Cookbook printed with fading ink to mimic dementia patients’ memory loss

A new recipe book has been printed with ink that fades over time to mimic the way people’s memories fade when they’re battling dementia.

Edinburgh-based media platform Boom Salon created the “living cookbook” in collaboration with Maggie Watson, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and Vascular Dementia in 2021.

Boom Salon founder Rachel Arthur describes Watson as her “adopted gran” and the book’s title, 4,4,4&2, comes from her sponge cake recipe, which comprises four ounces each of butter, sugar and flour, and two eggs.

The book includes recipes, photos, stories and scribbled notes, and each copy will fade in a different way, “mirroring the highly personal and unpredictable patterns of memory loss.”

“This publication is as much an act of design as it is of care,” Arthur explains. “It forces us to reframe our understanding of books as static objects, and instead positions them as temporal, evolving vessels for experience and increasing empathy and understanding of others.”

We spoke with her in more depth to find out more about the project, how it works, and why it matters so much.

What is Boom Salon set up to do, and how does this project fit into that wider vision?

Our mission always has been – and always will be – to democratise creativity for good.

We collaborate with extraordinary creative talents too often overlooked or undervalued, inspiring and empowering them to realise their own potential before sharing this with others across books, magazines, performance pieces and events.

Boom Salon’s 4,4,4&2

To date, we’ve had the privilege of working with talented individuals facing complex personal challenges including substance abuse, homelessness, forcible displacement and dementia; together, we’ve produced a range of creative outputs which reframe their narratives and reshape how they are understood by wider society.

This project fits into this mission by collaborating directly with someone living with dementia, Maggie Watson. A lifelong cook, upon diagnosis she was warned of the dangers of working in the kitchen unsupported – immediately removing one of her most creative outlets and feeding into the narrative of inability and worthlessness which our work to date has confirmed many people with dementia experience.

To rewrite this, we collaborated to create a living cookbook together – sharing Maggie’s favourite recipes from her life whilst simultaneously informing readers of the realities of the dementia journey through considered design.

Where previously there was loss and isolation, 4,4,4&2 presents possibility and connectedness again, through the medium of cooking combined with thoughtful design and storytelling.

Where did the idea for this project first come from?

As with all of our projects, a single story, told in passing.

This particular one was of a friend’s grandfather, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in its early stages and supported to live at home. The family had medical backgrounds and visited regularly, convinced that all was well as they each witnessed him doing his daily crossword each and every day.

Assuming he was still ‘sharp,’ it came as a huge shock when he passed just six months later.

It was only then, when clearing out the family home, that stack upon stack of newspapers were found, filled with the daily crossword – and for the first time, the family looked close enough to see that the same word was repeated over and over again.

This planted the seed of the unknowns of dementia, even within medical fields, at a time when it is the leading cause of death in the UK, it felt particularly pressing to learn more and consider what role design could play in reshaping the narrative.

Boom Salon’s 4,4,4&2

What is the ink made of and what makes it fade?

The ink reacts to air and light, fading differently on each and every stock – the book contains multiple GF Smith stock.

GSM and composition further affect the change, alongside subtle tweaks we make during the printing process itself. 4,4,4&2 is designed to mimic the human brain itself, and the degeneration which can occur during the dementia journey.

In the same way that human interaction can shape this greatly for an individual, so the book is affected by its own, individual treatment.

A copy which is closed and nestled between other books on a shelf will fade wholly differently to one which is left splayed open – mirroring the effects that human interaction and care can have on a person with dementia themselves.

Some of the pages within the book can fade in less than a day; others could last for many months. You will not be able to tell by looking what to expect, just as there are no visual markers for what lies ahead in any person’s own dementia journey.

Why is it important that each copy fades in a different way?

No two people with dementia will experience the same journey; for us, the publication would have fallen flat had we taken the easy route and developed a book which simply faded, in full, in the same manner within each copy.

This narrative is vital to the publication itself and mirrors the many year’s worth of research which went into this publication, alongside the lived experience which is at the heart of all of our dementia work.

Boom Salon’s 4,4,4&2

Gerry’s story, and therefore the resulting book we made with him, is wholly different to Maggie’s; it would have been an injustice to flatten the story to anything less personalised and unique.

The family hand-me-down scrapbooks of recipes which inspired 4,4,4&2 are so very unique in themselves, as well, that there was no option of creating anything uniform.

What impact do you hope the book has on readers?

We hope it nurtures understanding and empathy of the dementia experience – with Maggie’s blessing, it is shared in a personal, truthful manner that I’ve never seen before.

Maggie was adamant that we should share the elements never normally seen – the copy and paste, clinical diagnosis letter which arrives through your door.

The handwritten diary entries which depict exactly how it feels to forget your days. What it means to have others in your life who take the time to understand.

Boom Salon’s 4,4,4&2

4,4,4&2 ends on a hopeful, poignant note: the final chapter is one of “collective recipes,” rewritten and reshared throughout a family so they will never be forgotten.

They are spoken of together, recollected over the phone and scribbled down on the back of a letter from the bank, cooked together, devoured together.

They remind us all of what people with dementia can still do, of what they can give to us as families and individuals. They encourage us to nurture each other and accept the journeys we are each on, whether one of dementia or not.

Why are creative projects like this so good at adding a new dimension to our understanding of serious issues like this?

We always say, in the kindest possible way, that our work is about using design to trick people into having the conversations they should be having – but wouldn’t otherwise.

Creative projects can draw people into these – providing a hook, whether that be an exciting disappearing ink or a perfectly executed ligature. By enjoying, appreciating and consuming them, before we know it we can be delivered a message that, if we’re lucky, might just stick.

Boom Salon’s 4,4,4&2

For us, the dream is to get a publication like 4,4,4&2 into the hands of urban planners and civic leaders who are designing the cities of tomorrow – planting the seed to design inclusively now as opposed to retrofitting and rebuilding, at great cost, in the decades to come.

It’s a tall order for a family cookbook to achieve, but if Maggie’s instilled anything in us it’s to give it a bash.

Boom Salon’s 4,4,4&2
Boom Salon’s 4,4,4&2

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The Longevity Lessons: Coley Porter Bell (est. 1978)

From Tesco own-brand and British Gas to Boots and Lego, Coley Porter Bell has straddled packaging and corporate identity for nearly half a century.

