At this point in the year 2025, it feels almost obligatory to start a blog post or newsletter with a big healthy scoop of trepidation. The beginning of the year has been what you might call ‘turbulent,’ and I think most of our eyes are distracted by the chaotic goings on in the US government right now.

One thing I’ve been thinking lately is that attention is what’s giving the capital-R-Right power. It doesn’t matter if it’s outrage or fanaticism, any reaction seems to work for them. So I think one thing we could do is stop giving them what they want. Stop performing outrage on twitter, stop participating in and reading about the endless discourse.

Anyway, below are some thoughts about this strange tech/culture pivot and how the design industry is entwined in it. It’s kind of a rant, and I don’t really have any conclusions, but I hope some of it resonates.

Some links and pods at the end!

The Veil Evaporates

Through the 2010s, design agencies tapped a rich vein of free money, siphoning off venture capital and seed funding by transforming cadres of anti-social capitalists into glossy startup brands. For many it was our job to lend them credibility and enable them to give the impression they cared about things like ‘culture’, ‘diversity’ and ‘rights’ and not just productivity and exponential growth.

As we watch that artifice break down—as Zuck trades in his neoliberal creds for the reassuring masculinity of a heavy black t-shirt, and Elon takes to dismantling the US state like it’s an overvalued micro-blogging platform—what does this mean for the branding industry whose purpose was to build up the façade? Will the fintech and direct-to-consumer brands of the near future start to look somehow anti-woke? Or will the need for branding at all just disappear as platforms care less and less about looking like they actually care about their users? Will we see the rise of ‘anti-brands,’ carefully and professionally curated to seem like they haven’t been touched by a professional?

Metaphysical brands

Advertising and marketing emerged in the previous century with mass production, when it became possible to sell the same product to lots of people regionally, nationally, internationally. While desire for products had to be manufactured—birthing the advertising industry—it was at least tied to the physical realm. We could project our longings, insecurities and hopes on to a curated selection of items that we could use as talismans of our desired identities.

This new century has been one of disembodiment. We’ve been gradually but rapidly detaching ourselves from the physical. Marketing has become less and less tethered to the product itself, and more about associating a brand name to a certain lifestyle. Now there’s almost no need for a product. There is only brand. It makes sense from the capitalist’s perspective: the perfect business is one that doesn’t have to deal with the costly overheads of manufacturing an actual thing or managing an actual service.

What is Airbnb, Deliveroo, Uber’s product? The uber driver owns their car, and is not considered an employee of the company. The airbnb host owns their property, and uses contractors to service and maintain it. This type of platform ‘brand’ is simply an interface. A leech applied only because the village has taken to a belief in blood-letting.

This is the fantasy of 21st century branding. All those startups wasting tax-free hoards of investors’ cash on transaction-skimming and data-extracting schemes, packaged as frictionless services that promise a shortcut to social-mobility while entrenching and exacerbating a stratified social order. These are the companies that have driven the branding industry for this first quarter-century, facilitating a boom in small- to medium-sized design studios who ape the language and culture of those they service. Moving fast and breaking things. Dynamically, disruptively, energetically pressuring designers to think of more logo options at 9pm on a Wednesday.

In 2025 this feels almost naive, like we were playing pretend, building make-believe companies and making them all shiny just like a real, actually useful business. But just as sub-prime mortgages led to the 2008 financial crash, we shouldn’t be surprised when venture capital pulls the rug out from under the entrepreneur class and leaves the rest of us with nothing to dress up (the tailor has no emporer to make clothes for?).

And so now we’re experiencing the financialisation of culture, converting human endeavours and interactions into casino chips, rooted in nothing but speculation. Nowhere is this analogy more apt (barely even an analogy) than in the brave new frontier of meme coins. Here discourse, memes, edgy in-jokes and online culture more broadly is speculated on in an ironic facsimile of the stock market — a tacit understanding of the unreality of our digitised, mediated culture. It’s a world that has, through desperation or nihilism, utterly lost faith in the promise of a social contract. When you see your prospects on a steady decline, you might conclude that if you can’t beat em you may as well see how many free drinks you can get in their casino.

We might see this unexpectedly influencing the branding trends of the next few years, as companies try and ride the wave of extremely-online culture breaching the mainstream. Perhaps the next step is brand wojackification.

As we see the tech sector discarding any and every employee seen as superfluous to the core objective (harvesting user data to sell to other data-harvesters so they can more effectively harvest data) and dropping all pretence of wider societal improvement, maybe branding is superfluous too, now that we’re not pretending anymore.

Can we get back to reality as designers, as a design industry? Where can we help, be actually useful, make sense of things? Is our economy able to sustain businesses that don’t just grow exponentially? If we’re going to maintain a habitable world, at some point it’s going to have to.

Share

Some links:

You can’t post your way out of fascism — 404 Media

Physical media is officially back — Embedded

Fascism as a form of self-hatred — Mental Hellth

What Trump’s media strategy has in common with brand activations — Yello

Let’s get real — Unpopular Front

Some pods:

The Backrooms — Sixteenth Minute

Debt — ACFM

Donny talks about toilets — Hyperfixed (Put the lid down.)

Leave a comment

Share

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and General Salutions!

It’s been a turbulent year in the world—genuinely horrifying for a lot of people in some parts of the globe—and next year doesn’t look like it will be letting up much. But we continue.

Here’s to positive action in the new year.

Some updates on this blog below, as well as some thoughts on the year ahead. As always, thanks for reading, and any algorithm-boosting engagement with this post is much appreciated :)

Welcome to the Breakdown

As you may have noticed, I've changed the name of this blog to better reflect what I want to do with it.

So, to refocus, Creative Breakdown is a blog about branding, design and communication in the climate crisis.

It's about the visual world and the creative sector, breaking down trends and recurring themes, and the intersection of politics and graphic design. It's about being creative and having a crisis of conscience, from my personal experience of working in both the commercial and non-profit worlds.

It's about trying to do the right thing in your work.

It's about the kinds of things I want to write about.

It's my blog :)

Share Creative Breakdown

100 subscribers!

As I refocus the blog, I'm also pleased to report that I've now reached over 100 subscribers! It's a small milestone but I think worth celebrating :)

I started this blog in September 2023 as somewhere to put my errant thoughts, without much expectation of an audience, and it's been gratifying to see some of my writing resonate with people. Just knowing someone will read gives me a little more motivation to write!

2024 Recap

The past year has been something of a rollercoaster for the news cycle, and at times it's been difficult to muster the spirit to face the world, let alone write about it. I find the urge comes and goes, along with the flow of design work. That's evident in the lack of posts in the first half of the year, with a glut of red-hot takes in the past few months!

Let's recap:

This year I've been working closely with a few different climate-change-focused groups, and I've noticed this space is as susceptible to jargon as any other: it's natural to develop a shorthand between the people you're working with to make communication more efficient. This piece focuses on the word 'climate.' A word we've come to use as a catch-all for basically everything to do with our work—both on its own and as a prefix—and those of us who are familiar generally understand it to mean 'to do with the climate crisis and general ecological breakdown.' I make the case that we can't assume the public at large has the same level of familiarity with the subject, and sometimes we have to be more specific, even though it might feel like we're repeating ourselves or labouring the point.

In this post I wanted to work through what a transition to a sustainable economy could actually look like for those of us working in the creative industry. From the type of work we do to the kinds of businesses we run. I want to encourage people in this industry to start thinking and making changes right now for the future we will be otherwise forced to adapt to.

It seems that October was a bit of a rough one for the old mental state. This one is a bit of personal catharsis. I think I just had to get all the bad thoughts out. Apologies, but also, not sorry ;)

During the election season in the US I was struck by how the branding of the Harris campaign felt like some of the slick brand campaigns coming out of the fintech and consumer retail sector. Beautiful work that ultimately (in my opinion) sanitises politics and feels indicative of the Democratic Party's disconnect with the public.

This one came on the heels of an appearance by venerated creative guru and vice-chairman of Ogilvy, Rory Sutherland, on the Cleaning Up podcast. Beyond the obvious contrarianism, his reactionary squirming betrays a reticence to confront his own fears. I think he is like a lot of people, in that he wants to keep doing what he's always done and hopes that everything will be ok. Except that, unlike most people, he has a very influential position as one of the chief marketers of fossil fuels, and thus one of the major blockers of the political action we desperately need. An example of the toxicity of Wishful Thinking.

2025

Looking to the next year—without making any firm resolutions—I want to commit to writing with more resolve in 2025 (if that's not an oxymoron!)

