new ways. It culminated in an exhibition in London in 2016, showing ten years’ of prints. They were a labour of love, but they also meant that every single year we had a number of prints that we could send out to new potential contacts. Still when I go to the global headquarters of Nike in Beaverton in Portland, I’m amazed at how many of these sit in leaders’ offices there. When we first got a finance director, they couldn’t believe how much we’d invested as a business in things like this – we even had our own gallery for a while. It doesn’t make sense from a purely numbers mindset, but if you put things out there for authentic reasons, there are ripple effects over time. In 2017, the studio became a B-corp, the fourth creative agency in the UK to get this accreditation. Around 2016, I couldn’t help but look around – as we probably all have at varying points over the last 10 years – and wondered, what the fuck is going on? All these systems are not fit for purpose for the future – financial systems, food systems, relationship systems, energy systems. They’re not working. And I was like shit, are we part of the problem? Accept & Proceed’s work for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory I’ve always thought of brand as a piece of technology that can fundamentally change our actions and the world around us. That comes with a huge responsibility. We probably paid four months’ wages of two people full-time just to get accredited, so it’s quite a high bar. But I like that the programme shackles you to this idea of improvement. You can’t rest on your laurels if you want to be re-accredited. It’s like the way design works as an iterative process – you have to keep getting better. In 2019, Johnston and his team started thinking seriously about the studio’s own brand, and created a punchy, nuanced new positioning. We got to a point where we’d proven we could help brands achieve their commercial aims. But we wanted to hold a position ourselves, not just be a conduit between a brand and its audience. It still amazes me that so few agencies actually stand for anything. We realised that all the things – vision, mission, principles – that we’ve been creating for brands for years, we hadn’t done for ourselves. It’s a bit like when you see a hairdresser with a really dodgy haircut. But it’s hard to cut your own hair. So we went through that process, which was really difficult, and we landed on “Design for the future” as our promise to the world. And if you’re going to have that as a promise, you better be able to describe the world you’re creating through your work, which we call “the together world.” Accept & Proceed’s work for Second Sea We stand at this most incredible moment in history where the latest technology and science is catching up with ancient wisdom, to know that we must become more entangled, more together, more whole. And we’ve assessed five global shifts that are happening in order to be able to take us towards a more together world through our work – interbeing, reciprocity, healing, resilience and liberation. The year before last, we lost three global rebrand projects based on our positioning. Every one of them said to me, “You’re right but we’re not ready.” But this year, I think the product market fit of what we’ve been saying for the last five years is really starting to mesh. We’re working with Arc’teryx on their 2030 landscape, evolving Nike’s move to zero, and working with LEGO on what their next 100 years might look like, which is mind-boggling work. I don’t think we could have won any of those opportunities had we not been talking for quite a long time about design for the future. In 2023, Johnston started a sunrise gathering on Hackney Marshes, which became a very significant part of his life. I had the flu and I had a vision in my dreamy fluey state of a particular spot on Hackney Marshes where people were gathering and watching the sunrise. I happened to tell my friend, the poet Thomas Sharp this, and he said, “That’s a premonition. You have to make it happen.” The first year there were five of us – this year there were 300 people for the spring equinox in March. I don’t fully know what these gatherings will lead to. Will Accept & Proceed start to introduce the seasons to the way we operate as a business? It’s a thought I’ve had percolating, but I don’t know. Will it be something else? One of the 2024 sunrise gatherings organised by Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston I do know that there’s major learnings around authentic community building for brands. We should do away with these buckets we put people into, of age group and location. They aren’t very true. It’s fascinating to see the breadth of people who come to these gatherings. Me and Laura were thinking at some point of moving out of London, but I think these sunrise gatherings are now my reason to stay. It’s the thing I didn’t know I needed until I had it. They have made London complete for me. There’s something so ancient about watching our star rise, and the reminder that we are actually just animals crawling upon the surface of a planet of mud. That’s what’s real. But it can be hard to remember that when you’re sitting at your computer in the studio. These gatherings help me better understand creativity’s true potential, for brands, for the world, and for us. Design disciplines in this article Brands in this article What to read next Features Turning Points: Cultural branding agency EDIT Brand Identity 20 Nov, 2024

Michael Davies is head of Stix Design, the graphic design and branding arm of architecture firm Sheppard Robson. He’s worked on BBC Cardiff, UCL Marshgate and Freshfields law firm’s London HQ. Design What would your monograph be called? No, I don’t shop at High and Mighty. I am the first-born son of West African parents, and growing up, I stood out because I was very tall – I’m now 6’ 7” – and also one of the only black kids at school. This led to a strong desire to fit in. Maybe this has made me always feel really comfortable as part of the team, working shoulder-to-shoulder to create work that stands out. But, of course, this instinct to collaborate is balanced with my idiosyncrasies and expressing my own perspectives on work and life. And yes, I shop at the same places as everyone else. What recent design work made you a bit jealous? I really like the wayfinding scheme at Borough Yards by f.r.a. When I first went there, the designs really spoke to me as a body of work. The work hit every button – intuition, intrigue, interaction, story-telling. The lot. It’s how I would love to have answered the brief. f.r.a.’s wayfinding work at Borough Yards What’s an unusual place you get inspiration from? I have a few. Salts Mill at Saltaire – a former mill housing art galleries, shops, and cafe and diner – and The Pheasantry Cafe at Bushy Park, but my current favourite has to be the ground floor cafe at the V&A. The sheer scale of its beauty and ambience is always surprising. They’ll throw in a quartet every now and then, in case you might think it isn’t atmospheric enough. It’s great for people-watching, too – I bet it’s a good spot for writers. Name something that is brilliantly designed, but overlooked. It has to be a brand new pencil. The very sight of one conjures up so much potential before you’ve even made a mark. What object in your studio best sums up your taste? Perhaps not strictly an object, but I Iove the cupboard-sized meeting room in the far corner of the second floor of our Camden office. It has a huge, cantilevered window that looks out onto our green roof. In the summer it turns into a full-on meadow. It’s a great place to feel the breeze, feel connected to nature and think. The view from the second floor meeting room Leadership What feedback felt brutal at the time, but turned out to be useful? Earlier in my senior career I worked for someone who’d employed a number of us from a previous agency. The familiarity was a key factor in why I took the position. A good friend and design director there advised me to step up and assume full responsibility for all aspects of the projects I worked on – “Don’t wait for instruction from your design leader, try to come forward with solutions rather than asking what should you do.” His implication was, “Don’t be too comfortable” and try not to lean into my design leader too often. Be more proactive. This proved to be a difficult period of transition for me at the time, with lots of sleepless nights questioning my every decision. Eventually, I learned there’s a value to making mistakes as it afforded me the opportunity to grow. That outcome was career-changing. What’s an underappreciated skill that design leaders need? Make the process as enjoyable as you can. A little self-deprecation and good humour goes a long way. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and be honest with praise – say when something goes well or looks great, just as you would when it doesn’t. What keeps you up at night? I work with a smallish team in a large organisation, so occasionally, several jobs might come in from different directions, all at the same time. That can be quite stressful. There’s always that one job that’s taking too long to land, you take on others to fill the gap and then it suddenly drops – arrrgh! What trait is non-negotiable in new hires? Working alongside so many different skill-sets here at Sheppard Robson affords us the luxury of attacking problems from all sides. The key to doing this successfully is through open lines of communication. I need good communicators and great listeners. Their work will always speak for itself, but those two traits make all the difference. Complete this sentence, “I wish more clients…” …would allow us to just lead the way. I know this isn’t always easy for clients, seeing as creativity is a totally different language/science to some. However, there’s no need to fight the process. Take your time selecting the right agency, then trust us, and enjoy the journey.

