NotOnSunday and We All Need Words rebrand Direct Ferries

NotOnSunday and We All Need Words have injected some personality into Direct Ferries.

The world’s biggest online travel agent for ferry bookings, Direct Ferries already had 2.5 million customers in 25 countries, but wanted to keep growing as an aggregator.

The client initially approached Rob Mitchell of strategy and copywriting agency We All Need Words to help with a new tone of voice for its customer services and bot.

“They asked us what their brand should sound like,” Mitchell says. “In a very kamikaze account management style, I said it could sound like anything, because I don’t think you’ve got much of a brand.”

Duly hooked, the client asked what their brand could look like, with the right help.

The Direct Ferries brand guidelines developed by NotOnSunday

Mitchell brought branding agency NotOnSunday on board – they had first worked together on the rebranding of the Scouts’ UK division in 2018.

“We needed a platform and vehicle to enable us to grow,” says Direct Ferries CEO Niall Walsh.

That growth will come from the aggregator share of the market, which is low in this sector – while 45% of tickets for trains are bought through aggregators like TrainLine, it’s just 5% for ferries.

“Conversion rate is everything to us,” Walsh explains. “We’re a traffic acquisition machine. It’s about giving that traffic the best customer experience so that they check out.”

To get them down that funnel, the rebrand needed to instil confidence in its audience.

“Customers can see when there isn’t consistency. If there’s no consistency, there’s no trust, if there’s no trust, people aren’t going to give you their credit card number,” Walsh says.

Consideration was given to typographic treatment of lengthy words in other languages

He admits the company had never previously had a considered brand – instead it had been built through iteration and trial and error.

Visually and verbally, from the website, emails and display ads to the call centre and blog, there was a mix of styles.

“Before you know it, you’ve got a complete mess of images and tone of voice,” Walsh says.

We Are All Words and NotOnSunday set about creating a brand that showed ferry travel in a more aspirational light. They swapped images of ferries and facilities for sea air and views of the horizon, and they ditched cheesy photos of models in favour of travel magazine-style photography.

The tag-line was created by We All Need Words

The wider strategy was to present Direct Ferries as the ferry brand. We All Need Words developed a tag-line – “Wherever you’re sailing, start here.”

This was part of a wider, adaptable brand system using chevrons, which mimic the shape of a ship’s bow. These can be used on their own or paired with ‘A to B’ couplet headlines, mirroring the overall “wherever you’re sailing” line.

The chevrons can be repositioned to take into account different word lengths in the 24 languages that Direct Ferries operates in.

These headline pairings are delivered in a pair of typefaces – the sans serif Mundial, described by NotOnSunday’s Trev Townsend as friendly, and the serif Rocky, which is a little classier.

Together, they’re intended to bring out and draw together the bigger brand system.

NotOnSunday did an audit of the ferry sector, including its iconography of boats and pictograms. “Direct Ferries got lost among the others,” says Townsend.

The Direct Ferries logo before and after

The previous logo was very literal, says Walsh. “Having three ships to define that you sell a ferry felt slightly dated.”

NotOnSunday crafted the new logo, with a mark created out of the ‘D’ and ‘F’. The angle of the ‘F’ matches that of the chevron.

The new hero colour, orange, was chosen to be both modern and timeless, and to stand out from its blue rivals. That is contrasted with secondary colours that are meant to reference the sea – dark and light blues and greens.

All of the new design work had to fit around the existing UX, because of its robust and proven capacity to drive sales.

The new Direct Ferries tone of voice and branding

“We could change all the details and decorative elements, but we couldn’t change the customer journey, because it’s been tested and tested and it works,” Townsend says.

NotOnSunday redrew the icons, including the car symbol and dog paw print, giving them the same line weight. Similarly, the buttons are now consistent sizes and shapes, with rounded edges to match the logo mark.

And it’s worked, Walsh says. “The data tells us that customers prefer this brand, because nothing else has changed on the website, it’s the same product, price, experience, and the same user journey,” he says.

Direct Ferries OOH advertising

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“What brands get wrong about disruption”

Disruption has become a popular brand strategy as start-ups, challengers and even established brands seek to stand out in crowded categories.

Disruptive brand building subverts a consumer’s perceptions through narrative and tone. But, while disruption is often associated with boldness and audacity, its true power lies in challenging category norms in unexpected ways.