CEO Vicky Bullen, who joined in 1995, explains how optimising its position in WPP, changing with the times, and staying relatively small have helped the agency survive.

Coley Porter Bell CEO Vicky Bullen

How did Coley Porter Bell begin?

It was a breakaway from Fitch, where Jim Coley, Colin Porter and Sally Bell had been brought up by Rodney Fitch thinking about brand.

They set up in 1978, with Coley and Porter leading creative, and office manager Bell doing everything from finance to client service.

Their original clients, Guinness and M&S, came with them from Fitch.

Sadly Coley, who had been ill with a brain tumour, died in 1980.

In the 1980s, the economy peaked and troughed. How did that impact the business?

At the beginning of the decade, the economy was booming and design was growing up – shifting from being somewhat of a craft business to a professional service, and importantly, from going from design to brand.

CPB began to grow fast. CEO Jan Hall was a marketing and new business dynamo, and she took the agency from small to medium-sized in the first half of the 1980s.

Big FMCG wins came along like Tesco – the largest ever own-brand rebrand, we believe. The agency scaled rapidly to deliver that project, and it led to a 10-year client relationship.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Tesco own-brand

But towards the end of the decade, when there was concern that another recession was heading down the tracks, the team felt they needed to be part of something bigger to weather a storm. So they started talking to potential buyers.

A conversation with Sam Sampson, who had sold Sampson Tyrrell to WPP in 1986, led to us being bought by WPP in 1989.

This was a time when agencies were being snapped up by the big networks. How did being part of WPP impact on the business?

Soon after joining WPP the recession hit, so growth was sluggish.

However, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell took a keen interest in the new acquisition, and often made introductions to the CEOs and marketing directors of WPP clients, which was a real boost for business.

And Porter and Hall worked hard to meet their WPP counterparts, to look for opportunities.

By the mid-1990s, the leadership team, under new CEO Helena Rees, was starting to have differing opinions about what kind of business they wanted CPB to be.

A few years later, Simon John and Stephen Franks, who joined as group creative directors in the early 1980s, left to set up their own things.

When you’re part of WPP, you’re expected to grow, and that’s absolutely fair enough. We need to give a return to our shareholders.

It wasn’t that John and Franks didn’t want to grow, but they wanted to stay more of a boutique size.

How did CPB boost its reputation for corporate identity work?

A pivotal win was British Gas in 1993, which had been privatised. At this time, corporate identity was all about the logo, and brand wasn’t a word that was used.

Porter’s team believed that brand was just as important in corporate design as in packaging, and that was quite unusual at the time.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for British Gas

CPB pitched against Sampson Tyrrell and other traditional identity agencies. There was a sense that CPB’s win annoyed the whole industry, because we were seen as a packaging agency.

In fact, we already had corporate work, but British Gas brought more our way, like the Environment Agency and BT.

How did the agency reposition for the future?

At the end of the 1980s, our new CEO Amanda Connolly did an agency reset.

The business had done really well through the 1980s. And there was a feeling in the 1990s of, right, where are we going next?

Connolly commissioned some client research which told us that CPB was seen as the Rolls Royce of design companies – brilliant at its craft, top of its game, but a bit traditional, part of the old guard, and extremely premium.

I never worry about being expensive as long as you’re delivering brilliant quality. But there’s something wrong with being a bit fusty and dusty.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Boots

Connolly reframed the offer around strategy and creative. She wanted us to be the agency that dug deep to understand brands. She created the visual planning product, to introduce a new way of thinking about brands.

And she made sure that the business had a very strong strategy offer. We’d always had a strategic approach, but we hadn’t had strategists until then.

To this end, Connolly brought in Beth Barry, ex-EMEA planning director at WPP-owned Ogilvy, one of the sharpest brains in planning, and a really established name. That was a massive coup.

In 1999, we lost our final founding partner, as Porter – who was then chairman – followed Bell and left to set up his own thing again.

By now, CPB was working very closely with WPP-owned ad agency Ogilvy, becoming their brand identity partner.

What impact did working with Ogilvy have?

Connolly was reporting directly into Sorrell, but WPP got so big that it was no longer tenable for one of the smaller agencies to be reporting that way.

We could have reported into the Brand to Design Group – the WPP division that included Enterprise, Landor, Addison, Lambie Nairn and The Partners.

But we thought, if we go in there, everybody’s going to be fighting for the same bits of new business.

Meanwhile, when Ogilvy were talking to clients about brand and brand identity, they wanted to have expert partners.

We thought we’d have a better chance to grow with Ogilvy, because we would have a more global outlook and would be able to explore new business opportunities with its clients.

We didn’t want to lose all our FMCG business, but we felt that we’d become quite FMCG-focused, and quite local.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Tesco finest

We also felt we needed a US office, so in 2019 we opened in New York. That made a difference, not just in terms of working on US brands, but for global brands headquartered in the UK, I think we appeared more credible.

Our founding US-based clients, Merck and Nationwide, were both Ogilvy clients. We have 15 people in New York, so we work in blended teams on the US business.

I joined in 1995 as an account director, and took over as CEO in 2005. I sat on the Ogilvy leadership team and so I knew all these people. I still know a lot of them, which is helpful as it gives us such good access.

What’s next for CPB?

Last year, we moved from Ogilvy into the Landor Group, to become a founding part of a new branding network with WPP branding agency CBA.

This new network, which officially launches in January 2026, aims to be the antidote to the monolithic agencies, offering big agency impact with a small agency vibe.

The CBA network was founded in Paris in 1982 and has about 300 people across nine markets. That’s small compared with Landor, which is 1,300 people, Omnicom-owned Interbrand, which has around 650 employees, and 500-strong FutureBrand, which is part of Interpublic Group. But it will give us more global reach.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for the Post Office

There’s some interesting skill-sets in the network, like a fantastic retail and environment design practice in Paris, and some great consumer insight tools in LATAM, which we’ll tap into.

Just sharing the experience and credentials that this network has will be positive for us.

It’s a great opportunity for our people, because they’ll be working with broader, more global teams, in different markets. I think it will help with attracting talent.

The CPB name will remain, because it has got such legacy.

Design and branding is pretty cut-throat. How has CPB survived for nearly half a century?

I think we’re still here because we’ve always adapted. We’ve tried to stay ahead of the game in terms of what brands need.

From the start, we believed in the need for deep consumer insight to get to the right solution.

And then we understood that storytelling was more important. So we developed those skill-sets.