6 June, 2025 In our weekly interview series, design leaders answer five questions about design, and five questions about leadership. Michelle Noel is the founder and strategy director at London branding and design agency Studio Noel, whose clients include Centrepoint, the Natural History Museum, and Imperial College London. Design What would your monograph be called? I actually asked my team about this one, and this is what they came up with – That Pencil Better Be Sharp. This may be down to me only ever writing in pencil and them taking the piss! What recent design work made you a bit jealous? It’s not recent, but I still love Pentagram’s Battersea Cats and Dogs home rebrand. I love the energy in the identity and the illustrative approach which feels really expressive and representative of all the different breeds. What’s an unusual place you get inspiration from? It’s always been about going outside and getting away from the screen. Walking helps me get inspired as it gives my mind the ability to be still, and I find then that ideas naturally come. Name something that is brilliantly designed, but overlooked. The pencil sharpener. There are some beautifully designed old ones that are really interesting in how they work. What object in your studio best sums up your taste? We commissioned Rachel Joy to create a piece of art for our studio. I love the bold typography and colour palettes that she uses in all of her signwriting artwork. Studio Noel’s Rachel Joy artwork Leadership What feedback felt brutal at the time but turned out to be useful? When we first started out as an agency, our website and logo were intentionally minimal. But during a pitch, a client casually remarked, “We didn’t really have a brand identity.” It was a passing comment, but it stuck with me. I realised that while we were focused on our clients, our own identity wasn’t shining through, especially in our proposals. That moment prompted a shift. We went back to refine and strengthen how we presented ourselves, making sure our brand was clear, consistent and confidently expressed in everything we created from that point on. What’s an underappreciated skill that design leaders need? Leadership is about stepping back and giving others the space to grow. Creating room for more junior team members to try and even fail. This accelerates their development and builds confidence. We’ve also learned that great ideas can come from anyone in the business, regardless of their role or level. Embracing that mindset has been key to our agency’s growth. What keeps you up at night? Often it’s an idea or opportunity sparked by something I’ve read. It could be a new way to approach a strategy, a shift in how we work, or even a big-picture concept that could shape our growth. What trait is non-negotiable in new hires? We’re looking for curious, collaborative individuals eager to learn and grow with us. There’s no room for big egos. As we grow the business, we want people who are just as invested in shaping its future. Complete this sentence, “I wish more clients…” ….prioritised accessibility in their branding. We do a lot of work in this area, including training teams on both the client and agency side, and we’ve seen first-hand how powerful it can be. Often, the barrier is simply a lack of knowledge, both in what makes a brand accessible and in the broader benefits, like significantly increasing audience reach. With nearly one in five people in the UK living with a disability, that’s a huge portion of their audience that could be unintentionally excluded. Brands in this article What to read next design/leader: OCCA founder Kate Mooney Interior Design 8 May, 2025

FORM Brands Studio has given London’s Air Ambulance Charity a new look. Rather than transporting patients to hospital, the charity’s doctors and paramedics treat seriously injured people at the scene from its two helicopters and eight cars. It is the only organisation performing this role in London. Established in 1989, it is called to a rising number of patients across the capital every year, helping more than 2,000 people in 2024. London’s Air Ambulance Charity (LAAC) needs £17m a year to operate, 96% which comes from donations. “But 60% of Londoners don’t know we’re a charity,” says LAAC’s director of fundraising and marketing, Jayne Clarke. FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity in OOH posters Its new organisational strategy is about raising awareness, enhancing fundraising efforts and strengthening its connection with London’s communities. “We’re trying to make sure the strategy is about hope and looking forward to the future,” Clarke says. To accompany this new strategy, the charity also decided to change up its visual identity. “Our previous branding was very corporate,” Clarke admits.FORM Brands Studio won the job after a pitch. Strategy director Beth Andlaw set up the east London agency in 2022 with creative director Alex Andlaw. Before that she had been in comms and PR, and had worked with LAAC on and off for about 20 years. FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity on stage FORM introduced a new wordmark, colour palette, typeface, icons, motion, creative copy, messaging, fundraising memorabilia and photography. However, the existing helicopter icon was retained. “It has a lot of love and legacy,” says Clarke. The agency’s brand idea, Propelling Promise, was inspired by the urgent, intense nature of the work carried out by LAAC’s clinical and operational crews. That was used to give structure to creative copy lines and the new tone of voice. Each lead line includes an element of “propelling” to imply urgency and momentum, and “promise” to imply warmth and hope. That resulted in lines including “Trauma doesn’t stop. Neither do we” and “Here for London. Today, tomorrow, always.” FORM brought in Peggy Nyamekye to work on the copywriting. Meanwhile, the visual identity, developed with designer Mayan Mistry, comprises a gradient design system, drawing on the rotational motion of helicopter blades. Borough names are repeated in radiating patterns and overlaid with the gradient. Red is still central to the charity’s identity, but FORM introduced the vivid orange worn by medics on-scene. “These colours blend in the gradient, creating a visual signature that speaks to urgency, action, optimism and hope,” says Alex Andlaw. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/06/LAA_OOH_TUBE_1920x1080.mp4 With the help of motion graphics designer Matt Fowler, the agency introduced movement to the branding, to reflect the aircraft’s blades in flight. The logo’s new wordmark is in Barlow, inspired by the existing big white lettering on the helicopter tail booms. Before, the charity’s name was written lower case in a thinner font. “Now it’s bigger, bolder and more impactful,” says Alex Andlaw. FORM also redesigned the icons to have more personality but still be functional. “The icons help the team talk about quite hard subjects,” he says, such as casualties, and the designs had to balance warmth and realism. “We did quite a few hearts, some look too detailed and some too basic,” he explains. The agency also created a series of collectible badges, inspired by the embroidered badges worn by the charity’s doctors and pilots.FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity in Instagram posts Meanwhile, photographer James Pearson-Howes was briefed to capture real people, places and moments from across London. The new branding had to resonate with very different types of donors, from the charity’s collection buckets to seven-figure corporate donations, says Clarke. “And the doctors wearing the brand have very strong opinions, as do the pilots. FORM took in all these views and managed to make all those people happy.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/06/LAA_OOH_BILLBOARD_1920x1080.mp4 FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity in OOH posters

Type foundry F37 has launched a new typeface inspired by one of Manchester’s last wooden street signs. And they worked with designer Craig Oldham and copywriter Ellen Ling to bring it to life on a series of billboards celebrating the city’s particular brand of pride. F37 Mancunio is based on the typeface on the sign underneath the railway in St Michael’s Place. F37 founder Rick Banks was drawn to the uneven stroke endings on the ‘C’ and the ‘S’ and designer Rodrigo Fuenzalida worked it into a full typeface with nine weights and “a width axis for flexibility.” Mancunio is named after the Roman fort that once stood in present-day Castlefield. “Rick found the reference ages ago and always wanted to turn it into a font,” says F37’s Keelin Wright. “We wanted to take something from the city, and create a font that represents the history of Manchester, but still feels quite modern as well.” The sign in St Michael’s Place that inspired F37’s Mancunio typeface Wright explains that although there are a lot grotesque sans serif fonts in the F37 library, the “quirky” letter endings and old-style numerals create “ a more human type of grotesque.” When it came to launching the typeface, Wright says they wanted to celebrate its connection to Manchester – where F37 is based – in the right way. “We thought because we’ve taken something physical from the city in terms of the sign, we want to give something physical back,” she explains. “We felt that the billboards would give something typographic to the city, especially around springtime, when Manchester is coming out of the gloom.” F37’s Mancunio typeface Banks and Oldham had worked together on several previous projects and bought in Ling to develop the copy-led campaign. She admits it was a daunting brief in some ways, given some high-profile misfires with localised campaigns in Manchester in recent years. In 2022, locals ridiculed a Magnum advert which misrepresented one of the city’s more insalubrious squares, while a recent Adidas billboard for Manchester United proclaiming that “Manneh is Red” was equally derided. Writing on LinkedIn, designer and United fan Andrew Whitehead said he had never once heard the club referred to as Manneh. “It’s not a nickname. It’s not Manchester United. It’s just… off,” he wrote. “This is what fake authenticity looks like.” “There is all this localised stuff that just bombs,” Ling says. “The pressure is on not to do something that feels tired and out of touch.” F37’s Mancunio typeface The team all felt it was important to steer away from many of the well-worn Manchester motifs, which many people feel have been co-opted by commercial interests looking to exploit the city’s creative soul. “When we were putting the brief together, we found pages and pages of reference for things that we didn’t want,” Wright says. “It was much harder to find things that showed what we actually wanted.” “A lot of this stuff feels like it was made by outsiders,” Oldham says. “History didn’t start here in the 1980s – there’s a wealth of culture and community spirit.” It was exciting, he says, to avoid cliches around Tony Wilson, the Hacienda stripes, and the city’s bee symbol and try and capture “the stoicism, the acerbic wit and the self-deprecating pride.” Some of the posters do take familiar topics – like the city’s famously bad weather or Ian Brown’s quote that Manchester has “Everything but a beach” – but Ling says they worked hard to find “a sting in the tail” and “reclaim” these tropes. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Other references are extremely local and deliberately perplexing to outsiders, such as the celebration of Boombox Barry, an iconic local personality. “He’s part of our everyday experience of being in Manchester,” Ling says. “It was nice to give him his flowers in terms of the joy that he brings, and the enigma that he is.” One poster even references the Magnum-advert debacle, celebrating “alfresco tinnies on a piss-soaked Piccadilly G.” For the design, they tried several approaches, including using acid colours, but Oldham says he and Banks realised at one point they were “trying too hard.” The stark white text on black background was the perfect way to showcase the typeface, Oldham says, and stands out in the cityscape. “This dense spot of black cuts through this ocean of visual clutter,” he explains. “It confronts people, and forces them to read the words.” Ling adds that the design works perfectly to communicate the deadpan tone of her copy lines. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Manchester’s creative scene has been struggling with the changes wrought by the city’s rapid growth and development in recent years. Designers have even taken to remixing the city’s famous visual language to protest against “incessant gentrification.” Oldham recognises the tension, although he thinks it’s happening in many cities. “I think as cities grow and change rapidly, you get to a crossroads,” he says. “What are we going to change into? What are we going to take with us? And what have we got to leave behind? “I think that’s a universal worry, but Manchester’s very much at that point in its life cycle right now.” Ling agrees. “It’s not that the city’s independent spirit is being crushed, it’s more like it’s being Last Of Us fungi-d,” she says, in reference to the hit HBO show. “It does feel that everything that you know in your bones makes Manchester great is being commoditised.” F37’s Mancunio typeface Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair.