I think there's a gap in the creative industry, where the dynamic between our work and the world around us isn't really being seriously taken into account. There's plenty of writing around sustainability and graphic design, and I've had a lot of conversations recently about minimising our impact in the materials we use, the hosting of our websites, the bandwidth of our case study videos and other resources. These things are all of course important to consider, but I think we can easily get distracted by them.

The climate emergency is only going to become more urgent, and we need to be thinking and talking as a sector about how we transition to a non-extractive economy. That touches everything from the type of clients we choose to work with, to the business models of our agencies, to the importance of effective public communication. There's potential for the creative industry to be a real driver of change, as well as an example to others of how it can be done. We are supposed to be problem solvers, after all.

In the next year, I aim to explore this more, and in some small way stimulate much needed discussion of these topics.

Thanks for joining me this far, I hope you'll continue to read in 2025 and beyond!

My replies are open if you feel the urge to respond to anything I've talked about above or in future :)

Leave a comment

Sutherland was recently on the Cleaning Up podcast to clarify his position on promoting fossil fuels (something his agency has no qualms doing). 

As pointed out in this thoughtful post by my colleague and fellow Serious Person Jamie Inman, Sutherland is unable to give a straight answer, resorting mostly to deflection and lamentations of 'virtue signalling,' before melting into the form of a pop-psychology Jeremy Clarkson and casting doubt on the general veracity of climate science as a whole.

It's an infuriating listen if you spend a lot of time thinking and talking about climate change, but to many it probably sounds reasonable. After all, can we really be sure of anything these days? Isn't everything unpredictable? Why spend all this effort trying to change things, if change itself could be harder than what we're trying avoid? 

In Sutherland's view, the people calling for radical change are dogmatic: we've been taken in by the climate cult and can no longer see the nuance, the uncertainty. In short, we're naive, unserious, and not worth listening to. He asserts, dogmatically.

Share

I understand dogma to be something that is repeated and reinforced in spite of the piling evidence to the contrary. 

To call for ‘balanced debate’ when the science has long been established, to insist on working with polluters as 'part of the solution', to write off every extreme weather event as an outlier, and to throw doubt on established fact. This is dogma veiled as pragmatism.

You could even call it wishful thinking.

We’re all scared.

Underneath all the can-we-really-be-sures and the 'balanced debates' lies a deep-seated fear, and a wish to be told that everything's going to be ok. Sutherland accuses others of dogmatic thinking while grasping tightly to his own dogma of uncertainty that gives him comfort in the face of reality. And that's why his arguments resonate. They give people tools to self-soothe, to placate their own fears, and to find their own comfort in the idea of nuance, of uncertainty, of 'both sides'.

Sutherland lives in uncertainty because that’s how the status-quo maintains itself. Instead of looking towards visionary, systemic change, the status-quo leans on behavioural science and the idea that small tweaks to 'consumer behaviour' can have wide-reaching impacts. That improving the wifi on trains is preferable to creating an actually functioning rail network. That consumer choice equates to social freedom and equality.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that a man who’s dedicated his career to finding new and innovative ways to sell more products is not really a 'systems change' kind of guy. But it's still disappointing to realise that someone who is held up as a genius in the field of creativity turns out to be bought and paid for by fossil fuels. As Chomsky would put it, he may not be paid to say these things, but he's certainly paid because he believes them.

Far from the incisive, innovative thinker he’s widely praised to be—and I had always assumed he was—Sutherland here is the embodiment of the status-quo staunchly digging its heels in and refusing progress, as it always does.

Subscribe now

What’s the big idea?

We have to go beyond clever behavioural tricks and offer something bigger. Something coherent, tangible. The solutions are there, from renewable energy to circular production to devolution and degrowth. These ideas are up against huge vested interests, and they need creativity. Creative agencies have a duty to put their vast talents towards making sustainable lifestyles more understandable, engaging and desirable, before it’s too late to adopt them.

We have to realise that the future cannot be found in nudges, in nifty tweaks, or in Ogilvy’s behavioural science department (as paid for by fossil fuel contracts).

The future is, by definition, not the status quo. The agencies that transition from the clients of past—and start promoting the solutions of the future—are those that will enable the creative sector to survive and thrive.

Leave a comment

What might an actually sustainable creative career look like? Read more:

As someone who pays attention to design and branding, I'm interested in how this story of politics is reflected in the way campaigns and parties present themselves. I think the evolution of political branding helps tell the story of the corporate capture of political culture, and the plummeting trust in western democratic systems.

Kamala’s campaign design is a masterpiece of minimal nuance. Subtly cribbing from civil rights era typography, eschewing any decorative stars, stripes or containers and dialling up the Democrat Blue to a refreshing shade that Yves Klein would approve of (and that brand designers are now all-too-familiar with) to convey a refreshing sense of directness and authenticity all within a simple yard sign. Yet it's so well balanced and considered that it betrays a cosmetic approach to politics, wrapped in the sleak sheen of a coastal startup.

The campaign is simply too good at branding.

For corporations, branding is crucial. It’s the difference between Coke and Pepsi, between a Whopper and a Big Mac. When you’re selling the exact same product, you have to manufacture difference in the consumer’s mind. You can see where I’m going with this.

Subscribe now

Brand Britain

The late nineties was the height of neoliberalism—arguably the historical peak of western liberal hegemony—perfectly encapsulated in the rebranding of Labour as ‘New Labour’.

Here, the corporate capture of party politics was up-front and celebrated. The government of Private Finance Initiatives brought in a wave of brand-friendly corporate partnerships, transforming a historically working class, socialist-leaning party—the party of labour—into a pro-business, pro-finance, fully capitalist party. New Labour was a shining vision of a progressive corporate utopia, and it changed the face of political campaigning both in the UK and the US.

Traditionally, political campaigning is about promoting policy, rallying supporters (and demonising minorities) and making leaders seem as inspirational and likeable as possible, while undermining the opposition. The New Labour campaign of the nineties embraced corporate influence, and opened up politics to the advertising industry and to the techniques of branding. Of course, advertisers have long played an influential role in politics, but here they were able to apply their learnings from the illustrious evolution of consumerism through the 20th century and the post-world-war boom.

Conditioned by Thatcher and Reagan, the public had settled into it's role as consumers, finding our self esteem and identity through association to different brands that offer the exact same products in different packages. New Labour began to define it's own difference through brand-association. This was the era of "Cool Britannia," in which British startups and their charismatic CEOs came to prominence on a cultural wave of Brit Pop and Young British Artists. Tony Blair was able to present himself as a young go-getter in the same mould as Richard Branson or James Dyson, who could unlock our entrepreneurial spirit and be an ambassador for "Brand Britain." In doing so, New Labour was pitched as brand over a political party. A consumer choice, free from the historical baggage of ideology and class conflict.

The Obama campaign of 2008 represented something of an evolution of this approach, using the techniques of corporate branding to full effect and becoming the first campaign to have something like a corporate logo. The ideas of 'Hope' and 'Change' were pitched more like brand values than anything grounded in actual policy, the party coalescing around a progressive, optimistic lifestyle brand. But this was mere moments before the crash. Before the booming economy finally bust, and the cracks in the foundation of the corporate ideology were plain to see.

When Hillary Clinton tried to replicate Obama's approach in 2016, commissioning her own corporate logo and design system, well, we saw what happened.

You could describe Trump as a sort of "anti-brand" in the way that his staunchly brash, unashamedly gauche aesthetic flies directly in the face of frictionless, faceless, liberal technocracy. While the Dems shrouded themselves in a shiny wrapper of corporate competence, Trump was brazenly unvarnished.

Kamala's campaign is keenly on-trend in its aesthetic, mirroring the output of the buzziest brand agencies: a visual marketing approach that any software-as-a-service, lifestyle or fintech company would be happy with. But this election (and the last two) shows evidence of a backlash against such a corporatisation of politics.

The world of brands is a world of passive participation, in which decisions that define people and their communities are largely substituted by a choice of products and services. In which consumers 'vote with their dollars' and the idea of 'freedom' is synonymous with 'choice.' When the primary way that we see ourselves shaping our world is as consumers, democracy becomes a matter of brand preference. And when both parties in a two-party system are vying for the same corporate donations, the decision becomes more and more like choosing between a Whopper and a Big Mac.

But when you've been eating nothing but McDonalds and Burger King, you start to crave fibre, texture, substance.

I'm not trying to say that the design and branding of the Harris campaign will lose her the election, but that the design and branding of the Harris campaign reflects the reasons she is not as likely to beat Trump as she should be. A painstakingly considered surface level veneer of progressivism, a manner of indecipherable management-speak that belies a lack of conviction, and an undercurrent of cynical hawkish geopolitics and military alliances that undercut her attempts at seeming principled. The intangibility of it all.