Then we could see that brands needed to think about purpose, brand experience, sustainability. And we brought in the right skill-sets.

We developed a process to deliver unordinary ideas – that are sticky and relevant, and create distinctiveness in a world where differentiation is hard to come by. We’ve embraced AI, and started creating experiences, like the F1 Paddock Club at the British Grand Prix.

The upshot is a massively broad range of work which reflects that ability to move with the times.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for F1

And we’ve chosen our place in WPP very carefully, moving homes within the network, and changing reporting lines.

We’ve always deliberately been WPP’s smallest branding offer, with about 45 people in London, in contrast to stablemates Design Bridge and Partners, which is 900-strong, and Landor.

Being small in the context of WPP agencies means we have to be resourceful, to reach into the network so that we’ve got the right skill-sets, and to be able to scale up and down.

We have to be collaborative, and clients want that, they don’t want bloat in an agency. They want agencies to be simple, agile, lean and dedicated, and staying small has helped us do that. And being small, our clients get access to senior teams.

How do you think CPB is seen by the industry?

Some people say CPB hasn’t done anything radical for a long time. We have done radical things in the past, like Kotex and the Museum of London, but sometimes it’s not right to do something radical.

You have to be super-respectful of very established brand equities – we’re real guardians of iconic brands.

Championing brand ideas-driven creative work that helps our clients grow is a very clear proposition to go out to market with. And it’s something that we can rally our people behind.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Kotex

We’re very lucky – our people stay. I’ve been here for 30 years and our production director Peter Cottington has been here even longer. About 50% of my leadership team have been here for more than 10 years.

Also, clients come back to us, and clients who’ve moved jobs come back to us. That’s another important part of why we’ve succeeded.

That makes for a very stable business. We look after each other, we’ve got each other’s backs.

And we believe in each other, which makes a huge difference to a business’ longevity. Because when leadership teams start to crack, businesses start to crack.

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“The timeless design lessons I learned creating album covers”

Before the stream. Before the swipe. Before the algorithm decided what your next favourite song was, there was a square sleeve. A piece of print that wasn’t just packaging, but a portal to an infinite number of worlds.

Album covers carried rebellion, intrigue, mood, and message. And sleeve design teaches us how to package identity with permanence, through restraint, intrigue, and intent.

For designers then, and, just about, now, they were a chance to craft identity with pure emotional clarity.

For today’s brand builders, it still holds lessons we’re at risk of forgetting. No room for fluff. No place to hide. Just music and meaning, distilled into 12-inch truths – or more often in my case, the size of a CD case.

Rob Petrie’s album cover for Cream

Instinct and intensity

I learned to design in that space. My first sleeves were made on instinct and intensity, not through focus groups or pitch decks.

From early work with the Liverpool super-club Cream to the precision of the Pet Shop Boys, Electronic, M People and Lightning Seeds, up to my recent collaboration on the Light of Leith Orchestra vinyl cover, it has always been about visual storytelling with tactile resonance.

That need, that urgency, hasn’t faded. It’s shifted.

Album artwork wasn’t there as pure decoration, or at least it wasn’t if it was doing its job properly. It defined.

As a young designer immersed in cutting-edge popular culture, I saw sleeves working harder than ads. A minimalist logo, a cryptic image, a whisper of text – these weren’t aesthetic choices, they were emotional codes.

Rob Petrie’s album cover for The Pet Shop Boys

They spoke directly to those who were listening more deeply. They had to jump out of racks filled with identically sized and shaped products and resonate across gender, generation, and musical tribe.

Cream’s early visual language was built on bold colour and geometric clarity – a kind of visual directness. Hell or High, a water brand I developed at Leith, feels miles apart in theme, but there’s a common design instinct – clarity with soul.

Both aim to create resonance not through noise, but through intentional simplicity.

The best sleeves didn’t tell you everything. They invited you in. And that ethos, of inviting, not instructing, still shapes how we build brands today.

The sensibility lives on

That sleeve sensibility now shows up in places that don’t spin on turntables.

It’s in the clean lines of a gin bottle. Typography that only reveals its true meaning later. The use of mystery, not gimmick, as a strategic choice that rewards the consumer for their intelligence.

Design for brands has become noisier, faster, and more reactive. Throw everything at it, including the hallucinating kitchen sink, and hope for the best. The answer is in there somewhere, right?

Yet the lessons from sleeve design demand a different pace

Craft over complication.
Tone of voice over trend.
Memory over mimicry.

Effing Gin was designed with the same mindset I had in the late 1990s – find the feeling first, then shape the form. It’s not retro. It’s resonant. It carries heritage and rebellion in equal measure.

Ewan’s Cut was equally simple on the surface, featuring typography as the hero and crediting consumers for their film knowledge, with each of the bespoke “film script” labels being a unique reference to a Ewan McGregor film.

Leith’s Ewan’s Cut bottle

We’re told consumers want clarity. That confusion is friction. But sometimes, what isn’t said speaks loudest. The sleeve taught us that often what you don’t see matters most.

As AI generates infinite near-perfect executions, what becomes valuable is imperfection with intention. Authors of meaning, not curators of mood-boards.

Original work that earns its place because someone gave a damn about how it feels.

Design language born on album covers wasn’t obsessed with strategy. It was obsessed with emotion. And that’s the heartbeat that endures. Even now, when building identity for Leith, it’s about authorship. Instinct over process. Feeling over formula.

Not about nostalgia

Don’t get the impression that I’m suggesting we should all get misty-eyed over album sleeves of yore. There are still great designers out there who are making work that really resonates.

Brat by Charli XCX, designed by Brent David Freaney, has had its fair share of recent plaudits but rightly so, and it raises a lot more questions than it answers . Is that really a default font, maybe Arial?“Why does its positioning look deliberately low? Is its “anti-design” stance off-putting, or effectively subversive?

Heavy Heavy by Young Fathers, designed by Hingston Studio, features a mesmerising image created by Jordan Hemingway which is mysterious, cryptic, visceral and indefinable.

We shouldn’t just preserve that language – we should project it forward. It’s not a nostalgic exercise; it’s cultural continuity.
So, what does all this mean for today’s brand builders? A few provocations:

Treat every touchpoint like a record sleeve. Make it crafted, intentional, and desirable.
Reject lazy inspiration. Don’t start with design references. Start with a mood, a feeling, a narrative.
Let mystery lead. Clarity’s great, but intrigue lingers longer.
Make emotional shelf life your metric. The sleeve lasted because it mattered.
Design isn’t about control. It’s about connection.