5 June, 2025 In this series, Clare Dowdy speaks with design studios that are 30+ years old, to find out some of the secrets behind their longevity. Michael Johnson set up his London-based brand consultancy Johnson Banks in 1992. From Duolingo to Pink Floyd, Cancer Research UK to the Royal Astronomical Society, the studio works with “people who want to do big things.” He sat down with Clare Dowdy to discuss what he’s learned over the past 33 years. Michael Johnson How did Johnson Banks come about? My 20s were very turbulent: eight jobs in eight years, a lot of different countries, different cities, learning on the job. My last job – at Smith & Milton – was relatively settled, I was kind of running a corporate design department. I had a client there, Tom Banks. After I left, he also left his role at Legal & General with the projects I had been working on, and we used that as a basis for the company. That was 1992, the back end of a recession. For a couple of years, everything was fine. Then we started having “creative differences.” And the pressures of running a tiny design company are substantial. So we parted ways in 1995, but I kept the name. Johnson Banks’ symbol for the V&A’s William Morris show At that time, we weren’t really in the branding world. For a decade, we were very distracted by getting on the graphic design map, trying to win D&AD awards, doing lovely stamp projects. And then we started to get some cultural projects: the V&A and the British Council. I started to think, OK, now we’re beginning to show what we can do. When and why did you start thinking seriously about your strategy offering? When we started to get into the branding arena, I knew we were underpowered in terms of the strategic thinking. I may have thought that I could do it, but it takes a bit to persuade clients when you’re 35, with hair almost down to your knees. If you’re up against important-looking people who can field a few grey hairs, you’re going to lose that pitch. So we partnered with strategic companies like management consultancy Circus, and followed that model for much of the 2000s. That led to the Shelter rebrand, and a few other quite big branding projects followed. Johnson Banks’ visual identity for Shelter Eventually we realised that we could do the strategy ourselves. I had sometimes been a little frustrated by the work that my strategic partners – naming no names – were doing. It sounds a bit mean, but sometimes I would get this 90-page PowerPoint document from them, and I’d put it on my designers’ desks, and their faces would go blank. I think that 20 years ago, there was still a bit of the idea that you’ve paid £100,000, so here’s your huge document. We slowly realised that if we were in control of the process, and were involved all the way through, then that jump out of the verbal brand to the visual brand could be much better managed. How did you rethink your strategy offer? The penny dropped in the mid-2000s when we worked with Save The Children. At the time, and I don’t think they’d mind me saying this, Save The Children were a bit of a basket case. They were associated with WI fairs and cake baking, and they had a royal as their patron – they were nothing like what they are now. I realised we needed to work out what they stood for before we did any design. I did this huge chart, and stuck it on a wall at the client’s office. And I said, it strikes me that there are strategic choices that you have got to make as a comms team about where you want to take the Save the Children brand. Johnson Banks’ poster for Save the Children That was an incredibly productive meeting, and also it helped us realise that before we got anywhere near the design, we needed to sort this out. I know that sounds like really basic stuff now. I didn’t trust my instinct for a decade or so, but in that Save the Children meeting, a light bulb went on for me. Once you’d worked out how to do strategy in-house why didn’t you scale up? A lot of companies would have done that. That’s how companies grow, and can end up quite quickly at 60 people. We have nearly always been around six to eight people. Because I could bridge that gap between the verbal and the visual, it meant we didn’t need to add people. And I’ve discovered over the last 25 years, that with a really good account director, Katherine Heaton, and me, and a design team, there is a heck of a lot that we can do. So we stayed small and partnered with filmmakers, animators, cultural specialists. Post-pandemic, a lot of people have adopted that hub and spoke model – we did it 20 years ago. Probably twice a year we’ll lose a pitch because of our scale. But conversely, with some clients you can sell in the fact that they’ll always deal with Michael Johnson. They’re not going to be handed down the chain, because there is no chain. Johnson Banks’ logos for Jodrell Bank Alongside this direct contact with you, what’s your main selling point? It seems to be that we think pretty hard about stuff. We almost never jump into design. A lot of thought goes into what we do, sometimes way too much. Sometimes our projects are incredibly difficult, gargantuan, intertwined and really hard to unpick. That’s a slightly poisoned chalice, because then people go, gosh, well, if they could unpick that, then they could unpick our Gordian knot. For example, we’re working on a major London university brand at the moment that has over 60,000 staff and students, 11 faculties, and hundreds of centres and institutes and departments, and we’re trying to navigate a way through. How did you work out what you wanted to specialise in? Sometimes you can get sucked into something that you just don’t want to be doing. By the end of the 1990s, Johnson Banks had got a reputation for doing annual reports. Part of me quite liked doing them because there was an interplay between words and pictures. And we were getting senior level access to clients, which makes you feel a bit better, because you’re having an interface with chief executives. But then I was thinking, hang on, we’re in danger of getting stuck here, because of course, they’re cyclical. And the death of the annual report – and the death of print – was coming over the horizon, with the internet. Johnson Banks’ Annual Report for Polygram (1995) Since then, my interests have changed. I do not have any interest any more in doing awful blue chips or terrible fintechs. I want to apply all the comms and the branding that I’ve learned to people who could really use it – not-for-profit, culture, education, philanthropy. You know, doing good. How did you build up this not-for-profit work? You lean into the referrals you’ll inevitably get within silos where you want to be referred. I learned this from Mary Lewis of Lewis Moberly. We were pretty close in the 1990s and she always said that referral business is the best business. Over 85% of our clients are not-for-profit – most design companies have a 20-80 split between non-profits and commercial clients. I never liked that ratio, what you might cruelly call ‘the Robin Hood principle’ – we are going to steal from our luxury car account and give to the charity. We did do a bit of that for a while. We did an airline in 2009/10 at the same time we were doing charities. I would justify that with the Robin Hood principle, but I just felt more and more uncomfortable with that. Johnson Banks’ campaign visuals for Cancer Research UK As our percentages went up and up in not-for-profit, eventually I said, look, we should just tell people this is who we are, and this is what we do. It was obvious anyway, so let’s be explicit about it. A few people said we were crazy, that we’d never get any work. But the reverse has been the case. We’re on our sixth environmental project. If you say this is what we want to do, and this is what we will do for you, then I think, funnily enough, clients find that very helpful. How did you build up to bigger projects? Let’s take education. We’ve done three or four really interesting campaigns for universities and now we’re in the position where we can do university rebrands, and have won a top 10 global university. But it has taken 15 years of education work to get to that point. I may not have thought that it would take quite so long to persuade people that we could do their identity. But education is a very conservative sector, and moves slowly, like museums and galleries. If you’re small, you can afford for a sector to move slowly, whereas bigger agencies need a pipeline. I’ve watched dozens of companies get to this critical point where they’ve grown and grown and then they’ve just fallen off the cliff because