When New Labour rebranded in the Nineties, they were riding a wave of cultural and economic prosperity in the UK. Slick, shiny brands like Virgin were the heroes of the day. Now we’re experiencing a massive loss of faith in capitalism and the corporations that feel so disconnected with to the public. The fact that her design is on-point serves only to add another layer of gloss to the package. Harris only offers a vague idea of corporate confidence. She offers a considered brand and an absence of politics. Like Coke partnering with Pepsi, she's pursued endorsements from Cheney and Bush: a tacit acknowledgment that it's all just sugar water.

There's no corporate sheen to Trump's campaign. Beyond the bluster, the lies and the grifts, what Trump is offering this time round is real: real bigotry, real hatred, real oppression. Terrifyingly real, but real nonetheless.

Share

ALSO READ:

A great follow for design in politics:

YELLO by Hunter Schwarz

The MAGA box campaign logo has never been more popular

Hello, in this issue we’ll look at the rise of the Trump-style “MAGA Box” logo and what makes the best “I Voted” stickers…

Read more

2 years ago · 4 likes · Hunter Schwarz

Lately I've been feeling the urge to write something a bit more personal. I'm not sure it fits with the "beat" of whatever this substack is, but I'm making some room for it here, because it's hard to stay professional all the time. Because professionalism is really a kind of self-censorship, and I'm not sure why but I'm a little afraid to step outside of it. But let's give it a try.

It's been a fallow couple of weeks for my brain. Chalk it up to early onset Seasonal Depression. Some days I've cursed every driver of every car that streams past me down the slushy autumn road, pushing their foot on every pedal that sends yet more gas into the air. Days I've felt buried under the rubble of modernism, crushed by the weight of a century of mistakes.

It's hard to broach the existential dread that comes with knowing and accepting the reality and weight of the climate crisis. Some of us know it, but try not to look straight at it. Others have heard the broad strokes of it, and may worry a little, but decide (perhaps for their own good) not to concern themselves with it, while a small minority choose to flat-out deny that it's real.

Some of us are staring through our fingers into the abyss, in the morbid hope that it might acknowledge us.

These past few weeks have been a real challenge for the climate news ingester. We've seen major oil companies further shred any semblance of a hint of a veil of responsibility, while our government funnels billions towards them under the guise of carbon capture technology that doesn't work. Clean energy, conservation and rewilding projects that we know are effective languish in the meantime. Now scientists are telling us their own predictions were too conservative, and unpredictable failures in our ecosystem are causing breakdown to accelerate. All the while Hurricanes tear into the south of the US, floods abound everywhere, and fossil-fuelled genocide continues unabated.

How do we not fall into nihilism. How does the world remain so disconnected.

It’s like we are ants, incapable of altering our own patterns. Following pheromone trails, digging holes and chewing out branches. It looks like intelligence—a lot’s happening—but it turns out it's actually very dumb.

Will we simply consume everything we can until we can't?

I see a lot of posts about the importance of not giving up, not going to sleep, of connecting with nature and getting back to the core of things. I like how it sounds, but it feels so abstract. What does ‘not giving up’ mean? What, for that matter, would ‘giving up’ mean for someone who's barely influencing a fight? I'd quite like to go to sleep. Sleeping means we can dream (I think someone famous said that). But this feels more like sitting awake, waiting, bracing for the wave to hit. What else can most of us do? It's inescapable.

I suppose that's it. Wait for evolution to rein us in. We've finally found the line. Stepped over the boundary. Will she put us in our place?

Some days I perceive the whole concept of 'climate communication' as the sound of middle-class wheels spinning in place. Something to occupy the mind and conscience of those of us too comfortable to really get involved in the political reality. But that’s uncharitable. Political reality means conflict, violence too, eventually.

So we're left to formulate some kind of twisted philosophy in order to live in the world, carry on with life, maintain a belief in the future and still know what we know. Perhaps that's what is meant by not giving in.

Like I said, a fallow few days for the old noggin, writing from a bleaker state. But I’m feeling a little more positive as I hit ‘post.’ (Is my mood my reality, or does reality create my moods? Both. It’s both.)

From the top of the hill near our flat, you can see all of Glasgow. Some mornings the whole valley is swamped in fog, and it's hard to make out the faintest shapes of the spires that punctuate the city. Other mornings it's so bright and clear that you can see all the way to the Trossachs, the first snow glistening from the mountains beyond.

Share

Thanks for reading.

Here’s a song that perfectly encapsulates everything I just wrote. In fact, don’t bother reading my ramblings, just listen to Jeff:

Clean energy—and transitioning energy workers away from fossil fuel extraction—is a vital aspect of the necessary transition away from fossil fuels, but this stock photo idea of a green new deal doesn’t include most of our economy (writing here from the UK), which is largely based on service rather than manufacturing. And there are dirty, filthy, smog-infused, lung-clogging sectors in the service economy: the financiers who perpetuate fossil fuel extraction to name an obvious one. And then there's advertising.

The advertising industry provides a haven for all the creative minds who want to make a decent living as a designer, illustrator, writer, away from from the precariousness of the struggling artist, poet or novelist. It lures us in with its promise of creative fulfilment, a vibrant social life and the opportunity to put our genuine passion and hard earned skill to use. Then it makes us sell cars.

We don't think of advertising as a carbon-intensive industry. After all, a bunch of computers, flip-charts and sharpies can't be that unsustainable. And we recycle the Prosecco bottles at the end of the week. But consider that the job of advertising (and marketing, branding and PR) is to increase growth: to take any given quarterly revenue graph and push the line up and up. That means more cars, more clothes, more oil, more gas, more carbon, more whatever. More waste.

Perhaps it's an obvious point, but it's one that people like Mark Read of WPP would like you to ignore. By his account, his company's fossil fuel clients simply want help to be "truthful, fair and accurate." But if the industry was forced to take it's full impact into account, it wouldn't be able to exist under the current net-zero framework.

Given the creative industry at large is primarily an engine for growth (and growth means eventual, slow and spectacular, calamitous death), what are we to do? What does a 'just transition' look like for the creative industry? Can we sell our way out of capitalism??

I want to focus on the creative sector, so I won't go into economic and political theory (I’ll spare you my novice takes on Marx) but I would like to outline what I personally wish our system could look like:

I think it's reasonable, and not utopian or frivolous, to envision a system that puts public wellbeing over and above private wealth. An economy that takes into account the cost of expending natural resources and prices those resources accordingly. A system that can mitigate waste and put as much investment as possible back into the system (which is geared towards public wellbeing.) I refuse to accept that this is too much to ask, or that it's unrealistic to work towards.

It may or may not be realistic to you, depending on your own tendency towards cynicism, but let's say we get some way towards addressing the balance. Where does advertising and marketing fit? If there's no demand for endless growth, surely there's no need for it? Well, maybe not as much, but there are always creative, artistic people, and creativity is necessary in most pursuits.

What then will a creative career look like? Here are a few things a creative agency might do in a system that is not completely extractive and exploitative:

'Selling' behaviours and lifestyle changes.

Mass communication, whether commercial advertising or government messaging, is propaganda. Part of the work of the creative industry will be to make lifestyle change desirable, and to promote pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours. This might be state-funded, some will be philanthropic, but there is a role for businesses and entrepreneurs too (I'll get to this below). It's happening already, albeit on a very small scale relative to our vast consumerist machinery.

Aiding democratic and public service.

From experience design through to social media content, there's a whole world of public processes and services that sorely need attention. Each point at which the public interacts with a service requires careful thought, creative problem solving and communication, and many experts and generalists should be collaborating on their design.

The same goes for the democratic process. Not just inspiring and informing people around elections, but encouraging participation in local planning and decision making.

Just think about the amount of thought and creativity that goes into the design of Glossier and Nike's flagship stores. What if we could apply that creativity to something as boring as public consultation?

Promoting Community Interest Companies and Not-for-profit businesses

There are businesses—operating right now—that would fit into the aforementioned ideal. They need to create engagement and reach their audience as much as anyone.

A Community Interest Company (CIC) is a limited company that exists to benefit the community rather than private shareholders.

A Not-for-Profit Business (not to be confused with a Nonprofit or charity) essentially works like a normal business, except with 100% of its profits invested in community, charity or environmental projects (see Jennifer Hinton for more on this idea.)

It's not hard to imagine a world where all businesses are beholden to their community rather than shareholders or directors—this relatively simple switch would have transformative consequences—and they would still need to compete to exist. These companies still need to use creativity and desire and humour and emotion to engage their customers and thrive.