And if we want brands to mean something, really mean something, we have to remember what the sleeve taught us. Design with intent. Craft with emotion.

Let the square speak, and listen when it does.

Rob Petrie is head of design at Leith.

Rob Petrie’s album cover for Light of Leith Orchestra
Rob Petrie’s album cover for M People

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“We needed a complete reset” – Jaguar MD defends controversial rebrand

The managing director of Jaguar has mounted a robust defence of the car company’s much-discussed rebrand.

Rawdon Glover, who has been with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) for 12 years and steering the Jaguar business since 2023, was interviewed by Jon Evans on his Uncensored CMO podcast. The episode was titled, Jaguar Relaunch – Genius or Marketing Madness?

Last year, Jaguar unveiled a controversial rebrand, and a few weeks later its new concept car, the Type 00. It became the big design story of the year, and while the brand insisted it needed to make sweeping changes to attract new buyers, many people were shocked by the new designs.

But Glover told Uncensored CMO that Jaguar should be a brand that divided opinion.

“A new Jaguar shouldn’t land and everybody goes, yeah that’s nice,” he said. “We are fine with polarising. What we shouldn’t do is try and be loved by everybody… you’ll end up with vanilla – six, seven out of ten.”

The commercial strategy behind the new car, Glover explained, is to sell “relatively small numbers at elevated price points.” In that context, he said that having some people love, and some people hate, the new design isn’t a problem.

And he drew a comparison with the launch of the E-Type in 1961, which also caused some controversy. “That’s Jaguar at its very best,” Glover said. “That’s what Jaguar should do.”

Glover said he and the team were unconcerned by the furore around the rebrand, because a key part of the marketing strategy was “to get people saying, ‘What is going on at Jaguar’?”

“We just wanted people to acknowledge that Jaguar was doing something that was different,” he said. “The whole purpose of that two-week build-up was to get as many eyeballs as possible on the unveiling of the new design language.”

The new Jaguar logo, by Jaguar Land Rover’s in-house design team

Despite Glover’s upbeat analysis, there were reports earlier this year that JLR was reviewing its relationship with Accenture Song given the reaction to the new branding. Glover wasn’t asked about this, and it’s not clear if the two parties are still working together.

The need for change

Glover said that the bold departures of the new designs – both of the visual identity and the cars themselves – were necessary, given the challenges facing Jaguar when they embarked on this work.

He mentioned the massive changes in both the technological landscape, with electrification and self-driving vehicles, and the competitive landscape, notably in terms of Asian manufacturers.

Taking into account “the dynamics of our brand, the age profile of our client base, and I guess, candidly, the commercial performance of the brand,” Glover says there was a need for revolution, rather than evolution.

“The answer clearly wasn’t to tweak here or tweak there,” he said. “We needed to make a big change. We needed a complete reset.”

It’s been suggested the new electric Jaguars, which will launch next year, will cost around £100,000, and the brand hopes between 80 and 90% of buyers will be first-time Jaguar owners.

Glover says he understands that Jaguar “is one of the industry’s most cherished icons” and that they hope to take existing buyers with them into Jaguar’s new era. But he was clear that attracting new, younger consumers is the main priority.

“It was very clear from the demographics of our previous client base, we needed to attract a new audience,” he said.

A new design language

Given the size of the strategic shift Jaguar wanted to make, Glover says they had to “deconstruct and rewire” people’s existing associations with the brand.

And some of the design choices were “quite straightforward” as they shifted into an EV-focused future.

For example the growling cat logo had “connotations with throbbing combustion engines” and “didn’t make sense” on an electric vehicle.

The leaping cat – known as the leaper – was retained, but Glover said it needed to be contextualised within the new visual direction.

“How do we reinvent the leaper to look appropriate in the context of that new design language?” he said.

That led to the development of the strikethrough,  the 18 horizontal lines which surround the leaper which now appears in the negative space within that set-up. It also led to a new type system, with a mix of upper and lower case letters, which Glover said creates “beautiful symmetry and circular consistency” and, in the future, will “open up all sorts of interesting artistic abstraction.”

The new Jaguar maker’s mark, by Jaguar Land Rover’s in-house design team

Glover also discussed the unusual design process which JLR used to create the Type 00. Rather than engineers creating a brief, they started with a design competition involving the whole JLR design team.

“There’s a really large pool of talent, and we had a competitive process, where effectively they were all given the same brief, and they had three months to explore creatively,” he explained.

They ended up with 17 full-size vehicles, made of clay but painted to look like production models, featuring four different design languages. “The purpose of that really was to make sure there was tension in the process,” Glover said.

The Type 00 concept models were launched in Miami Pink and London Blue, and Glover said these colour choices were an important part of the “brand world” they wanted to create. “We want it to be exuberant, we want it to be visceral,” he said.

He is aware that production models often end up looking and feeling very different to the concept cars, with “all the joy and the all the fun” often missing in the final designs. But Glover is confident that won’t happen with the new Jaguars.

“I’m really close to the production car – I don’t think anybody’s going to be disappointed,” he said.

Copy nothing

The long gap between the brand and concept launches, and the arrival of the new models was also a deliberate strategy, Glover explained.

“We could have waited much closer to when actually the vehicle will be on sale,” he said. “But we need to spend this time to tell people that actually Jaguar isn’t perhaps what they perceive it to be, and reposition the brand. So that’s why we went as early as we did.”

And he is confident that when people see the new cars in person, the overarching strategy will all come together.

He referenced “copy nothing,” the phrase adopted by Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, which was widely-used (and often pilloried) in last year’s rebrand.

“When everybody else is going this way, Jaguar has got to have the strength of its convictions to do something completely different,” Glover said. “The spirit of what we’re doing with this re-imagination of Jaguar is entirely in keeping with that philosophy and that, and I think when you see them on the road… it’s going to have an incredible reaction.”

And he seems happy to be driving through such big changes, despite the backlash.

“The best bit of career advice I ever had was don’t sit on the comfy chair,” he told Evans.

The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00

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How is Superside using AI?

Superside is a design, branding and creative service that works with the in-house teams at clients like Reddit, Pernod Ricard and Antler.  Executive creative director Kae Neskovic explains how they’re using AI.

You can see all the articles in this series here.