This is achieved not only through striking visuals or provocative messaging, but by fundamentally redefining what a category can mean, and the experience a brand can deliver.

One newly launched brand that’s aiming to defy its category conventions is mud, an emerging petcare company that is setting itself apart by embracing mess, mud and natural animal instincts.

The brand’s Everyday Wash for Dirty Dogs is marketed for “dogs who were meant to get dirty”.

The brand’s brown, grey and black colour palette is inspired by different shades of dirt, and its founders describe it as “a small act of rebellion against the sanitised world of modern pet care.”

Angelina Pischikova and Karina Zhukovskaya’s identity for their mud pet care brand.

While it’s too early to predict mud’s ability to disrupt its category, its mission is certainly thought-provoking.

If successful, disruptor brands can not only capture market share from established competitors, they can shift industry dynamics and open up a new market for consumers seeking alternatives.

Think Liquid Death, the US brand which made canned water cool with its irreverence and punk/heavy metal aesthetics. Or Oatly, which turned oat milk into a cultural statement with witty long copy and an anti-advertising aesthetic.

“Being pioneering isn’t always about ripping it up and starting again.”

When a disruptor brand is so successful that it brings about positive change, it’s often because that category is ripe for disruption.

Prior to the arrival of disruptor brands like The Ordinary and Glossier, the beauty industry had thrived on creating a feeling of exclusivity, mystery and luxury, with glossy celebrity-fronted advertising and products making vague promises at inflated prices.

The sector was entirely upended by the arrival of The Ordinary, which democratised skincare by championing science over celebrity and enabled a much wider group of consumers to access high-quality skincare.

Stunts like selling “ordinarily-priced” eggs for $3.37 at the height of the American inflation crisis, or dumping a stack of dollar bills in a store window, cleverly highlighted its no-frills proposition and flew in the face of typical beauty marketing by taking swipes at influencer endorsement.

Glossier was another hugely influential agent of change because it built its brand around user-generated content and real customer feedback, rather than top-down beauty ideals.

But with disruption comes risk.

A disruptor brand can seem inauthentic if its brash, bold branding doesn’t fully align with its ethos. WeWork’s tactics backfired massively when its “changing the world” narrative collapsed under scrutiny.

Its demise also demonstrates that moving fast and breaking things isn’t necessarily the best approach to disruption.

The company promised a variety of flexible office spaces catering to different needs, but ultimately failed to deliver because of its focus on global expansion at breakneck speed – a strategy that proved unsustainable.

Also, disruption stops being disruptive when everyone’s doing it.

When luxury fashion first shifted online and onto social media, many fashion houses pared back their logos, incorporating the clean, minimalist typefaces favoured by tech brands like Google and Microsoft. This minimalist branding style became so popular among brands, from Saint Laurent to Celine, they all started to look the same.

Even Liquid Death’s success has had its limitations. Despite becoming a sensation in the US, it didn’t create any significant ripples in the UK water market and exited after less than two years – showing that disruptive brand activity can get lost in translation. What works in some markets and cultures, may fall flat in others.

For legacy brands, the stakes are particularly high because a major identity shift can erode established brand equity. Old Spice successfully moved away from its “dad’s aftershave” image through ironic humour.

By contrast, Aberdeen Group’s attempt to reach new audiences backfired dramatically after its rebrand to Abrdn in 2021 was met with a torrent of mockery. Earlier this year it announced it was reinstating the missing e’s.

Being pioneering isn’t always about ripping it up and starting again.

Brands don’t need to reinvent themselves or tear down the competition to make an impact. You can be just as innovative by quietly committing to long-term, incremental change.

Sustainable fashion brands are a case in point here. Companies like Finisterre and Reformation are leading a slow fashion movement by committing to eco-friendly and ethical practices, offering consumers a high-quality alternative to fast fashion.

To truly disrupt, a brand must have ambitions beyond being brash and attention-seeking. Disruptors need to stay true to their brand essence as well as strategically differentiated from rivals.

Before adopting a disruptive stance, consider what consumers really want and analyse whether your rivals are delivering on that need.

You must also ensure your branding resonates with your target audience and connects to a broader cultural shift. In this way, you can help ensure your disruption strategy gets people talking for all the right reasons.

Polly Hopkins is managing director of FutureBrand London.