Now imagine your creative agency is also one of these business. Not being beholden to a profit-motive would, in a successful agency, enable everyone to be paid well, and put creativity first. A system that's not driven by growth but by need would also not require a surplus of labour, or—to put it another way—thousands of graduates pulling all nighters on pitches. It would mean less hours, more collaboration, better social cohesion and less stress. If this feels like some unattainable utopia right now, then it might be time to start asking why that is.

What about now, though? What can a skilled creative person do to take a small step towards this pragmatic utopian dream?

My advice to up-and-coming designers, copywriters and creatives: start looking for jobs in those above areas. It might take some hopping and skipping through typical commercial agencies and companies, but each hop adds another string to your bow. Start to gravitate towards the roles that serve some kind of public good, whether that's through well-meaning brands, non-profits, CICs, or even well-meaning agencies that still have to make compromises. It might even mean working in or with… the Government.

A lot of agencies outside the big holding groups are starting to experiment with new business models like the CIC, as well as the Co-operative model. Seek them out (perhaps look into starting one!) and have conversations with people about these ideas and what small steps can be taken towards a better system.

Here's an interview question you can ask a prospective employer: "what's your plan for a sustainable future?" It will make you sound smart, like you care about the longevity of the organisation, and if it sounds like they've given it some real thought then maybe it’s an open door you can continue to push. If they start talking about recycling, well then maybe it’s time to consider getting your clipboard out and figuring out how wind turbines are made.

Thanks for reading this far! If you enjoyed this, click the heart at the bottom! It helps other people see it. If you think someone else might enjoy it, click this here Share button :) It helps other people see it:

Share

Inspiration

A few things drove me to write this:

• Working on Purpose Disruptors' latest Advertised Emissions report and the Agency for Nature

• Listening to this episode of Upstream:

A quick note: subscribers may have also received a newsletter from me recently. I hope this didn’t feel like an imposition! The idea is to use those newsletters to update people on my recent design work, as well as some more links to interesting stuff related to design, communication and the climate crisis. If you’d like to receive that one, you can sign up here :)

The word is ‘Climate’

I've noticed an increasing dependence on this word—detached from it’s usual pairing as ‘climate change’—frequently used on it's own and as a prefix to unrelated words. Terms like 'climate conversation', 'climate anxiety', 'the climate space', and as a catchall term, like 'working in climate' or 'talking about climate'. I've even seen posts about how to have a 'climate career'.

While terms like this have been used for a while now among activists, academics and policy people, seeing it seep more and more into public communications is worrying to me.

'Climate Change'

By now we might assume that most people understand climate change, or at least the broad strokes of the problem, but I think this assumption is misguided. As a follower of many environmental and activist accounts online, I'm submerged (at times drowning) in posts about 'climate issues'. There’s an understanding that in following you’ve already achieved the level of literacy on the subject required to understand the posts.

But outside, in real life, people aren’t regularly referring to the climate or climate change. People use generic terms like 'eco' and 'green' to refer to anything from the topic of recycling to a person's traits ("he's quite 'eco', y'know?" "She's very, sort-of, green..."). The dial hasn’t shifted much from when I was a kid in the nineties, when everyone was talking about aluminium cans and the Ozone Layer.

I think for lots of people the term 'climate change' is simply another topic on the list of priorities referred to in a YouGov poll (usually somewhere below 'the economy' and above 'housing'). We struggle to make the leap from a siloed issue of more or less importance than other societal woes, to understanding that climate change is integral to everything, from how our economy functions to the security of our housing to our energy bills and even mental health. It is all-encompassing. "The Climate" is literally everything. Language fails us.

Insider language

As groups of people who coalesce around an issue or interest, we develop shorthand to refer to parts of it. We see this in the tech sector all the time. Terms like ‘Algorithm’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ begin as technical terms with a specific meaning and dissipate into culture to become catch-all terms for however apps harvest and regurgitate our personal data right now.

Now, as queasy as I am to acknowledge it, there is something that can be described as the Climate Sector: the broad collection of non-profits, institutions, academics, consultants etc who make a living talking, thinking about, researching and communicating around the issue of climate change. I count myself grateful to be part of this, while remaining uneasy about the professionalisation of activism.

As this sector establishes itself, it becomes expedient to use shortcuts in our language. We all know what we mean when we say 'climate' so let's jettison the redundant suffixes shall we? We've now gone through so many of them that we're actually just tired of deciding which one is correct. Are we in the midst of a Climate Crisis, or declaring a Climate Emergency? Is Climate Change enough, or are we witnessing Climate Breakdown?

So we simply say 'climate' and hope everyone will broadly know what we're talking about.

Except, when I think of 'climate', loads of other things come to mind: local weather, or fancy climate-control air conditioning functions, or the temperature and humidity on a given day in a given place. My parents love to talk about the micro-climate where they live on the South West coast. One of my main associations with the word is the 'political climate' of today’s culture wars, or the ‘climate of fear’ we hear of during the Cold War.

Saying what we mean

I'm not trying to be pedantic, and I’m definitely not criticising those who work in this area. Finding the right language is a challenge we’re all reaching to overcome.

I’m not sure exactly how, but I know we need to say what we mean. What is 'climate anxiety'? It’s the worrying we all do about the future, for our kids, our wildlife, and for our own prospects and quality of life. Do we need to 'start a climate-conversation' or talk about our dependence on fossil fuels and what our lives might be like without car ownership? When we call for “climate action” what actions do we actually want and who do we want to do them?

As a fan of brevity I’m reticent to say we should use more words, but sometimes we have to explain what we mean, not by defining our special terms, or making explainer graphics, but by being specific, right there in the text.

We become averse to specificity because these things are hard to confront. It's hard to tell people that their lifestyle has to radically change, and to recognise that while we might envision a better, more balanced, connected and fulfilled life, it will be interpreted my most people as a massive and unfair sacrifice. It’s easier to abstract the problem.

When we're specific we face these issues, and go some way towards processing them, helping people understand the inequality and power structures at their root. When we're generic and broad we only speak to people with the prerequisite knowledge of what the words mean. It's fine to talk about 'addressing climate anxiety' to a funder or partner who's well versed in the subject, but when we use this language in public-facing communication, we risk coming off as pretentious, or out-of-touch, or just generally inscrutable.

The challenge is challenging

I say all this while understanding the difficulty of language. We use these terms to communicate quickly and concisely, in a world where attention is in short supply. We want people to know immediately “this is about climate change” while we need them to know climate change is about everything. It’s also been useful to differentiate climate change from environmental conservation, but ironically in the effort to communicate something more existential, the terms we use have become more abstract. We need to inspire without overwhelming, to invite and not deter.

So what I’m pitching isn’t a complete shift in language, just that we check ourselves before we, to put it crudely, disappear up our own arses. No-one will be able to connect with us up there.

Share

I’d love to know what other people working on this think. Am I fixating on the use of this word or is it really something of a blind spot? I could be way behind the conversation on this. Let me know in the comments or feel free to DM me!

Podcast corner

Here’s an interesting conversation adjacent to this topic, including a suggested framework for communicating along shared values, real villains and solidarity:

Volts

Volts podcast: how the left can suck less at messaging, with Anat Shenker-Osorio

In this episode, messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio — a researcher, campaigner, author, and speaker — discusses the elements of an effective message, what’s required to spread messages, and the right way to test whether they’re working. We also get into the best way to craft climate messages and the current debate over “popularism…

Listen now

4 years ago · 27 likes · 6 comments · David Roberts

Subscribe now

The light here is different—silvery, more ethereal somehow—it never feels quite as thick and golden as it can in the south, but contains a certain cool-blue clarity.

Every year it feels like it's been so long since the trees have had leaves that I can't help but wonder if it's just not going to happen this time. Like we're just waiting for that one day to come when the blossom fails to bloom, the birds forget how to sing. The winter’s been more gloomy than usual, a dark grey headwind numbing the cheeks and stinging the eyes, leaving us yearning for safety and certainty.

And yet, April rolls around again and the trees begin to bud, in spite of everything. The fog is lifting. Yesterday I heard the sound of a woodpecker again for the first time since last summer, I didn't realise I had missed it.

Share

I’ve noticed I’ve had a few more subscribers since I last posted a few months ago now: thanks so much for signing up! Some of you might be here following the news that we’re dissolving Glimpse. It’s been an amazing experience that’s set me on a particular path that I’m very grateful for—the organisation is dispersing but the work continues :)

I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’m ever going to be a regular writer or content-creator in the way that you seem to have to be to build a following in this new personal-brand-economy: work gets busy, or I periodically just run out of things to say. I don’t think I can have opinions or interesting takes on a deadline. Some people are so good at that, but it just sounds exhausting to me. But I’m happy to have an outlet where I can put thoughts sporadically out into the world, and I’m grateful for anyone who is interested to read them!