they’ve been feeding the monster. To help with that, agencies often add a new business person. No-one ever talks about this, but a new business person costs around £50,000. The rule of thumb, in my world at least, is that you have to take that salary and triple it with turnover to pay that salary. So you need £150,000 worth of projects to pay for the new business person before you’ve made a penny. So to make a profit, the new business person has to bring in over £200,000 of work. And if this person can do it, which is not guaranteed, then the company has to scale. It’s so easy to get caught on a treadmill. What else has helped you stay in business so long? We’ve always led with the thought behind the idea, not the way it looked. Because I was always much more interested in the idea behind something, I think that has helped us not get sucked into the visual, to use the type face du jour, the colour that everyone else is using. And it’s understandable, because graphic designers want to do stuff that their peers really like. But paradoxically the trick, in my opinion, is to try and zag away from the trends. Create a new trend yourself. Johnson Banks’ globe symbol for the COP 26 climate conference Design disciplines in this article Industries in this article Brands in this article What to read next Neville Brody on clients, education, and his unexpected OBE Graphic Design 30 Jan, 2025

The relationship between strategists and designers is key to creating effective work that meets clients’ needs. But strategists can feel misunderstood, and even undervalued, in their attempts to set a project’s direction through clear and meaningful thinking. We spoke with a range of in-house and independent strategists about what they wish designers knew about their work. Is the role of strategists changing, like so many design industry roles right now? If so, how? “The lightning speed turnaround” of creative work is creating new pressures, says Gardiner Richardson’s associate director and strategic lead, Matt Forster. Partly this is down to the rise of AI, which is front-of-mind according to independent strategist Manfred Abraham, who has held senior roles at Interbrand and Wolff Olins. The two big shifts, he says, are AI’s potential to bring efficiency to the process – using information gathering and analytics to inform insights – and the dramatic changes that AI will bring to the consumer landscape. “Imagine a world where your personal AI agent makes your life much easier,” he says. “What are consumers going to do with their extra time? Strategists will have to work in close collaboration with creatives to be able to imagine the future for our clients.” Beyond AI, consumers’ withering attention spans, coupled with the proliferating demands on their time, creates a big challenge. “Brands are looking for strategists to show them high interest areas of culture where they have a credible role to play, making it easier for them to reach their audience,” says Matt Boffey, chief strategy officer, UK & Europe, at Design Bridge and Partners. As the world becomes more complex, there is a renewed appetite for clarity, says Polly Clark, a strategy consultant for agencies like Buddy Creative in Cornwall. “I’m seeing that simplicity is even more important than ever,” she says. “Overly complex or convoluted thinking isn’t helpful for anyone, and just slows everything down.” And some strategists have noticed a bit of mission creep. “Increasingly, clients are expecting strategists to contribute at a broader business level not purely brand strategy, design or comms,” says Louise Kennedy, who recently joined Into The Light as head of strategy. What don’t designers understand about your role? “Strategy is not a threat or a limit to designers’ creativity,” says Gardiner Richardson’s Matt Forster. “It’s a springboard to a controlled creative leap.” Into the Light’s Louise Kennedy points out that “designers, on the whole, are visual and often want to get to the ‘creative ask’ very quickly so they can start doing what they do best. “But many of us strategists enjoy taking people on the journey of how we got there by unpacking context and patterns. What designers might see as wordy, we see as fascinating storytelling, but perhaps we tell them more than they need to know, to protect our own egos.” There seems to be a recurring tension between the idea of strategists as left brain thinkers – rigorous, analytical, and logical – against designers as right-brain thinkers – more creative and emotional. But Manfred Abraham points out this is a false – if persistent – way of looking at strategy. “Some designers have missed that there might be a strong right brain there as well!” he says. What don’t clients understand about your role? “Unless clients have experienced it before, they aren’t immediately going to understand the value of strategy,” Gardiner Richardson’s Matt Forster says. “They may have worked with agencies who underpin their creative approaches on little substance. “Once we’ve explained our strategic process, why we follow it and the value it will create for all their creative communications and wider business, it’s a no brainer.” Nor does every client understand the commercial power of great design. “In the brand consulting and growth space specifically, clients often think that strategy is communication strategy,” says Manfred Abraham. “The strategies we develop go much further than that – communications is a part of it.” And adding all this value takes time – more than some clients realise. “I think for clients, it is understanding the need to protect the time and space to do a proper job at this stage and the benefit that will bring,” says Into The Light’s Louise Kennedy. “We might even need to commission new insight work if we feel there are big gaps in knowledge,” she adds. How do you balance multiple client meetings with getting the deep thinking done? This, most strategists agree, is a precarious juggling act. “It sometimes feels like ‘manager time’ has won out over ‘maker time,’” says Design Bridge and Partners’ Matt Boffey. “Days are apportioned into slots, from 30 minutes to an hour, which is perfect for meetings but inadequate for building momentum on substantial projects. The goal, he insists, isn’t to eliminate meetings. “Collaboration remains essential. Rather, it’s to create conditions where both discussion and deep work can thrive. We must be careful that ‘talking’ doesn’t completely squeeze out ‘doing’.” He encourages his team to block time between meetings to mentally stretch, as you might after a gym session. “And I’m a strong advocate for reserving longer periods, either half days or full days, for the ‘deep work’ required when writing a discovery debrief or developing brand strategy.” Although Louise Kennedy blocks out time in this way, she finds it doesn’t always work for her. “Often in those moments I can get brainfreeze as I feel under pressure to produce something smart,” she says. “So I like to read everything on a project then leave it for at least a day so my brain can digest it fully and start working behind the scenes.” External consultants can work the schedule that suits them. On most days, Manfred Abraham gets up at 5.30am because that’s when his brain is at its best. It’s also a time of day free of client meetings, “so it’s great thinking time,” he says. Polly Clark, on the other hand, embraces this juggling act. “It’s always something I’ve needed to do, and actually helps sharpen my thinking. Switching focus means I can come back to things fresher, and stops me getting caught up in the weeds.” What’s the worst thing a designer can say to a strategist? Matt Forster – “That they still don’t get it – which means I haven’t involved them enough, explained it well enough or done a good enough job.” Louise Kennedy – “’I’m confused’ or worse, ‘I’m confused and bored’.” Matt Boffey – ‘“Great, the client’s bought the strategy, now we can really start the work.” “This sounds like strategy has become a hurdle to clear before creativity begins, where it should be the foundation that makes creativity powerful and purposeful. The best work happens when strategists and designers see their contributions as interconnected parts of a unified process, rather than unrelated elements.” Polly Clark – “In the past I’ve heard designers question what strategy brings. That’s been when the strategy hasn’t made sense of the challenge, or is overly convoluted – which is sure to make everyone switch off.” Manfred Abraham – “That great design doesn’t need strategic thinking. It’s simply not true. We are great individually but we are brilliant together.”