Broadly speaking, are you excited for how AI will change the design industry or nervous?

I’m definitely excited. There’s always been a natural progression of technology in our field, and it would be unreasonable to think that it wouldn’t keep evolving. AI is just the next chapter.

But I also think we need to stop thinking of “AI” as one big thing. It’s not the same when your mom uses ChatGPT for a recipe, a creative uses Runway to edit videos, or a scientist uses it to speed up calculations.

It’s not one thing, so it’s not going to have one single effect.

Instead of being nervous, I think it’s much more productive to focus on how do we, as a group, make AI work for creatives instead of waiting for it to be decided for us?

Do you have an agreed policy around AI as a business?

Yes, we do. We’ve defined a set of principles that guide how we use AI, built around our company’s vision, our brand values, and the needs of our customers. We developed these in collaboration with our leadership team.

Some of the key pillars:

Opt-in, opt-out flexibility – Customers always have a choice.
Human-guided creativity – Technology is powerful, but creativity starts with people.
Data security first – We protect assets and keep everything confidential, safe, and compliant.
Customer-first approach: Different clients want different levels of AI involvement, and we adapt to that.

When did you realise AI was going to have an impact on design? Was there a moment, a tool, a conversation?

It’s hard to pinpoint a single “aha” moment because things have been changing so fast.

A year ago, many of us thought, this is cool if you’re a 15-year-old wanting to make a poster, but what can it actually do for big enterprise brands?

So many companies leaned into that grotesque factor of AI making fun of what it can do, the Super Bowl Minions ad comes to mind, or Fiverr’s Nobody Cares, trying to talk about AI as this sort of fad or trend that doesn’t really work, like NFTs.

Now things are changing. Month by month, quarter by quarter, the improvements have been massive. It’s been incredible to watch, and it keeps pushing our thinking.

Have you undergone any AI training?

Yes, and this has been a huge priority for us.

In the beginning, we encouraged self-training. But we quickly realised that’s not scalable, fun, or aligned across the team, so we built a structured training program.

Our L&D team collaborates with AI experts to run regular workshops and up-skilling sessions. Over the last six months, we’ve trained our entire creative services team of 300+ people on the latest tools, and we’ll keep doing it as the space evolves.

How do you use AI in the studio’s creative process?

There are so many different ways we use AI, it’s integrated across the full creative process:

Ideation and research – From desk research to note-taking, brainstorming, summarising conversations, and distilling insights, AI helps speed up and streamline early-stage thinking.
Moodboarding and exploration – It’s great for early visual exploration and riffing.
Image manipulation – Think of it like Photoshop on steroids, adapting, transforming, and refining visuals at scale.

Custom workflows – We’ve built AI-driven systems to support design ops, like auto-populating design templates, plugging into Figma, and manipulating design systems. It’s more than just generating images, it’s an engine behind smarter, faster work.

The one thing AI isn’t great at is taste and judgment. It’s a powerful assistant, but creative direction still starts and ends with humans.

Do you think clients care if and how you use AI at work?

Absolutely. We always discuss AI usage up-front with clients, and they’re in full control, at both the project and account level. They can opt in or opt out entirely.

Some brands are all-in on using AI to multiply what they’ve already built. Others want to keep their image generation 100% human.

Do you use AI for any non-creative aspects of running the business?

Yes, AI is everywhere behind the scenes.

AI note-takers in meetings, ChatGPT for quick research, writing, brainstorming, automations across dev, product, marketing, pretty much every tool we use now has AI baked in, and people across the company are encouraged to experiment and build new workflows.

Beyond the best-known tools like ChatGPT, what’s one AI tool you’d recommend to other design studios?

Some of our favourites right now:

Krea – Great for campaign generation and marketing workflows.

Leonardo AI – Our go-to for visual exploration and enhancement.

Runway – Amazing for video work.

Visual Electric – Super fun and the most intuitive for designers.

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“Checkbox to catalyst – why smart brands unleash their employees”

Brand activation is undergoing a quiet revolution within the day-to-day experience of employees.

As audience attention fragments and the line between internal and external brand touchpoints blurs, the smartest organisations are turning inward, empowering their employees not just as messengers, but as activation strategists who shape the brand’s public-facing presence.

Successful brand activation pulses through peer networks, team meetings, grassroots projects, and ultimately, the customer experience itself.

The rise of employee co-creation

Companies commonly think of internal brand activation as the process of bringing employees along for the ride.

The legacy playbook is familiar: a coordinated internal communication plan rolling out in concentric circles ahead of an external launch, a toolkit for frontline staff, perhaps an all-hands meeting with the C-suite.

But category leaders are rewriting this script, tapping into the power of employees as co-creators of culture, relevance, and reputation.

“When employees are given real agency, the brand itself gains depth, agility, and cultural relevance.”

Delta Airlines, for example, has made co-creation a core part of its approach, inviting employees to shape activations like the Inspired Journeys digital art pop-up. At this event, employees and community members shared travel stories, which Delta employee-artists brought to life in real time as digital art, weaving employee creativity directly into brand experiences.

This model is about unlocking the full potential of the organisation’s most credible voices to shape authentic interactions online and offline, directly with customers and across their own communities.

Strategic co-creation is the differentiator

The evolution is driven by necessity: a sense of purpose leads to stronger retention, and involving employees as brand advocates is one way to give them a sense of purpose.

Salesforce built its brand advocacy program around the belief that all employees are industry experts with authentic stories to tell.

Rather than distributing canned messages, Salesforce encourages advocacy built on employees’ unique expertise, interests, and perspectives. Employees are provided with toolkits to help them, but success hinges on personalisation: ambassadors are encouraged to adapt content, add their own insights, and share stories meaningful to them and their networks.

For example, during the annual Salesforce Dreamforce event, employees have shared behind-the-scenes experiences, industry tips, and community impact stories, contributing far more reach and engagement than official brand channels alone.

The results: over 25,000 employees acted as authentic advocates, collectively generating 742,000+ social shares and amplifying Salesforce’s brand voice across industries and regions

Leading brands convene employee advisory groups, inviting diverse voices to shape everything from messaging to product launches. These forums are not about rubber-stamping leadership ideas – they elevate the nuances and creativity that make activations resonate.

Rituals, recognition, and real-time feedback loops

Brand activation is now a living system, not a point-in-time event.

Smart companies weave brand values into daily rituals, from recognition moments to collaborative innovation sprints.