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How to run better meetings

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

Recognising that your meetings aren’t working is one thing. Fixing that is another. At Taxi Studio, they decided this was an area they wanted to focus on – and they are already reaping the benefits.

We spoke with creative director Stu Tallis and in-house coach Katie Scotland about what’s changed in the way they run meetings at the Bristol-based studio.

As leaders, why was this an issue you as wanted to focus on?

Stu Tallis (ST): I think pre-Covid, meetings – or gatherings as I like to call them because meetings sounds a bit corporate – had their challenges. But post-Covid, they got more complicated because we’re all working in a hybrid way.

It’s very rare I go to any gathering where everybody’s either all remote, or all in the same room. There’s always a bit of both, so there are new dynamics to manage.

People on screen can feel a bit superfluous, because they can’t quite hear what’s happening in the room and they don’t get a chance to put their opinions across. They can leave feeling a bit deflated.

Katie, myself and a broader team have been working on thinking about psychological safety, and what that means for us as a studio. And we felt that meetings can be a really good, tangible metaphor for how that can be deployed.

Katie, can you talk a bit about your role at Taxi?

Katie Scotland (KS): I’m available to everyone in the business for them to book in a coaching session for whatever they need.

Sometimes it might be people working on longer-term career growth, sometimes it’s working through an in-the-moment challenge, or some feedback.

Alongside that one-to-one coaching, I also support the team with broader behaviours and development and learning. So I get to see the themes that connect all those different moments together, and the theme of psychological safety runs through it.

Psychological safety is talked about quite a lot, but how well understood is it?

KS: It’s quite an abstract term, and people have different levels of awareness, and different preconceptions of it.

Our starting point is to make sure that psychological safety is understood equally by everyone.

So we took some time to do that, to make sure that people understand that it’s different for everybody, that it’s not necessarily something that we can fully control, that it’s not about being really fluffy and nice, it’s actually about being quite challenging but in a non-judgmental way, so that we can achieve the most productive growth.

Taxi Studio’s Meetings Etiquette guide

What we’ve done over the last few months is to work out how we can make psychological safety really tangible for people.

So we aligned it with Taxi’s three values – live fearless, play fair, and form real relationships. And under each of those, we’ve got really practical steps of how we build psychological safety.

So starting with “Setting expectations” – normalising that people will come with different perspectives, different opinions, and that some stages of a project might be quite challenging.

Then we have “Invite participation.” Make sure you’re intentionally bringing people in, inviting people’s contributions, advocating for others if they are less forthcoming.

And then a really important thing to think about is to “Stay objective.” Keep things really fact-based so you can focus on the topic or the problem, rather than the people dynamics within the room.

And so how do these principles shape meetings at Taxi?

ST: We have introduced some meetings etiquette. One of the main things is encouraging people to think about who really needs to be in a meeting. Who will really add value? And who doesn’t need to be there?

Don’t just invite everyone, because time is precious.

Then we encourage people to set a clear agenda. It can be brief, but put it in the invite, so people can think about it beforehand. What do you want to achieve by the end of the meeting?

And for bigger meetings, we’ve started to encourage people to think about who the best facilitator might be. When you’re dealing with lots of different minds – on screen and in the room – it’s beneficial to have someone focused on participation.

They can notice things. We’ve been in this meeting for half an hour, and that person’s not said a word. Are they ok?

A lot of this is about changing habits and for some people, those habits have been ingrained for decades.

What are the specific challenges of creative meetings?

KS: Pace and energy. There are a lot of ideas flying around and people can get very excited.

It’s a fast-paced business, so people want to get to a solution quickly. That’s positive, but there’s a risk there as well, that we miss other ways of thinking if we don’t pause to get all the right input before we rush forward to a solution.

ST: I get FOMO. If we don’t run these sessions in the right way, I worry that we’ve missed something because the brightest minds, the quietest minds, haven’t had an opportunity to say their piece.

And that bit of work that we just launched could have been even better if we had given that one person the platform to say what they were thinking.

KS: There was a meeting recently which was going really well, and we practically had the project plan done in the room.

But just before the end of the meeting, we hit pause and went round to check where everyone’s head was at. What was their main take-away?

It only took two minutes, but you saw what was quite a frantic energy in the room calm down, and everyone found their own place in it. These small changes can make a big difference.

Do these same meeting principles apply to all meetings at Taxi, like all-hands, and one-to-ones?