27 May, 2025 Design, like almost every industry, runs on meetings. But are there too many? And how well do yours work? This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here.  When Shopify’s employees came back to work after the Christmas break in 2023, their calendars looked very different. Bosses at the e-commerce company had decided to purge all meetings of more than two people. An estimated 12,000 meetings were removed at a stroke – all meetings were banned on Wednesdays too. “Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson, and we are giving our people a ‘no judgment zone’ to subtract, reject meetings, and focus on what is most valuable,” Shopify’s chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian said at the time. Later that summer, they were at it again adding a “cost calculator” into employees’ calendar app, putting a dollar value on every meeting, based on who attends, and how long the meeting was. Asana did a similar thing to Shopify in 2022, removing all recurring meetings and asking employees to think carefully about whether they should be added back in. Through meetings becoming shorter, or removed entirely, they apparently saved the average employee 11.5 hours a month, or nearly four weeks across a working year. In The Guardian, one expert asked about the Shopify purge put it succinctly – “Most organisations have too many meetings, and most meetings aren’t good.” And there it is. Design, like most industries, runs on meetings – one-to-ones, company updates, team huddles, client pitches, brainstorms, creative check-ins, and more. In a hybrid or remote work culture, meetings have proliferated – one estimate says meetings jumped 70% during the pandemic. Of all the issues facing the industry, meetings may not seem like the most pressing (and it’s certainly not the most glamorous). But in thinking about day-to-day work, and the things that impact it, I’d suggest that meetings are right up there, both in terms of quantity and quality. “There’s no Mr Meeting coming to fix it for you.” The first thing, if you think your meetings culture could be better, is to take responsibility for it. Gillian Davis, an executive coach and leadership expert who works with many creative businesses, says she hears a lot of complaints about meetings. “People always tell me about these really bad meetings that everyone knows are bad,” she says. “Well, if a meeting isn’t working, put your hand up and say, ‘Hey, maybe we should redesign this meeting.’ There’s no Mr Meeting coming to fix it for you.” The key, Davis says, to an efficient and productive meetings culture, is to be intentional. What’s this meeting for? Who needs to be there? Who really needs to be there? Then you need an agenda to clearly and concisely set out the meeting’s aim, and at the end, you should agree on specific action points that reflect the intention set out in that agenda. “People might think this stuff sounds obvious,” says Stu Tallis, creative director at Taxi Studio who has helped rebuild the way his company runs meetings. “But agencies are fast and furious, and it’s easy for things like this to slip.” And if you put some of this best practice in place, then the idea of a meeting starts to shift. Many design leaders told me that it’s come to be seen as a dirty word in their studio – Tallis even avoids using the m-word altogether. Guanglun Wu, founding partner and chief digital officer at Made by On thinks this is an issue. “Many people are very protective of their focus time,” he says. “But that can lead to this mentality that meeting time is bad, that it’s unproductive. People become afraid of putting them in the calendar, and avoid them at all costs. “But it depends what the aim is. Making time to talk to people and collaborate is important – it’s not wasted.” Badberries’ managing director Natasha Szczerb wrote recently about the tricky balancing act of making time to focus on the clients, and the work, and making time to focus on the business itself. Recognising the tension between the two, Szczerb says, “was crucial to our survival.” And of all the operational decisions to make, and discussions to have, few leaders will feel their hearts fluttering at the thought of going deep on meetings. But take a moment to look at your calendar, and your team’s. How much time are they spending in meetings of one sort or another? And are you confident that time is being spent as efficiently and as effectively as possible? Meetings matter, and good leaders will make sure they are planned and used in the best possible way. And even if you’ve looked at this issue before, what worked for your studio in the past may not work any more. “Companies evolve,” Davis says. “Their rituals and systems evolve. So meetings should evolve too.” Industries in this article What to read next How to run better annual studio meetings 27 May, 2025 Features How to run better meetings 27 May, 2025

27 May, 2025 Most design studios run a meeting that looks back at the year just past, and forward to the year ahead. How can teams make the most of this important annual ritual? This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here.  Although they call it lots of different names, most design businesses run an annual meeting where they look back at the year that’s gone, and forward to the 12 months ahead. When done well, these meetings can be extremely useful – to celebrate successes, re-establish focus, and course correct where necessary. But when done badly they can confuse staff, paper over problems, and damage morale. Gillian Davis, an executive coach and leadership expert who works with many creative businesses, points out there is often a huge gap between the way big client meetings are prepared, and the attention big internal meetings receive. We spoke with Davis, and three design leaders, to gather practical advice for running more effective annual get-togethers. Start with why Davis says the first decision for leaders planning one of these meetings is to work out why they are doing it, and what they want to achieve. “It’s too easy for these meetings to become a waste of everyone’s time,” she warns. “Ask yourself, what is the one message we need to get through going into next year? And then design the meeting around that.” That takes clarity, an ability to prioritise what the business needs now, and sometimes self-awareness. SUN’s Jamie Kelly says their most recent annual meeting was part of a “personal reinvigoration” to address a flatness he felt in the studio, despite a string of successful projects. “I wanted to use it as a spur, to look at all this great work we’d done, but also to get down and dirty into the things that we hadn’t enjoyed, or that hadn’t gone so well,” he says. “It was about mixing that celebration with some really honest conversations.” Context shapes content Communication begins way before the first words have been uttered. Where do you hold the meeting? How do you frame it? What do you ask people to prepare? All of these decisions shape how your message will land. For example, if a business is reflecting on a challenging financial year,  holding this meeting in a sun-soaked locale with a generous free bar will seem quite jarring. That may seem like an extreme example, but Davis says she has seen proposals that are totally at odds with the story the leaders want to tell. Number crunching Many leaders use these annual meetings to reflect on the company’s financial performance and its targets for the year ahead. Work out how much you want, and need to share, says John Wilson, CEO of Universal Design Studio and Map Project Office. “We try to be open and transparent, so there’s an understanding of where we are as a studio and there are no sharp surprises,” he says. “But I don’t think everyone needs to know everything.” For Guanglun Wu, founding partner and chief digital officer at Made by On, accessibility is key when it comes to this information. “We need to explain it in a way that can be contextualised by everybody within the organisation,” he says. “Some people understand what numbers and acronyms mean, and others don’t. So we put a lot of effort into those presentations in terms of the information design, so we can make that accessible.” SUN’s Jamie Kelly had a neat approach in his most recent annual meeting. He visualised the turnover as percentages related to specific client projects. “People could see how the projects they worked on contributed to the overall picture, and how their work has impacted the business,” Kelly explains. “I think the team found it interesting and maybe a bit surprising.” Who speaks – Leaders Gillian Davis says that the amount of time taken up by leadership presentations should depend on where the company is and how it’s doing. In tough times, she says, people want to see and hear from their leaders. In this context, she thinks 90% of the meeting should be direct communication from the most senior leadership. In better times, the teams themselves should be encouraged to present and lead discussions. Who speaks – Teams Most leaders like these meetings to include talks from specific teams but there are a couple of things to consider. Davis once saw an 150 slide deck for a company’s upcoming AGM, and every department had its own structure for their individual section. Some consistency is important, she says, as is avoiding it feeling like a long list of things that team has done. It’s great to celebrate successes, but it’s even more useful if that involves some reflection on how and why it worked well. Davis thinks “some element of interaction” helps elevate these sessions