Consider Adobe: its Inside Adobe platform is more than an intranet. It enables 20,000+ employees to create, personalise, and share content, while also integrating feedback and employee-generated initiatives.

Content is targeted by location or role and distributed across web, mobile, and in-office digital displays, with analytics driving ongoing improvements. This approach has achieved a 94% satisfaction rate among employees – clearly a valued approach to communication.

Authenticity over consistency

Perhaps the biggest shift is from consistency to authenticity.

Employees at companies like Macy’s, for example, participate in the Style Crew program, where employees create and post videos such as bartending tutorials or hiking adventures.

Each video features Macy’s products, chosen by employees themselves, and is shoppable. Viewers can click directly on what’s featured, blending employee passion with commerce in a way no scripted campaign could match.

Style Crew is so popular that it has expanded to include influencers outside Macy’s, making the effort an especially powerful example of achieving authenticity by branding from within.

Empowered and trusted, employees have amplified brand reach exponentially and created the model for a grassroots expansion.

Data-driven personalisation and continuous evolution

The best-in-class strategies are data-driven, and in this regard, businesses seeking to build brands from the inside out would do well to learn from employee advocacy programs.

Electronic Arts (EA) continuously improves its EA Insiders employee advocacy program by combining analytics with regular feedback loops. Participation metrics, such as programme sign-ups, content shares, and engagement rates, are tracked in real time, while pulse surveys and direct employee feedback identify what content and recognition incentives drive authentic advocacy.

This data-driven, feedback-informed approach ensures the program evolves to remain motivating and relevant, enabling EA to scale advocacy globally while keeping participation authentic and employee-powered.

Brand activation powered by employee ownership

This re-imagining moves internal brand activation from checkbox to catalyst.

When employees are given real agency, supported by data, feedback, and opportunities to co-create, the brand itself gains depth, agility, and cultural relevance it could never achieve through messaging alone.

The result isn’t simply better alignment, but a living system where the brand evolves with, and even because of, its people.

In this model, advocacy emerges not as a managed campaign, but as the natural outcome of genuine participation and shared ownership.

Chris Prescher is chief strategy officer at Fifty Thousand Feet.

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design/leader: The Collaborators’ MD Jayne Noblet

Jayne Noblet is managing director of food and drink branding agency, The Collaborators. The Bristol-based studio’s clients include McVitie’s, Applewood cheese and Filey Bay whisky.

Design

What would your monograph be called?

Saddle up, and ride your pony. The title of a David Christie track from 1982, the year I left school.

It’s a metaphor for taking action and moving forward in life. I am a firm believer in taking control of life, rather than it taking control of you. Great design often means making brave choices and not being afraid to move forward.

I am also a lifelong horse lover with four ponies of my own, so it’s more than a metaphor for me!

What recent design work made you a bit jealous?

I love this Heinz brand campaign by Wieden + Kennedy. I am a big fan of their work, often controversial, always highly creative.

This campaign is so simple and relies on clever insight that we instinctively know the ads are talking about Heinz without even showing or mentioning the brand.

Wieden + Kennedy’s It Has To be Heinz campaign

What’s an unusual place you get inspiration from?

I live in the countryside with a lot of nature on my doorstep. I have always found inspiration for design in the changing of seasons and the rhythm of nature.

I love a trip to the bright lights of London or New York, but nature is awesome.

Name something that is brilliantly designed but overlooked.

Sounds crazy, but I love a good tap. A well-designed tap is a beautiful thing. The ergonomics, the weight, the turn, the touch, even the sound when the water pours.

They all make a big difference to how you experience, say, running a bath after a hard day at work.

What object in your studio best sums up your taste?

That’s Big Ken, a Kenia Palm we have in the studio. We have added a lot of indoor plants, and it’s brought a new dimension to how I feel about the environment.

Every time a team member has a birthday, we buy a new plant. We joke about working in Jumanji, so we might have to stop that initiative soon!

Jayne Noblet’s plant

Leadership

What feedback felt brutal at the time, but turned out to be useful?

We had a non-executive when we first started The Collaborators who told us that we should stop treating the money in the bank as our own and think of it as business property.

Consequently, we were as poor as church mice for quite some time, but it was great advice and one we have stuck to ever since. Cash is king.

What’s an underappreciated skill that design leaders need?

Empathy and understanding. Life happens when you are least expecting it. Showing compassion when times get difficult for people in your business builds loyalty, respect and a deeper connection between the team.

What keeps you up at night?

I am not much of a worrier. I think that’s been a blessing over the years. Worrying achieves nothing apart from stress. I get excited about ideas and change, and that can certainly keep me awake at night.

What trait is non-negotiable in new hires?

A can-do attitude. Positive people make life so much nicer.

 Complete this sentence, “I wish more clients…”

…would appreciate the value of great design, not just the cost.

I think the next decade will be interesting. With AI gathering pace, will clients become more cost-sensitive, or will craftsmanship and the more subtle and insightful qualities that only a ‘real’ designer can bring be more sought after and therefore more valued? Let’s see.

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From rugby to basketball, sports teams lean into entertainment-heavy brands

Financial pressures, and the need to broaden fan bases and embrace the digital world are driving sports clubs to rebrand. From football and rugby to basketball, designers are taking cues from the world of entertainment.

This applies to sports leagues and organisations as well as individual clubs. Last month, Brand Potential rebranded English rugby’s top flight as Gallagher PREM, “ to position rugby as one of the most electrifying sports experiences in the world.”

And earlier this year, Nomad and Chapter X repositioned the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) as an entertainment brand, playing up the characters of the players, for example.

“Clients are increasingly looking for inspiration outside of sport so that they stand out in a very busy market,” says Tom Allwood, managing director at sports branding specialists MATTA, whose clients include England Cricket, Women’s Elite Rugby in the US , and England Football.

Adam Partridge, executive strategy director at Mr B & Friends, backs this up. “More sports teams are seeing themselves as entertainment brands,” he says. “Now, rugby is realising that it also needs to do more of that, if it wants to be sustainable and appeal to new fans.”

Mr B & Friends is behind the recent repositioning of Bath Rugby, and also rebranded Bristol rugby club, Bristol Bears.

“English rugby clubs have become unremarkably similar,” Partridge says. “Similar imagery, similar language, similar social media posts, kit launches and season ticket campaigns.”