KS: Absolutely, it’s across the board. Some of the most intense meetings can be one-to-one. They’re quite often the moments where what someone wants to say goes out of their head completely.

So the same principles apply. Setting expectations – “We’re here to talk about some feedback.”

“Here’s my perspective, I’d love to hear what you think” – that’s inviting participation.

What’s your advice to other leaders who might want to change their meetings culture in this way?

ST: First of all, it’s all about finding people within your business that believe in it, so it’s not just driven by one person saying, “This is what we’re doing now.”

There needs to be a shared vision, and a shared passion – we’ve got different people in different teams that champion this.

And you’ve got to understand what psychological safety means to you.

Katie has worked really hard with the team on this – we’re Taxi Studio. These are our values. What does this mean for who we are and what we do?

Until you done that, you can’t create the rules, and the protocols, and the etiquette, because it should all ladder up to your values and your behaviours as a business.

The other thing is that it’s not going to happen overnight.

We like that quote from James Clear in Atomic Habits – “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.”

You have to invest in it as a business – it’s a long game.

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How to run better brainstorms (or why to scrap them)

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

When we first had the idea to focus on meetings, I wasn’t going to write about brainstorms. It felt like something that was already well-covered in countless blogs, podcasts and videos – some great, some eminently forgettable.

But creative meetings – whether you call them brainstorms or not – are a key part of the industry. Whether they happen with a client or within the team, floating, testing and sharpening ideas needs to happen in some format.

And it turns out it’s something a tonne of designers have very strong opinions on. And so here are five creatives with five different ideas about brainstorming better…

Brian Collins – Just say no

Brainstorming is what happens when people who have never had an idea try to simulate the appearance of having one. It’s a séance for the unimaginative, complete with bad office snacks.

No-one I know with real talent has ever, ever, ever requested a brainstorming session. Why? They already have ideas. Too many.

No, no, no. Talented people do not brainstorm. Talented people brood. They sulk. They take long walks and think. They lie awake at night with a crushing sense of impending failure and wake up with ten better ideas than yours.

And they show you. And you build on them.
What they do not do is gather around a sad whiteboard as if divine inspiration is lurking in the fluorescent lighting.

A brainstorm session is a padded cell for corporate dullards who want the thrill of “creativity” without the burden of actually being creative. These people don’t want ideas – they want to be seen near ideas, like tourists posing in front of ruins they’re helping to destroy.

The room is always the same: a preening, dead-eyed facilitator and 12 poorly dressed people with Sharpies hoping someone else will say something first so they don’t have to.

What follows is an avalanche of inoffensive garbage: slogans that sound like rejected insurance commercials, metaphors involving bridges and climbing and journeys and belonging, and the inevitable appearance of someone who says, “Let’s circle back!” or “Let’s all re-group!” with the conviction of a war criminal.

Brainstorming doesn’t generate ideas – it produces landfill. It’s the intellectual equivalent of dumping out everyone’s junk drawers and pretending it’s the Musée d’Orsay.

Brainstorming is cowardice disguised as collaboration. No-one risks anything, no-one thinks deeply, and no-one ever leaves with an idea worth remembering.

But everyone claps. They clap for the blandest suggestion. They clap for showing up. They clap because clapping is easier than saying, “This was a fucking waste of time and I now wish I’d lied about having to be out of town.”

But it’s not too late.
Because you now realise this is where your ambition, imagination and hope will surely die, strangled by consensus, Post-It notes, cold coffee, and people who still use the word “ideate.”
Run. While you can.

Brian Collins is founder and chief creative office of Collins, and president of the ADC.

Joel Stein – Think about the set and the setting

I think if you say the word brainstorms, a lot of people just have an immediate allergic reaction to it. I’ve been in enough bad ones to understand why that is.

Brainstorms are disastrous for all sorts of reasons. They are not good for introverts. The most senior people naturally dominate the session. But there’s also not really time and space for people to think even a few steps beyond the most obvious things that come into their heads.

Everyone feels the pressure to say something that’s not completely stupid, so people default to saying stuff that isn’t going to get them laughed out of the room.

I’m not saying brainstorms never yield anything decent or interesting. But they certainly put a lot of barriers in the way to getting good results.

Facilitation as a skill just doesn’t get talked about that much. It’s not really understood or respected.