Right now I have a lot of thoughts about mass communication and climate change. I’m trying to process and format them in at least a slightly coherent way, so keep an eye out in the coming days/weeks, as I’d love to discuss and hear from other people who are thinking about this stuff.

In the meantime, here’s a really good podcast series from Benjamen Walker: “Not All Propaganda is Art”

It’s about the CIA’s cultural influence in the 50s and 60s in turning the European view of US culture as crass and vulgar towards the celebration of individualism and populism that is so much the background of our mediated world today. I’ve been a fan of Walker’s for years now but this is the most coherent and binge-worthy thing I’ve heard for a little while.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading. If you like what you’ve read here, you can subscribe for free to get a little nudge next time I post. And consider sharing with one of your cool and interesting mates :)

Here I was, 36 years old, nerding out over some design for an insurance company called “Marshmallow” that features at its centre a friendly pink character called Marshall. It’s beautiful work that looks basically indistinguishable from many of the picture books I’ve bought my nieces and nephews in recent years.

From the playschool font to the pastel colours, to the anthropomorphised infographics, if it wasn’t for the subject matter, you’d be forgiven for mistaking this for an early-years education app.

This is not to undermine the work—I’m very much impressed by the consistent quality of Ragged Edge and I’m sure this will be a really effective rebrand—I’m not even trying to say there’s anything wrong with making things cute. It’s fun and I like it. But I think it’s worth thinking about this trend and where it came from, and what it tells us about where we’re at right now.

Adulting is hard

When I think of my generation I think of soaring house prices, expensive coffees and 50 hour work weeks. I’m part of a certain section of society that’s low on time and owns little in the way of actual wealth, but has enough disposable income to spend on door-to-door deliveries, brunches and meal kits. The intersection of my generation and class is one in which we’ve gotten used to having things done for us. Apps now seek to take the place of our parents: Deliveroo for lunch, Uber home, Hello Fresh for dinner. Monzo makes me feel like it’s managing my finances for me, and, when last year I was finally able to buy a flat, Habito took care of the mortgage.

All of this seems to make life easier, and I barely have to even (god forbid) speak to a person on the phone. It’s no wonder then, that the world of branded apps and financial services feels like a playground filled with brightly coloured friendly characters and squishy anthropomorphic shapes.

Sometimes this represents genuine technological improvement: think of the experience of banking now compared to 20 years ago and it’s hard to deny that the service is much better than it used to be.

But I’m also left with the uncanny feeling of being fooled into a false sense of security. A state of mind that is passive, trusting and pliable, filled with long-underused subscription services that I’ll sort out tomorrow I swear.

On a collective level I think this leads to a general tendency towards stasis. Things may have got considerably worse for our generation materially, and everything is much more expensive than it used to be, from the cost of a pint of lager to higher education, but everything feels so easy now that maybe it’s actually fine. And that’s of course overlooking the human cost of this perceived ease—the precarious gig-work that actually makes these apps work, from UberEats riders to freelance mortgage brokers and therapists, each sector becoming one-by-one more ruthless and ‘disrupted’ from the bottom up.

Early in my career I was fortunate enough to spend a 3-month stint working in the Google offices in London. They had a room full of nap-pods, free breakfast, lunch and dinner (with multiple gourmet options), mini-kitchens full of snacks and Mountain Dew, ‘playrooms’ with every latest console and ping-pong and pool tables. It was like going to that one kid’s house who was allowed fizzy drinks and had all the channels and an ADSL line (#just90sthings). The thing is, no-one at Google was using the fun stuff. Most people working there were chained to their screens for so long they had to use the in-house laundry service to get their washing done (and judging by the smell on the coding floor, often not making enough use of this service).

I think this might be a good analogy for the app-world that many of us live in now. A generation now in their 30s, stuck in suspended animation as teenagers/young adults, having our needs tended to by more and more services in exchange for degradation in material living- and working-conditions.

Branding has a big role to play to make this world palatable. It’s the tool that the libertarian tech industry uses to make us feel safe, looked-after, coddled. Like story-books, these brands want to make this increasingly privatised, individualised economy feel like a fun adventure, and it seems like the worse the economy gets, the more infantilising these stories become.

Finding job-hunting alienating, depressing and unmotivating? Actually, it’s fun, like making pretend you’re in a jungle :)

Getting nothing from your savings? Stick it all into crypto! It’s fun and quirky and definitely not a pyramid scheme 🙃

I always try to make these rants productive, and where I can find productivity here is in learning from the best how to make things like climate action and social justice more palatable to more people (if it can be done with insurance, maybe there’s something to learn there).

On the flip side I think there’s an appetite out there for audiences and citizens to be treated, and marketed to, like adults. There’s got to be a sweet spot in between treating audiences with seriousness and respect, and providing citizens with fun and accessible (and yes, even cute) experiences. I think that might be a good thing to aim for.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, consider subscribing and/or sharing :)

Subscribe now

Share

MORE ON THIS:

It’s paywalled, but I recommend watching Brad Troemel’s Pastel Hell Report that covers how we got to this millennial tendency to infantilise ourselves.

Podcast highlight:

Sticking to the millennial theme (and to the Replyall adjacent theme from last week), I just discovered PJ Vogt’s new podcast, and enjoyed this ep on music discovery titled ‘How do I find new music now that I’m old and irrelevant?’. I find myself having the same ridiculous neuroses as PJ when it comes to finding music in the “right” places, and judging what’s actually good vs what’s just catchy (and if there’s any difference!)

Keep reading:

Design in Progress→

Pushing positivity in a desperate world

I’ve long felt that charity and cause campaigning often takes the wrong approach, leading with problems over solutions, highlighting symptoms above root causes. It’s understandable, when the consequences of climate collapse, famine and injustice are so shocking, to want to show the world—to shine a spotlight on the awful thing. But I think this approach…

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · Mike Andrews

To those who’ve subscribed recently, thanks! It’s great to get some positive feedback on something that I’ve always enjoyed doing, though have neglected for years till now! If you’re new here, consider subscribing and/or sharing :)

→ Scroll to the bottom for a couple of interesting podcast recs

Subscribe now

Having noticed a certain trend towards psychedelia in branding and design lately, I’ve been thinking about where it’s coming from. It could simply be a reaction to the clean, humanist sans-serif startup world of the 2010s (as I touched on in my last blog), but I wonder if it could be reflective of, and used in the advancement of a desire for deeper connection with nature and with each other.

We’re currently going through an era of reappraisal of psychedelics and other drugs, and many scientific studies point to significant benefits in the use of psilocybins and MDMA for things like depression, anxiety and PTSD. These drugs have famously been adopted by Silicon Valley polycules, and—as with most things picked up by the capitalist class—have been sanitised, microdosed and put to use in service of increased productivity, often to counteract the negative impacts of their own technology (the main result of which is increased sales of kombucha and cbd-infused-everything.)

The psychedelic renaissance in medicine has led to a wide range of brands using visual cues from the Doors posters to associate their products with mental health and self-care, and this slick psychedelia has arguably become the defining look of 2023. I found this run-down of 2023 branding trends from 99designs (maybe the lowest common denominator of the design world?) and nearly all of them are variations on the 70s psychedelia-inflected theme.

Where psychedelia gets interesting, I think, is in its folkish roots. The revival of Folk Horror represented in ‘Midsommar’, is, I think, a good illustration of a new-found fascination with nature, and also speaks to a deep fear that runs through our collective psyche—a fear of community, and of each other. We desperately yearn for a time before phones, Facebook and 4chan, before 24 hour news, before Twitter, before Tiktok. We yearn to be closer to each other, but we’re also terrified of the prospect.

I think there’s something in this fear that’s a powerful communication tool. Fear is fun, and nature is scary, awe-inspiring and cool. It’s not the reserve of anorak-wearing birdwatchers, shotgun-toting farmers or sandal-wearing hippies, and it’s not over in some rainforest somewhere. Nature is for everyone, and it is all of us. But how to communicate that?

In campaigning we use these terms like ‘nature-connection’ and ‘climate change’ in our efforts to make people engage. The paradox is that naming something separates it—puts it in a category apart from ourselves and our lives. ‘Climate Change’ or more recently, simply ‘Climate’, is thrown around by activists and scientists alike, and it’s all over our communication with the public. But in as much as it means anything to anyone, a term like this embodies the intangible—the numbers, the science, the policies—and tends to alienate people outside a very specific group of people who care about those things.

Brands deal in vibes, embodying just enough of an appealing identity so that people can consume it and make it part of their own. Activism is usually a step behind branding, picking up the Canva templates left over in the tail end of the wave. But I think we could embrace the darker, edgier side of this particular trend—the folklore, the scary stories, the characters—to really embody this desire to return to nature, put the phone down and touch grass.