Mr B & Friends’ new look for Bath Rugby

While rugby can count on the loyalty of its long-standing older male fanbase, he points to the challenge of attracting and maintaining the attention of younger audiences.

“Gen Z have so much exciting stimulation at their fingertips,” he explains. “A conventional sport such as rugby, particularly those clubs still steeped in traditional ways of doing things, will have their work cut out if they want to infiltrate the Gen Z world.

“They have to start thinking differently, break free of the traditional rugby mould, and really start amplifying all that they do,” Partridge says.

Bath Rugby’s new identity is intended to celebrate the club’s players as modern-day gladiators.

While Mr B & Friends simplified Bath Rugby’s crest, its focus was on introducing two new contrasting primary fonts – Ra Bold and Nyght Serif – the former a reference to the city’s Roman and Georgian heritage, the latter to reflect the dynamism of its playing style.

In rugby, this need to cultivate a new fanbase is a financial imperative. High-profile clubs have folded or been brought back from the brink by new investment, including Wasps, London Irish and Worcester Warriors.

“Most are propped up by their owners, they can’t afford to keep losing millions, they need to be financially sustainable,” says Partridge.

Bath Rugby is part of this story too. Somerset Live reported in March that the club is increasingly reliant on its owner’s deep pockets to keep them afloat after posting a near £4 million loss in the last financial year.

Many such clubs “need to broaden their fanbase, and reach beyond the rugby bubble to reach more commercial opportunities,” Partridge adds. “This rebrand is about trying to create new revenue streams, growing the Bath Rugby fan base and future-proofing it.”

Similarly, the rebrand of basketball club London Lions is in part to mark the fact that it has turned a corner, after two years of instability and financial issues that left the club facing administration.

The new London Lions logo by False 9

The new logo features a geometric lion’s face fused with a basketball topped by a crown – a key heritage cue, as is the year the team was founded.

“Fans had been calling for a lion in the crest for years,” says Hamish Stephenson, founder and CEO of False 9 in London.

The agency has worked with the London Lions for many years on digital content, campaigns and in-arena activations that lean into the entertainment world by “uniting sport, music, fashion, and wider culture into an authentic London experience,” the agency says.

However, Allwood at MATTA cautions that balancing past, present and future isn’t always easy. “Established teams need to modernise without losing their heritage and what makes them special,” he says.

This is a tightrope also walked by long-standing football clubs.

New York-based designer Christopher Payne, who specialises in football clubs, is familiar with the challenge.

“This is the sharp end of design,” Payne says. “It’s a highly opinionated world. So many people have deep relationships with their club’s identity, some of which have been there all their lives, and which they have as a tattoo. It’s very tribal and generational.”

The old Peterborough United logo and the new one

To get his rebrand of Peterborough United (aka POSH) over the line, it was vital to bring fans on the journey. So he conducted a fan forum, fan surveys and focus groups at the design stage.

POSH prides itself on being youthful, with a young team and academy, “but the badge felt dated and tired,” says Payne. Its light blue on white design didn’t help. “For the digital landscape, it was busy and messy and had accessibility issues.”

His solution was to update key elements of the existing identity, like the winged lions and the key.

“We didn’t want it to live within a shield or circle, because if you have a unique shape you can be recognised by your silhouette, and has more power when small on digital,” Payne adds.

Borrowing cues from the entertainment sector is likely to continue, as even financially stable clubs are targeting younger and younger audiences. “People are looking at the next generation of fans, even targeting eight-year-olds,” Payne says.

Chris Payne’s new typography for Peterborough United

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Only rebrands iconic hi-fi company Cambridge Audio for a new era

Only has rebranded Cambridge Audio, the much-loved British hi-fi brand founded in 1968.

The Manchester-based studio, co-founded by brothers Daniel and Matthew Tweddle, started working with the company at the end of 2023. Cambridge Audio wanted an agency that had experience in both music and industrial design, as the new identity feeds across product, digital, and marketing and comms.

Nick Udall, head of marketing at Cambridge Audio, says the work was prompted by a need to attract and engage a broader range of users.

He says the company had “an early mover advantage” when it first got into streaming, but its brand still tended to speak to the older, male audience that tends to dominate the hi-fi market.

“When you look at the data from the streaming giants, there are more female listeners than male,” Udall explains. “We needed to change not just the brand, and how we look and feel to a younger and more diverse audience, but also the product set that goes with it.”

As with many projects which look to modernise legacy brands, the challenge was to attract new people without alienating the loyal, existing customer base – “If we get something wrong, we’ll be the first to know about it,” Udall laughs.

Daniel Tweddle, Only’s strategy director, says the key thing was to “avoid the temptation to pivot everything towards the sensibilities and tastes of the new demographic you’re trying to reach.”

“The thinking here was not to pivot from one group to another, but to broaden out the definition of who we were trying to speak to,” he explains. “What do they have in common? It’s passion and enthusiasm for music, so we wanted to build around that feeling.”

For Matt Savage, Cambridge Audio’s lead designer, this diversity made it a tricky brief. “It’s a hard brand to pin down,” he explains. “We sell £99 headphones, and we sell £5,000 amplifiers. That’s a fairly broad church.”

Only’s new identity for Cambridge Audio

And both Savage and Udall say the brand had to resonate internally too, among staff whose shared love of music manifests in different ways.

“The company is made up of music fans,” Udall explains. “We have everyone from pioneering ex-dubstep DJs all the way to me, who wanted to be the fourth guitarist in Iron Maiden. The challenge was to unlock some of that authenticity and embrace that with a fierceness we’ve maybe been scared to show before.”

The previous branding had become quite confused – at one point Udall says there were five different logo variations in the market. Matthew Tweddle, Only’s creative director, says the most recent version was quite “corporate,” while Daniel Tweddle says there was a tendency to show up in a very technical way, which could make the products seem inaccessible.

“We wanted to make it easier to create desirability and emotional connection,” he says.

Only’s new identity for Cambridge Audio

The company had already honed in on a brand idea – “made by music” – and wanted to keep the mark, which is a small circle inside a bigger one.

But Only changed the way the mark is used with the logotype, allowing them to appear independently – “to give them more power in different contexts” – and redrew the logotype.

This was a tricky job, Matthew Tweddle explains, because of the many manufacturing and production processes that shape how it appears. “There are so many ways that it’s seen on the products,” he says. There was a lot of consideration about the weighting of each letter and a lot of nuance in the way it’s designed.”