even further, so other employees can ask questions. For Made by ON’s Guanglun Wu, it’s all about teasing out what different teams can learn from each other. “What was really interesting about yout project that you want everyone else to know?” he says. “Explain the journey, what you learned and what are the future opportunities where we can be better.” This dynamic may be different in smaller teams. SUN’s Jamie Kelly runs these meetings as a two-way discussion for his seven-strong studio. “I pause after each section to ask questions. I want to hear what they think success could look like, so they can push my thinking,” he says. “It’s much easier in a small studio, where there is less hierarchy, to have that open dialogue.” Who speaks – Clients At its most recent annual session, Made by On invited a panel of current clients to take part in a fireside chat in front of the whole company. Guanglun Wu says it added a whole new dimension to the day. “When you have people come in and talk about their perspective on working with us, and how we enable their success, or how we communicate, then it builds that empathy.” Be practical and specific Let’s say leaders want to encourage more accountability in their teams. Saying that is the easy part, but it isn’t enough on its own. “Explain why you want to become more accountable as a business,” Gillian Davis says. “Say how you noticed it’s a problem. Describe the impact on the business. And then say how you are going to fix it, in a practical, day-to-day way.” Similarly give people the tools they need to make the changes you want to see. “Don’t just tell people something like you want them to develop their LinkedIn network,” Davis says. “Give them a playbook, a step-by-step breakdown of what that means and how to do that.” Beware of big surprises If you want to use the meeting to announce big changes around culture, structure or process, it’s worth getting some people on board first, says Made by On’s Guanglun Wu. “It’s important to give the people who need to instigate the change early visibility,” he says. “Explain the reasoning to the people it’s going to affect first, and give them a forum where they can give input.” Then when changes are announced to the wider group, you have a cadre of people who can help explain it to their colleagues, and allay any concerns. End on a high Like any performance – and Gillian Davis thinks these meetings do require an element of performance from leaders – the ending really matters. Think about how you want to leave people feeling, and tie it back to that one key message you were looking to land. Davis once saw a brilliant annual meeting at a big creative firm, which ended on a massive high. People were visibly enthused and excited. Until someone immediately grabbed the microphone to explain the travel arrangements for people who needed the shuttle bus. See annual meetings as part of a bigger strategy While these big set-piece meetings are important, they need to work as part of a consistent and coherent approach to leadership. Gillian Davis says leaders should look at how annual, monthly, and weekly meetings work together, some of which may be for everyone, and others for specific teams. “I think the monthly meeting should be a super-engaging company health check, and then the teams should have their own weekly rituals, where the real brass tacks of the work is discussed,” she says. For John Wilson, leadership is ongoing work, that shows up in myriad ways, big and small. “My gut feeling is that it’s not really about these big single meetings,” he says. “It’s about constantly iterating and refining and re-strategising and re-budgeting. “The best leaders I’ve worked with are not necessarily always standing up at the front, they are also gently pushing and prodding from behind.” Industries in this article What to read next Features How to run better meetings 27 May, 2025 How to run better pitches 27 May, 2025 “We need to talk about meetings…” 27 May, 2025

NotOnSunday and We All Need Words have injected some personality into Direct Ferries. The world’s biggest online travel agent for ferry bookings, Direct Ferries already had 2.5 million customers in 25 countries, but wanted to keep growing as an aggregator. The client initially approached Rob Mitchell of strategy and copywriting agency We All Need Words to help with a new tone of voice for its customer services and bot. “They asked us what their brand should sound like,” Mitchell says. “In a very kamikaze account management style, I said it could sound like anything, because I don’t think you’ve got much of a brand.” Duly hooked, the client asked what their brand could look like, with the right help. The Direct Ferries brand guidelines developed by NotOnSunday Mitchell brought branding agency NotOnSunday on board – they had first worked together on the rebranding of the Scouts’ UK division in 2018. “We needed a platform and vehicle to enable us to grow,” says Direct Ferries CEO Niall Walsh. That growth will come from the aggregator share of the market, which is low in this sector – while 45% of tickets for trains are bought through aggregators like TrainLine, it’s just 5% for ferries. “Conversion rate is everything to us,” Walsh explains. “We’re a traffic acquisition machine. It’s about giving that traffic the best customer experience so that they check out.” To get them down that funnel, the rebrand needed to instil confidence in its audience. “Customers can see when there isn’t consistency. If there’s no consistency, there’s no trust, if there’s no trust, people aren’t going to give you their credit card number,” Walsh says. Consideration was given to typographic treatment of lengthy words in other languages He admits the company had never previously had a considered brand – instead it had been built through iteration and trial and error. Visually and verbally, from the website, emails and display ads to the call centre and blog, there was a mix of styles. “Before you know it, you’ve got a complete mess of images and tone of voice,” Walsh says. We Are All Words and NotOnSunday set about creating a brand that showed ferry travel in a more aspirational light. They swapped images of ferries and facilities for sea air and views of the horizon, and they ditched cheesy photos of models in favour of travel magazine-style photography. The tag-line was created by We All Need Words The wider strategy was to present Direct Ferries as the ferry brand. We All Need Words developed a tag-line – “Wherever you’re sailing, start here.” This was part of a wider, adaptable brand system using chevrons, which mimic the shape of a ship’s bow. These can be used on their own or paired with ‘A to B’ couplet headlines, mirroring the overall “wherever you’re sailing” line. The chevrons can be repositioned to take into account different word lengths in the 24 languages that Direct Ferries operates in. These headline pairings are delivered in a pair of typefaces – the sans serif Mundial, described by NotOnSunday’s Trev Townsend as friendly, and the serif Rocky, which is a little classier. Together, they’re intended to bring out and draw together the bigger brand system. NotOnSunday did an audit of the ferry sector, including its iconography of boats and pictograms. “Direct Ferries got lost among the others,” says Townsend. The Direct Ferries logo before and after The previous logo was very literal, says Walsh. “Having three ships to define that you sell a ferry felt slightly dated.” NotOnSunday crafted the new logo, with a mark created out of the ‘D’ and ‘F’. The angle of the ‘F’ matches that of the chevron. The new hero colour, orange, was chosen to be both modern and timeless, and to stand out from its blue rivals. That is contrasted with secondary colours that are meant to reference the sea – dark and light blues and greens. All of the new design work had to fit around the existing UX, because of its robust and proven capacity to drive sales. The new Direct Ferries tone of voice and branding “We could change all the details and decorative elements, but we couldn’t change the customer journey, because it’s been tested and tested and it works,” Townsend says. NotOnSunday redrew the icons, including the car symbol and dog paw print, giving them the same line weight. Similarly, the buttons are now consistent sizes and shapes, with rounded edges to match the logo mark. And it’s worked, Walsh says. “The data tells us that customers prefer this brand, because nothing else has changed on the website, it’s the same product, price, experience, and the same user journey,” he says. Direct Ferries OOH advertising