Podcast Round-up:

I listen to a lot of podcasts: probably too many to reliably keep any information in my head. So in an attempt to parse the highlights from the parasocial background noise, here are a few recent episodes that stood out to me.

This interview with Naomi Klein from the QAnonAnonymous podcast—if you haven’t listened to QAA, fear not, it’s a podcast that started analysing the phenomenon of QAnon back in 2017 (not one that promotes it).

Naomi Klein is a leftist media and culture critic who wrote the hugely influential ‘No Logo’ and more recently ‘The Shock Doctrine’, who also regularly gets mistaken for feminist-thinker-turned-alt-right-reactionary, Naomi Wolf. This frequent misidentification has led Klein to the concept of doppelgängers and the mirror world, which I find fascinating, and a very apt description of the ‘left-right’ divide that’s increasingly becoming a divide between different realities. I will be checking out the book for sure.

Endless Thread has reliably scratched the itch that Reply All used to for me, unearthing weird and intriguing stories from the web—ostensibly from Reddit threads—and following them up. This one follows the nature theme, tracking one Redditor’s obsession with slime mould. Some fascinating facts about slime and fungus, and the nature of intelligence—and also about the inevitable descent into in-fighting and factions that happens whenever someone tries to be interested in a thing on the internet.

Share

Thanks for reading! Here’s another one:

One of the first examples of this kind of mass media flattening shows up in the development of political branding, specifically The Obama campaign of 2007/8. This marked the introduction of corporate graphic design and branding techniques into the political sphere, and kicked off its own trend within the branding world.

Obama’s campaign really utilised the connected, consistent, guidelined approach of a startup in a big way. Political campaigns have always sought to have their own distinctive voice—and to stand apart from the other guy—but this is the first time we saw such a branded campaign, complete with its own corporate logo.

The campaign’s use of Gotham established a since-ubiquitous typography style, which communicated a general sense of friendly but not-too-scary optimism. It aimed to reassure its audience that while we crave positive change, it won’t be too radical. It could say “CHANGE” in a friendly, accessible-yet-impactful font, just bold enough to sound like it means it, but not chunky enough to evoke connections to the art and design of 20th century political movements that some might consider too ‘extreme’.

It was enough in 2008 to say CHANGE and not really back it up with anything meaningful, but the disappointment of Obama’s terms in office has since made this approach feel somewhat hollow. So perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising to see Hillary’s campaign try to replicate this approach in 2012 with disappointing results.

This aesthetic did however prove a perfect fit for the startup boom of the 2010’s, with major “disruptors” adopting it as their house style, echoed for example in the startup-optimism and simplicity of DesignStudio’s 2014 rebrand of Airbnb. Their inoffensively positive aesthetic allowed them to couch aggressive, often destructive and unethical business practices with a bright, friendly, progressive sheen.

I remember doing a lot of business-to-business branding at the time—it was like a race to see who could find the next bold humanist typeface that had just enough quirk to be able to say it was different from Gotham (then Brandon, then Brown, then Circular, and so on…)

[side-note: this also spurred a glut of experimental sans fonts that no-one would actually use, documented in this very much of-its-time tumblr]

The time since this slick, optimistic period of design has seen something of a backlash in typography, seeing cycles of 70s inspired ornate slabs and serifs, dipping in and out of psychedelia, much of which has made its way into some of the biggest, most corporate of rebrands, and is now arguably the new bland.

This has been spurred on by an increasingly visually sophisticated and design-literate public, ever more comfortable creating their own personal brands, empowered by Canva and similar tools.

Share Design in Progress→

You could argue this indicates a golden age of pluralism in design: a multitude of styles to represent a multitude of expression. But as with most things under capitalism, I think this choice is an illusion. What’s been created is essentially a market of off-the-shelf styles and easily replicable templates, whose value is gradually becoming flattened to the lowest common denominator. It’s made it increasingly hard to actually be distinctive—as soon as an interesting visual style or illustration trend pops up it’s hoovered up by the branding machine and spat out in the form of a brand that sells mortgages. It’s a post-modern cliché that there are no movements anymore, but it’s a facet of meta-modernism that there’s a mini-movement for everyone to buy in to.

Ever since the Black Square overtook Instagram, it’s been understood by many that to post is to act; and to act is to post carousels of text calling people out for not acting.

In the past few years a cutesy, meme-able graphic style has proliferated, pioneered by social justice movements on Instagram and Giphy, and adopted by the US Democrats as an unofficial house social media style. This goes hand in hand with the rise of Procreate as a means to quickly create hand drawn illustrations— a development that’s also worked its way into corporate branding. I’ll save the rant about how we all now willingly work for free for social media platforms for another day.

So now we’re surrounded by visual stimulation—a plethora of styles with any substance surgically removed to where any interesting new visual approach rings as hollow as those old Gotham-emblazoned placards. A flattening not in terms of how things look, but in how creativity indicates any kind of value or substance over any other product, service or belief.

But I did not intend this to be some Graphic Designer’s lament!

I think if there is a way through this, it’s in really connecting with the substance of the thing you’re designing for, and tying your artwork inextricably to that. Burger King looks like a 70s soft-play area today because it wants to evoke nostalgia and associate its brand with that cosy feeling, and because we’re simply bored of corporate sans serifs. They do not make 70s inspired cuisine—they are not, and never will be Big Kahuna Burger—in fact nothing about their product or service has changed. These companies have to hijack trends because they don’t actually mean anything to anyone. In the same way, the political establishment cycles through graphic design styles because they’ve got nothing to say.

Us designers love to hark on about that modernist phrase Form Follows Function, but maybe the mantra for this meta-modern age should be Style Serves Substance—using cues and techniques that directly reflect, enhance or spring from the content and meaning of the subject.

Share

If you’ve found this at all interesting, consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues, so I can measure my self-worth in substack stats :)

I’m trying to write regularly, at the moment once a week. Subscribe to see if I can keep that momentum up!

Subscribe now

It’s been a while since Bob Geldof and co originally attempted to save the world through a combination of music and horror, and it’s now becoming more widely understood that leading with the problem—showing people in the bleakest of situations—leads to what Adam Curtis terms “oh-dearism.” This is the feeling of anguish, of a problem’s perceived unsolvability—the sheer desperation of it all—that may hammer home the importance of doing something, but ironically does not inspire a person to do anything, and worse, can rob people on the ground of their own agency.

Having worked with many charities and organisations, large and small, to help connect with their audience through design, I thought I’d outline a couple of things I’ve learned along the way.

Selling solidarity

The traditional approach to international aid has been to highlight the effects of catastrophe, and to almost guilt people into handing over their money. As I mentioned up-top, this may work in the short-term, but after decades of this strategy, it’s likely to have an apathy-inducing effect on the public.

But arguably what’s more important is the imbalance this causes in the perceived relationship between “us” in the West and “them” in what we call the Global South. We need to start approaching aid from the position of solidarity over charity, and this has become central to how I see communication in this sector.

It’s also something that Oxfam wanted to address in redesigning the Unwrapped range of gift cards. We made a big decision to take photographs of people off the covers of the cards, and instead illustrate the Oxfam programmes that are funded by the cards in a positive and celebratory way, that centres on the outcomes. We also wanted to highlight the partnerships Oxfam has built with people on the ground, making it clear that Oxfam are participants in this work alongside the communities themselves.

The aim here is to build a sense of solidarity between the person purchasing the card, the person receiving the card, and the Oxfam partner whose project benefits from the transaction.

This is what is meant by decolonisation—fundamentally shifting our mindset from the idea that ‘developed’ nations can benevolently lift those they deem sufficiently worthy out of poverty, to the shared understanding of the global systems that put them there in the first place, and that allow some humans to live in comfort while others live in desperation.

Tasty bites:

If you’re trying to inspire action, it’s important that action feels doable, or even better, enjoyable. Take the Jump encourages people with the means to do so to take part in six, manageable lifestyle changes.

Crucially they acknowledge the difficulty of making even a small lifestyle change, and focus on celebrating the increments, rather than admonishing failures. Their whole approach is centred on joy, community and celebration, and it was super-important that their brand toolkit allowed them to communicate those things.

This was a valuable lesson for me in creating a brand for use by volunteers with varying levels of design-literacy. Based on the use of a distinctive typeface, cut-out shapes and a bold, bright colour palette, the brand benefits from being thrown together in an exuberant way.

Space for Empathy

Creating a positive experience encourages people to build an emotional connection to a subject. This is something that the retail sector has long been aware of: just look at Glossier, Aesop, Apple and any flagship Nike store for just a few examples.