A new type system, built around Klim Type Foundry’s Söhne and Tiempos Headline, balances “attitude and confidence” with a more “high-end premium audio bit.”

“It allows us to communicate in a wide range of tones to different audiences at different times, while always feeling consistent,” Matthew Tweddle says.

Only’s new type for Cambridge Audio

The colour palette focuses on black and white, but there are other colours, inspired by designs from the Cambridge Audio archives, which are being rolled out too, most notably a burnt orange.

Over the period of working together, Matthew Tweddle says they encouraged the Cambridge Audio team “to take design as seriously as they do engineering.” Through those conversations, “the scope of what started out as an identity project has grown and grown.”

Daniel Tweddle says the new audiences the brand wants to reach “really care about the aesthetics of the products, not just great sound,” and that had to shape every design decision, from the product screens’ UI to the packaging and the new website.

“The technology has always been amazing, but the interface itself, and the design of some of those elements, didn’t give you that immediate sense of a best-in-class experience,” he says.

Udall says the response to the new look has already been encouraging. “My inbox is buzzing and I have had people reaching out who would never normally be reaching out,” he says. “It’s giving us the ability to talk to different audiences.”

That manifests in new collaborations with “brands you would never have thought we would be in the same conversation with, let alone working with.”

The recent tie-up with Rough Trade and Selfridges is a good example, he says, showing how the new branding is helping them reach new retail spaces.

And Savage says the work has had a huge impact on the hard-to-impress Cambridge Audio team too.

“One of the unsung benefits of a rebrand is the day-to-day clarity it provides to those who work with the brand and the guidelines,” he says. “Every project now happens with more fluency and more purpose, because everyone has this unified vision. Brands flourish in that environment.”

Only’s newpackaging for Cambridge Audio
Only’s new art direction for Cambridge Audio
Only’s new identity for Cambridge Audio

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“How vision became the most overlooked design problem”

At some point in the past decade, we became obsessed with clarity.

Clear communication. Clear workflows. Clear OKRs. Clear wireframes. We built systems to optimise the visible. We ironed out ambiguity with templates and playbooks. We believed clarity was our way forward.

But clarity without vision is a spotlight in a void. It shows you what’s there. It can’t tell you where to go.

Inside companies, we’ve come to conflate direction with design, and momentum with meaning. But in truth, vision is the most overlooked design problem of our time – because it’s not treated as a design problem at all.

The illusion of alignment

Most companies believe they’re aligned. They point to shared values, brand books, cultural artefacts, leadership off-sites.

But when you ask people what the company is building toward, you get polite dissonance. One cites the mission. Another recalls a tagline. A third points to market share or M&A goals.

The higher up you go, the more fractured the story becomes. Not because people don’t care – but because the vision has never been deliberately designed. It’s been softened, deferred, or vaguely agreed upon.

We’ve sat in rooms with brilliant teams who quietly disagree about the future. The result? A culture built on suggestion, not stance. A design team executing with precision but unclear on what it’s stewarding.

It’s not dysfunction. It’s dilution. And it’s everywhere.

Why vision gets neglected

Vision doesn’t collapse in meetings. It erodes in the in-between, when urgency outpaces imagination, when quarterly targets flatten long-term ambition, when brand is relegated to a marketing department instead of a leadership tool.

Vision is inconvenient. It doesn’t fit neatly into a Gantt chart. It resists being crowdsourced. It’s hard to measure and harder to maintain. When it’s treated like something to “align on,” you get language that sounds good but inspires no-one.

It’s easier to design what’s tangible – landing pages, products, playbooks.

But vision is felt before it’s proven. It’s a kind of gravitational force. You know it’s working when people organise around it instinctively. Language sharpens. Priorities shift. The noise fades.

Without it, you can still run a company. But it’s like flying without instruments – all acceleration, no altitude.

Vision is a system, not a sentence

The most dangerous misconception is that vision is a phrase to perfect. In truth, it’s the architecture of belief. It governs decisions, shapes behavior, and holds creative ambition accountable to purpose.

Vision isn’t the “what.” It’s the “why that demands a how.”

At Motto, we help leadership teams define what we call an “idea worth rallying around” – a bold, foundational belief that fuses strategy, story, and culture. And through our workshop, VisionCamp, we help teams operationalise that belief into something durable.

We built VisionCamp after seeing a recurring pattern – companies scaling fast but spinning internally. Founders carrying the vision in their head, but unable to translate it across teams. Teams moving quickly but aimlessly.

We’ve watched organisations go from 30 to 3,000 people without ever asking:

What unites us now?
What are we truly here to move forward?
What will outlast this moment?

VisionCamp is where that changes. It’s where leaders finally design the future, not just for optics, but for alignment that sticks.

These aren’t branding questions. They’re existential ones. And they belong at the centre of both business and design.

The myth of the external audience

Many still treat vision as a message for the market – a way to attract talent, inspire customers, win investors. But the most important audience for vision is internal.

Vision isn’t what you publish. It’s what you protect. It’s what your team reaches for when the market shifts, when products fail, when external momentum fades.

It doesn’t live on the About page. It lives in trade-offs. In hard conversations. In the standards upheld when no-one’s watching.

Without it, companies build extraordinary things for reasons no one can articulate.

You can’t design what you haven’t decided

Design is the discipline of choosing one future over another. But no amount of aesthetic clarity can compensate for a lack of direction. You can’t solve for vision at the visual layer.

This work has to begin at the top – with leaders willing to name what matters. Willing to commit to more than metrics.

Designers can express the vision. Writers can give it voice. But if it isn’t forged at the highest level, it will erode under pressure.

Carl Jung once wrote, “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” This isn’t just spiritual advice – it’s organisational.

A company that wants to endure must design its vision with the same rigour it gives its brand or product. Not what it looks like. What it means.

The opportunity ahead

We are at the end of the vague vision era. The time of poetic mission statements that mean little. The time of culture decks full of empty slogans.

What’s needed now is not more noise, but more nerve. Not messages, but meaning. Vision that holds. Vision that builds belief.

At Motto, we’ve seen what happens when that vision is built with care and conviction. Teams move with clarity. Brands resonate. Culture coheres, not around perks or pressure, but purpose.

The question is no longer “Do you have a vision?”

It’s “Is your vision designed well enough to move you toward a future worth building?”

Ashleigh Hansberger is chief operating officer at Motto.

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