Disruption has become a popular brand strategy as start-ups, challengers and even established brands seek to stand out in crowded categories. Disruptive brand building subverts a consumer’s perceptions through narrative and tone. But, while disruption is often associated with boldness and audacity, its true power lies in challenging category norms in unexpected ways. This is achieved not only through striking visuals or provocative messaging, but by fundamentally redefining what a category can mean, and the experience a brand can deliver. One newly launched brand that’s aiming to defy its category conventions is mud, an emerging petcare company that is setting itself apart by embracing mess, mud and natural animal instincts. The brand’s Everyday Wash for Dirty Dogs is marketed for “dogs who were meant to get dirty”. The brand’s brown, grey and black colour palette is inspired by different shades of dirt, and its founders describe it as “a small act of rebellion against the sanitised world of modern pet care.” Angelina Pischikova and Karina Zhukovskaya’s identity for their mud pet care brand. While it’s too early to predict mud’s ability to disrupt its category, its mission is certainly thought-provoking. If successful, disruptor brands can not only capture market share from established competitors, they can shift industry dynamics and open up a new market for consumers seeking alternatives. Think Liquid Death, the US brand which made canned water cool with its irreverence and punk/heavy metal aesthetics. Or Oatly, which turned oat milk into a cultural statement with witty long copy and an anti-advertising aesthetic. “Being pioneering isn’t always about ripping it up and starting again.” When a disruptor brand is so successful that it brings about positive change, it’s often because that category is ripe for disruption. Prior to the arrival of disruptor brands like The Ordinary and Glossier, the beauty industry had thrived on creating a feeling of exclusivity, mystery and luxury, with glossy celebrity-fronted advertising and products making vague promises at inflated prices. The sector was entirely upended by the arrival of The Ordinary, which democratised skincare by championing science over celebrity and enabled a much wider group of consumers to access high-quality skincare. Stunts like selling “ordinarily-priced” eggs for $3.37 at the height of the American inflation crisis, or dumping a stack of dollar bills in a store window, cleverly highlighted its no-frills proposition and flew in the face of typical beauty marketing by taking swipes at influencer endorsement. Glossier was another hugely influential agent of change because it built its brand around user-generated content and real customer feedback, rather than top-down beauty ideals. But with disruption comes risk. A disruptor brand can seem inauthentic if its brash, bold branding doesn’t fully align with its ethos. WeWork’s tactics backfired massively when its “changing the world” narrative collapsed under scrutiny. Its demise also demonstrates that moving fast and breaking things isn’t necessarily the best approach to disruption. The company promised a variety of flexible office spaces catering to different needs, but ultimately failed to deliver because of its focus on global expansion at breakneck speed – a strategy that proved unsustainable. Also, disruption stops being disruptive when everyone’s doing it. When luxury fashion first shifted online and onto social media, many fashion houses pared back their logos, incorporating the clean, minimalist typefaces favoured by tech brands like Google and Microsoft. This minimalist branding style became so popular among brands, from Saint Laurent to Celine, they all started to look the same. Even Liquid Death’s success has had its limitations. Despite becoming a sensation in the US, it didn’t create any significant ripples in the UK water market and exited after less than two years – showing that disruptive brand activity can get lost in translation. What works in some markets and cultures, may fall flat in others. For legacy brands, the stakes are particularly high because a major identity shift can erode established brand equity. Old Spice successfully moved away from its “dad’s aftershave” image through ironic humour. By contrast, Aberdeen Group’s attempt to reach new audiences backfired dramatically after its rebrand to Abrdn in 2021 was met with a torrent of mockery. Earlier this year it announced it was reinstating the missing e’s. Being pioneering isn’t always about ripping it up and starting again. Brands don’t need to reinvent themselves or tear down the competition to make an impact. You can be just as innovative by quietly committing to long-term, incremental change. Sustainable fashion brands are a case in point here. Companies like Finisterre and Reformation are leading a slow fashion movement by committing to eco-friendly and ethical practices, offering consumers a high-quality alternative to fast fashion. To truly disrupt, a brand must have ambitions beyond being brash and attention-seeking. Disruptors need to stay true to their brand essence as well as strategically differentiated from rivals. Before adopting a disruptive stance, consider what consumers really want and analyse whether your rivals are delivering on that need. You must also ensure your branding resonates with your target audience and connects to a broader cultural shift. In this way, you can help ensure your disruption strategy gets people talking for all the right reasons. Polly Hopkins is managing director of FutureBrand London.

Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell have created a dynamic equine identity for AI video company TwelveLabs. Based between San Francisco and Seoul, TwelveLabs describes itself as “the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform.” Unlike generative video tools which help users create videos from scratch, TwelveLabs uses AI analysis to help people understand their existing videos at a very granular level, which makes them more searchable. Co-founder and CEO Jae Lee explains that communicating this difference – between video generation and video understanding – was at the heart of their work with Pentagram. “In the middle of last year our models were improving pretty rapidly, and we thought we needed to up our game in terms of our storytelling, why we matter, and to match the design, the tone, and the messaging to our ambition,” he says. Lee described the previous branding as “straight out of Silicon Valley” and they chose Hudson–Powell and his team due to their tech-savvy design practice. In creating a new identity, it was important not to be “lumped in” with other generative AI video companies, Lee says, but also to differentiate themselves from other video analysis tools. “Our competitors essentially do frame-by-frame analysis, but we look at it temporally,” lead product designer Sean Barclay explains. “That’s what differentiates us, and we wanted to convey that secret sauce.” “On the first call, they had me at temporal reasoning,” Hudson-Powell laughs. His team had to avoid the visual cliches AI tools tend to embrace – “it’s a very noisy category with lots of sparkles.”  But they also had to capture and communicate TwelveLabs’ offering in a way that was accessible and exciting, but not dumbed down. “We had a distinct stream of work that wasn’t strategic or creative – it was just understanding the technology,” Hudson-Powell says. “We kept asking them, could we imagine your technology to look something like this? Or this? “We were trying to put some kind of conceptual apparatus around the technology, to see if we could find a visual communication language that we could start to build on.” “Jody was very good at pulling out those threads about what video looks like in our brains,” Lee says. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs The Pentagram team homed in on the core idea of “video as volume” rather than a timeline, and they built a series of thread-based diagrams to help explain how it works. This visual motif could be scaled across the touchpoints, from product pages to sales and branding. “You get this graphic stretch, so you’re speaking to different audiences with the same concept,” Hudson-Powell explains. The horse logo was grounded in what Hudson-Powell calls TwelveLabs’ existing “lore” – Lee says they were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 animation of a horse, and he likes the metaphor of a user as a jockey steering their technology. The logo – which has 12 layers in a nod to the company’s name – is often used in motion, galloping across a screen. “We worked a lot of animation into the identity,” Hudson-Powell says. “Animation can be quite frivolous, but we did it really intentionally. The logo gives you this feeling of perpetual motion, this rhythm at the heart of the brand, which is really important.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/01_TL_Logo_Gradient_16x9_60fps_10s_LOW.mp4 The team chose Milling for the typeface for its combination of “technicality and soft edges” and the visual identity uses the LCH colour system, which, compared to RGB, represents colour in a more similar way to how our eyes perceive colour. “You can match any two colours and they’ll be harmonious, which you don’t get with RGB,” Hudson-Powell says. “We can find infinite combinations.” There were also three colour subsets for TwelveLabs’ three key features – pink-purple for search, orange-yellow for generate and green-blue for embed. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new colour palette for TwelveLabs Lee says the new identity has resonated with investors, employees and most importantly, customers. “It’s given them this confidence that they’re working with not only a super-technical team, but also a team that cares deeply about video,” he says. “So we can communicate with our science community, but also with the people who are building the content we love consuming. There’s a duality which feels really connected.” Barclay agrees, and adds that it helps people grasp what TwelveLabs does – and what it might do for them – more quickly. “It’s definitely improved our website tremendously in terms of telling a better story,” he says. “Before it took a lot of time to comprehend what TwelveLabs is, and what we’re offering. We have definitely shortened that.” Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new logo for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new icons for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs

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