When we created the Choose Love stores we wanted to use the psychology and techniques of the retail sector to essentially solicit donations for refugees. By creating an experience that people felt drawn to, with moments of surprise, delight and storytelling, people’s empathy was allowed to naturally come out. We were struck by the power of objects to elicit an emotional response, with many people brought to tears by the touch of a child’s coat or boot.

The responses may have been emotional, but the experience itself was overwhelmingly positive—a celebration of the amazing work that Choose Love enables across the world.

Branding and design can create a positive, celebratory space in which to communicate serious, important issues. This space can be physical or digital—it’s the amalgamation of the experience created in the audience’s mind—and it can even start to change our whole culture.

Thanks for reading Design in Progress!

While I’m new to this, I’m enjoying the process of writing about communication, culture and the climate crisis.

Share

If you’ve found this at all interesting or insightful, please consider sharing with your network!

I don’t plan on charging anyone for this content, but you can subscribe for free below to receive new posts and show your support :)

Subscribe now

Cynical millennial that I am, I’m finding myself becoming more and more numbed, not just to the content I’m consuming, but to the designs I’m creating. I struggle with the idea that we’re having to play this game of social change in an arena built by neoliberal capitalists, on a field that’s constantly being shaped and reshaped by insane libertarian tech misanthropists.

The feed flattens everything. It places a cute cat video next to a flaming inferno in Greece, Maui, Canada, etc, etc. It commodifies content into units that can be monetised—even catastrophic events can be harvested for views, likes, comments and ultimately ad bucks. How can we make an impact from inside this barrage of content designed for passive scrolling? I don’t think we can.

We need to get people off the feed. The feed wants you to think that to post is to act. That opinions are activism, and that your online identity is more important than your offline actions. But we know that real gains are made primarily offline, in unions, on picket lines, in communities.

But how do I square this with my role as a graphic designer? To a hammer everything is a nail, and to a graphic designer in 2023 everything is an Instagram carousel.

My recent work with Parents for Future gives me some hope. The answer is community, and the solution lies outside the feed. Through a mix of irl and online—from the school gates to the WhatsApp to the Facebook group to the local park—PFF is growing and broadening a network of people who have a real investment in the future: their kids.

This gives me comfort as a designer. I’m more confident in the role of design and communication here—my job is to strengthen their sense of self as an organisation, to more effectively communicate the joy and passion and cohesion of their activity, and give them the tools to encourage people out of the feed and into the Zoom call, community centre or school hall.

The role of the feed for PFF is to build the relationship between the organisation and their followers, to radiate the passion, positivity, community and courage that they could be a part of. It’s less about hammering home the problem, more about embodying a solution—the bulk of which exists off-feed. Organisations like PFF can use platforms like Instagram and Facebook to build a kind of brand aura—an appealing periphery that helps draw people in. It’s all very well trying to get engagement on individual social media posts, but the ultimate goal is to get real, in-person engagement.

It’s easy to get disillusioned with this job (especially when you’re as cynical as I am), but this is an example of keeping the bigger picture in mind. Taking your laser focus off the effectiveness of one individual piece of design, and understanding a brand’s online presence as an atmosphere around the planet that is the actual group and their real-life work. Make it breathable, habitable, warm and inviting, and let the people do the rest.

In my first year as an undergraduate student at the seaside art college of Falmouth University it was instilled in me that designers have an obligation to use their skills for good. We learned about the Bauhaus and modernist utopianism, we worked away at competition briefs for Amnesty International, and explored personal projects on the nature of communication and the importance of sustainability. We were taught that artists, designers and architects were a progressive force — that we could change things if we chose to.

As I made my way into the creative industry, I carried my faithful idealism next to my freshly printed business cards. I came to London with an enthusiasm to create things that could, in some tiny way, make an impact — even if just through being something cool to look at. Branding was a fun and exciting sphere, and my chosen vocation allowed me to get paid for doing my hobby all day.

I managed to maintain some optimism through much of my early career, but it doesn’t take long for youthful exhuberance to be tested right from the gate. The seemingly endless slog of underpaid internships, the paternalistic creative director who thinks he’s teaching you by keeping you at work late, the research project for Big Tobacco that you feel obliged to undertake, the pressure to keep up with a lingering male-dominated “bants-culture” that refuses to die — thus begins a process of disillusionment even within just the first year of work.

It’s a gradual and insidious process of normalisation that makes you forget why you started doing something in the first place, as a hobby you love morphs into a job you tell yourself you love. For a good while, the creative process in itself is enough to excuse the briefs that don’t quite sit right, and as a people-pleaser I, like many designers, became pretty much obsessed with winning the respect of my contemporaries and superiors over most other concerns. But like the fresh sea-air in my lungs, my childish idealism was slowly replaced by a cynical London smog, as it became clear it was about as relevant as those oh-so-considered business cards.

We use design to shape experiences. To influence behaviour and to change perceptions. To create and reinforce relationships between people and entities. If we truly believe in the power of branding and visual communication to influence the way people act, we have a responsibility to choose who and what we use our skills in service of.

There is a collective cognitive dissonance in the psyche of the creative industries. We believe we have the power — through strategy, through careful curation of visual and verbal cues, through painstakingly rationalised concepts — to make or break companies and influence whole sectors. But we also seem to harbour private assertions that it doesn’t really matter. I see it as a kind of industry-wide imposter syndrome: maybe we just make things look nice, and maybe it is all frivolous at the end of the day, and maybe your five year old nephew really could have done it and maybe that’s why your parents don’t understand what it is you do exactly.

But if we have any faith at all in the efficacy of our work, it’s time to take its power seriously.

It’s no surprise that the creative industries make up the second biggest economy in the UK — second only to the financial sector. We are the mouthpiece of the consumer economy that drives the financial sector. We are the grease in capital’s machine, we keep the wheels turning and the engine humming. We are the mantra that tells people everything’s actually fine, even when we all know it is not.

We’ve forgotten that collectively we have agency. When Ken Garland and his co-signers published the First Things First manifesto in 1964, they railed against consumer culture and the “fast pace” and “trivial productions” of advertising (assertions that almost seem laughable relative to today’s output). They advocated for the industry to use its skills in service of education and the betterment of society. Perhaps this was a naive backlash against the inevitable. Or maybe it was a marker of a crucial point when things could have gone differently for society.

Conversely, subsequent generations of designers — now our ECDs and CEOs — would be brought up on the doctrine of neoliberalism and the free market. Nobody had to worry about the moral or social consequences of the work, with the invisible hand waiting in the wings to come in and sort everything out. The pursuit of money was noble in itself — or negated the need to entertain such lofty ideals. Designers and creatives across the world could pour their creative energy into all-nighters and spend the aftermath in the pub, leaving the rest to the divine machinations of the global economy.

But now we know this idea that so absolved us all of responsibility simply wasn’t true. As Naomi Klein documented at the time, the world has undergone a process of privatisation that few had predicted. A process that hoovers up social movements and integrates them into marketing efforts in a performance of consumer progressivism.

It’s become blindingly obvious that “good capitalism” just isn’t really an effective worldview. We need to stop seeing our work, our economies and our societies as seperate entities and start to understand that whatever we choose to do, in our privileged positions as professional designers and creatives, affects everything from our social structures to the environment that birthed them.

We have to start looking for ways to restructure our economies, and we can start with the creative industries. The corporate world, from multinational superbrands to ‘disruptive’ startups, is beholden to the skills of an industry full of people who found a way to monetise our passion — and in doing so often end up losing it. But what if we decided, step by step, client by client, to only service projects we were passionate about? What if we were to actually follow through with the intentions that many of us start out with? This doesn’t have to mean only working for charities and non-profits — it simply means being discerning about our clients’ effect on the world, and asking if we’re happy with amplifying that effect.

The wind is beginning to change. We’ve seen walkouts from developers at Google and Amazon that leave their employers in a tough bind, partly because they need to be seen to be amenable to change, but also because they simply can’t afford to lose the talent. We’ve seen Facebook face an employment crisis as talented would-be recruits no longer seem willing to stomach the effect the company knows it has on the world. Simultaneously, movements like Extinction Rebellion have gained traction in part because of their founders’ experience in marketing and advertising. We can be powerful and we do have agency if we choose to use it.

In the last decade or so working in the branding and graphic design industry, I’ve worked on many different briefs for a range of clients. Like most designers, I’ve relied on my employer to dictate the kind of work that comes across my desk, accepting that the people who pay my wages are the ones that ultimately get to decide what I spend my time doing. But lately I’ve been trying to view my skills as an asset for whoever I choose to use them in service of, and to take these decisions into my own hands.