If I ever ran an agency, I’d probably have a chief facilitator role. Not just someone who is quite senior, or happy to stand in front of a room, but someone that’s actually in the weeds of group dynamics and understands techniques to help people think more effectively as a group.

The space matters a lot. Not just where it is, but how it’s decorated and organised. You can’t expect people to go into a really grey boardroom, with traffic beeping in the background, and for everyone to be able to think brilliant thoughts.

With my new programme Ideas On Acid, I am thinking about creativity using the model of a healthy and therapeutic psychedelic trip. The key concepts with that are set and setting.

The mindset that you bring to the experience is going to massively shape the experience you have with these very powerful substances. And so is where you do it – you’ll have a very different time in the woods as opposed to in a dingy basement.

Leaders need to think about the atmosphere as much as the plan, or the exercises. The vibe is almost always the most important thing.

Joel Stein is a copywriter and creative consultant. 

Cat How – Booze unlocks brilliance

My creative director Chris Clayton agree on the fact that we come up with our best schemes, ideas, and breakthroughs in the pub together.

We make sure to have at least one session at the Barley Mow in Shoreditch whenever I’m back in London from LA. The magic happens normally after about eight pints of Timothy Taylor for him, and the equivalent in glasses of rosé for me.

I think it just makes you think bigger, braver, more silly, and you just say, why not? I always like to parrot an Ernest Hemingway quote – “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

But I forget the second line, as I’m not one to keep my mouth shut. And I lead with the first and apply that to the ideas me, Chris, and my co-founder Rog have when we’re in the boozer getting merry.

Sometimes they’re off-hand reflections about the studio, and we decide to change things up a bit, Or perhaps there’s an idea for a piece of work or a client we’d like to collaborate with – and we think a little more around the box on that.

I have to remind myself to add these all to my Apple Notes while staggering back onto the Tube, as often a lot of this gold is lost the next morning.

When it comes to within the studio, we encourage a bottle of beer in a brainstorming session or in meetings towards the end of the day. Our 1-2-1s too, we ask if folks want to go to, er, the Barley Mow again to have a chat. We find people open up more about their thoughts, dreams and aspirations.

Cat How is co-founder of How&How.

Ben Mottershead – Play puts everyone on a level

I think what happens in most creative meetings is that the loudest voice takes over, and you become reliant on that loud voice being right on every occasion.

I have found the most creative people tend to be active listeners, and so a little quieter.

We like to gamify these sorts of meetings. Getting out plasticine, or LEGO, and asking people to create something makes brainstorming more of a collaboration. If this brand had a mascot, what would it look like? What would change in this person’s life if they got really drunk at the pub?

It’s true that not everyone gets it straight away. There are definitely people who start off slouched back with their arms crossed; a very defensive posture. But I’m a big believer that everyone’s a kid at heart, and after a while, everyone gets really into it. It’s about giving people that freedom to play, and that permission.

These things spark very different conversations, and, crucially, you don’t have to be good at speaking to contribute. You put everyone on an equal footing, whether they are a seasoned strategist or a junior who’s brand new to the industry.

Seniority is a problem. I have met some fucking useless ECDs – people who’ve stayed at the same place for a long time and have learned how to play the politics.

But we’ve had juniors – and interns – who have a much more interesting approach to design because they haven’t yet been moulded by the commercialism that comes with working in the industry.

Ben Mottershead is founder and creative director of Never Dull Studio.

Matt Ballantine – Embrace the power of random

About ten years ago, I became interested in the use of play. Especially working in quite serious sectors, I noticed that an absence of people feeling playful often seems to correlate with an inability to come up with anything other than how they’ve always done things.

I think a lot of it then comes down to our preconceptions of what creativity is. I think people in the creative industries are a lot less creative than they’d like to make out. And people outside of the field think that’s something that other people do.

I work a lot in software consulting, where people want to be professional. And to be professional means to be really fucking boring. It’s like the Protestant work ethic – you can’t possibly be working hard if it’s enjoyable.

I discovered that randomisation could be a really interesting way to break patterns of thinking.

One of the analyses of the world around us is that it’s essentially just a series of random events that are going on at varying levels of predictability. If it’s a toss of a coin, it’s very predictable. If I put money on the stock market, it’s completely unpredictable.

I came across apophenia, which is the ability to spot patterns within random information.

