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The Longevity Lessons: Johnson Banks (est. 1992)
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 The Children.
At the time, and I don’t think they’d mind me saying this, 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 the Children brand.
Johnson Banks’ poster for 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 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 PolygramSince 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
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The Longevity Lessons: Johnson Banks (est. 1992)
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 The Children.
At the time, and I don’t think they’d mind me saying this, 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 the Children brand.
Johnson Banks’ poster for 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 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 PolygramSince 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
#longevity #lessons #johnson #banks #est