At this stage in my career I recognise that my position of relative experience means I have more power than I used to. As a junior designer I did not refuse to work on the gambling, payday loans, and shady tax-haven clients that came across my desk, and as a freelancer I found myself dropped in on plenty of queasy briefs — I may have sheepishly expressed unease now and then, but I mainly felt that I didn’t really have a choice. I know it’s much easier said than done. But we should understand that we do have some power, at every level.

I want to encourage graduates and young creatives to be bold enough to express your misgivings about working for unscrupulous clients. Talk to your colleagues about it, talk to your line managers about it. Make a fuss. Know that in this country (for now at least) you can’t be fired for voicing your concerns. And I want to challenge employers to listen to your employees’ concerns, and to seriously consider the ethics of the people you choose to work with. It’s a moral issue, but it’s also increasingly a human resources issue — the next generation of truly talented, conscientious young creatives is not going to be as willing to forgoe corporate ethics.

And if our counterparts at these corporations can no longer work with the progressive, smart, collaborative creative agencies that they enjoy working with, they might have even more reason to think twice about who they work for, until the companies themselves have to reckon with the fact that no-one wants to work for them.

Now is the time to start believing in our own influence as a creative community. It might start small — championing one or two amazing clients, refusing one or two not-so-amazing ones — but in selecting carefully who we are willing to work with we might quickly begin to help shift our culture in the direction that’s so urgently needed in order to make significant change possible. Because branding, marketing, design, advertising — it’s all culture. We need to face up to the fact that what we produce and who we produce it for really does make a difference.

Just as you can form a first impression of a new friend in a split second, it only takes a glance for someone to form a story about your organisation. Today’s visually saturated world only gives you a limited window of exposure for your audience to understand who you are and what you’re about, so your communications need to be imbued with a sense of your personality and purpose as a group of people — this arguably counts even more for campaigning organisations than it does for commercial businesses.

For many small organisations, creative skills are employed as and when they’re needed — a logo, a poster, a social media graphic, a website and so on. This is completely understandable, especially when you’re reliant on pockets of funding attached to specific projects, or perhaps good will and pro-bono creative support. But while this can result in well-designed, effective individual pieces of communication, it also creates a lack of consistency between different outputs. When each piece is considered individually, you can end up with a confused overall brand perception that lacks coherence and emotional substance.

Sometimes, no matter the size or experience of your organisation, it’s worth taking a step back and thinking more holistically about the creative process.

Component parts create overall perception

When we talk about branding we’re usually thinking of a brand’s component parts — logo, fonts, colours etc — but a brand is really how an organisation seems, or how we perceive it. A brand can be funny, cold, inviting, playful, irritating, lovable — in much the same way as we might talk about a friend or colleague. We make these subconscious associations in our heads, and without thinking we assess how they might fit into our story of the world.

In this way, a brand can itself be thought of as a story — one that’s both what an organisation wants to tell the world and one that is inferred and shaped by its audience. All the elements that form the visual and verbal representation of a brand come together to form that story in the mind of the audience.

By investing some time and energy in a fully thought-out branding process, you can establish your coherent story and give everyone who needs them the tools with which they can tell it, while avoiding confusion and inefficiencies.

The Branding Process

There is a tried-and-tested process for creating a brand — it’s designed to galvanise your sense of self as an organisation, as well as open up unexpected ways of expressing your message to your audiences, and it typically consists of four broad steps: Establishing, Exploring, Refining, and Producing.

The process can be adapted to the needs and practical limits of your organisation, but it takes time — and, crucially, space and contemplation — from all partners to get the best results.

1. Establishing your story

Before all the individual elements of a brand are created, you have to establish the outline of your story. This is the time to dig deep and unearth some answers to the fundamental questions about your organisation’s operations and ambitions. It’s not dissimilar to creating a business plan or funding proposal — in fact it can help with that process too — but it’s about converting these more functional aims and intentions into an emotive narrative that can be easily understood and engaged with.

These foundational tenets are the seeds out of which the visual expression of your brand will grow. At this early stage, it’s important to focus on the emotive, descriptive attributes of your organisation, and not about how you think it should look or sound (that will come later):

Vision

The big-picture-dreaming you get to do at the start of something new — your vision of the world and your role in it in a year, five years, or ten years. This will ensure your brand fully fits — not just who you are now, but who you want to be.

Values

What do you stand for? What’s most important to you? You might value compassion and transparency, or straightforwardness and efficiency. What does this tangibly mean for you and your colleagues, comrades and co-conspirators? These values should inform how you do things, and how you present yourself to the world.

Difference

Every organisation has a reason to exist. A need or focus that the founders felt was lacking in the space they work in. Whatever makes you different, what makes you necessary—this is how you define yourself amongst (and apart from) your peers.

Audience

Who are you talking to, and what do they think? Are they sipping an oat flat white while scrolling through twitter, or leafing through the telegraph with a pint of bitter? Maybe you need to be relevant in the coffee shop and the country club. It’s often taken for granted, but important to dissect in detail and prioritise who you want to engage with your story.

Peers

Who’s out there doing similar stuff? What do you like about them, and what do you want to avoid? Are there organisations in other spaces that do something you like? Who makes you jealous? Who do you admire? You want to find your own unique angle, while taking cues from the successful organisations around you.

2. Exploring visual directions

Here is where it starts to come to life. Using the information gathered in the first stage, we can start to explore shifts in tone and approach to figure out how best to tell your story. Are you a bold, urgent, action-oriented organisation, or is there room for a sense of humour and irony? Do you celebrate the wins or grieve the losses? You could be bright, vibrant and playful, or straight-talking, to the point and minimal. Perhaps it’s a mix of the above depending on the context.

Exploring the landscape

Typically the exploration phase will start with an audit of the visual surroundings of your organisation, identifying similar organisations working in the same space, other brands that speak to your intended audience, visual trends and even things to avoid.

Creating directions

This phase usually culminates in a presentation of a few different visual directions. There will be myriad different ways that your brand could be expressed, and each creative will find different expressions — this is about finding the energy and tone that feels right for your brand. Sometimes the best way to do this is to try two or three completely different approaches and gauge them on a spectrum — other times it can be an exploration in the details and nuances within a certain direction.

A spirit of experimentation

This is the really exciting stage where we can explore nuances and how they play out visually, and it should be approached in a spirit of collaboration and experimentation. Sometimes things come up that seem completely wrong, but it’s here that we can push boundaries and find the edges. We’re on this journey together, and allowing for wrong turns makes it easier in the long-run to find the right path. Regular check-ins ensure that if we start to go the wrong way, it’s only a few paces to get back to the main track and carry on hiking forward.

Most often it comes down to how a visual direction feels — and while people will usually have a lot of different opinions, it’s surprising how quickly a consensus can be reached when the groundwork has been done properly!

3. Refining your identity

Once this stage of open exploration is complete, we use a couple of rounds of feedback to refine the visual — keeping what we agree works, discarding or tweaking what isn’t so successful. That can mean taking forward one of the routes from the previous round and developing it, or it can mean taking the overall response from all of the routes to create a new, more refined direction.

It’s important to allow time and space around this stage, so that key decisions can be made between all the stakeholders in your organisation, eventually galvanising around a clear direction which can then be converted into a useful set of tools.

4. Producing usable assets and guidance

The final phase is where the brand toolkit and launch deliverables are created. Invariably this will include a logo, colours, fonts and other visual assets like graphic devices or illustrations.

Beyond those assets, it’s worth thinking in advance about what you’ll need to launch your brand — to start telling your story. For smaller organisations it could simply be a couple of graphics, or editable templates (with some guidance on how to use them) so that members of staff or volunteers can easily create social posts. Or if you have a bit more budget, how could you best use it? Do you want to set your stall with a video or animation, or commit some money to buy some ad space? What are the one or two things that you will get the most use out of? It’s about giving you the tools you need to tell your own story, as well as guidance and direction to be able to brief any future collaborators.

Why go through a branding process?

Embarking on the branding process can seem like a big lift for a small organisation, but it can be revolutionary in terms of how your brand is perceived. In a visionary sense it can help inspire people to your cause, and on a practical level it will provide you with both the direction and the tools to make quick decisions about the things you want to create, and even the actions or opportunities you want to take. It can help increase cohesion in your organisation and even aid recruitment: like a football team wearing the same shirt, your brand is something you all have in common, and you can attract people who want to wear the same stripes.

If you take on this process fully, you’ll emerge with a renewed sense of self, and a fully realised position to present to funders, collaborators, volunteers and punters alike.

Mike Andrews is Design Director at Glimpse — a creative collective working at the intersection of ecological and social campaigning and commercial creativity. If you’re interested in talking more about the creative process in the non-profit sector, email mike@weglimpse.co

Branding for nonprofits was originally published in The Glimpse Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.