It’s a very human thing. During lockdown, I started a project where I posted a picture of my cup of coffee every day, and asked people what they saw. An AI would tell you that it was coffee, or maybe a cup. People tell you that it looks like a leopard chasing an elephant.

Sometimes I use random photographs as a spur to help people come up with new ideas. We also built something called The Creativator. People put ideas on cards, and these get put into this thing that looks like a fruit machine. It’s designed to see what happens when random ideas get put together.

In the last few years I invented our tarot deck. Not because I believe in tarot, but because it’s a randomisation thing.

There’s stuff people will know from traditional tarot decks, like Death, but also character cards like the Business Planner, or the Sales Person. What would disaster look like for this person?

The idea is to build empathy, and break people out of conventional ways of thinking. I designed these purposefully to be this weird artefact that doesn’t feel like it belongs in the business world.

Matt Ballantine is a sociologist and engagement manager at Equal Experts.

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How to run better pitches

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

Whether pitching for a would-be client or unveiling work to a current one, presentations matter. And as with any collaborative process, there is a lot to think about.

But while decks are designed with painstaking care and insights polished up in advance, much less thought is usually given to the dynamics in the room. How do you bring a group of people together into a cohesive unit to present as a team?

Start with your people and their people

A great team presentation starts with a clear decision on who is on the team. For Chris Lumsden, co-founder of Good Brand Consultants, an “Opportunity Owner” is responsible for pulling the right people into the meeting.

He describes their role as “coordinating the group and briefing them on the presentation. They seek the team’s input and this shapes the best presentation and creates ownership for their individual contribution.”

Becky King, executive creative director of Dragon Rouge London emphasises the importance for each participant to have a clearly-defined role. “Everyone has to be there because they’ve got something to add.”

Ian Thompson, former head of Thompson Brand Partners, agrees and says that a good presentation draws on different speakers. “Contributions need to be balanced across the group,” he says. “This says that our expertise is across the board, and not an overreliance on one or two people.”

He urges leaders to send, “the people who the client will be dealing with if they select you. Not the good speakers. Not the senior people never to be seen again. And remember to think about, and act on, the make-up of your team when it comes to diversity.”

For King, knowing your audience is equally important in shaping what you say, and how you say it. “Find out who will be in the meeting, and what’s important to them. Look at their job titles and social profiles. Ask what would resonate with them, what’s important to a head of digital versus an HR director, for example.”

Be proactive around space and time

When on home turf, think about where the meeting will happen, but also who will sit where (and the unconscious messages these seemingly innocuous decisions can sometimes send).

Even when you travel to the client, it’s worth doing your due diligence.

“It’s on you to find out about the room, the technology and to ask for some set-up time,” King says. “If the meeting starts at 3pm, ask to arrive at 2.45pm.”

For Lumsden, it is the Opportunity Owner’s role to ask the client to share this information. “They find out about how much time we’ve got, what they want us to do with that time, and what they want to leave with.”

In a pitch, there are various things that eat into the allotted time – getting set settled in, introductions, handing over to each presenter, the Q&A. With this in mind, King stresses the need to “actively decide how you’re going to use the time.”

She advises against “fighting your own content by trying to pack everything in. This creates the room to discuss, provoke and talk things through.”

And clients clearly agree – 71% think new business presentations don’t allow enough time for discussion, according to this year’s What Clients Think report.

Make time to rehearse

For Lumsden, rehearsal time is vital. “You can’t just rock up and present,” he says. “The Opportunity Owner pulls together the run throughs, and makes sure they happen. They keep an eye on how long is each person talking for, that everything hangs together, and listen out for any sharp edges to smooth off.”

King agrees. “Rehearsals are particularly useful for checking your approach to handovers. And going over personal introductions, making sure they’re relevant and they fit into the time allocated. We decide how we want to begin, how we want to end, and when we will take questions.”

Questions create alchemy

Good chemistry is vital for a successful client relationship. For Thompson, it is a key aspect of team presentations.

“Chemistry is what separates one agency from another, when more than one agency has ticked all the boxes. Chemistry is created, or not, through conversation. And conversation is the refreshing part for a client who might be seeing multiple agencies in a day.”

Clients are very attuned to understanding group dynamics – and what they might mean for any working relationship.

“The audience picks up on your chemistry as a group,” King says. “Negative influences include people on the team who are making up the numbers, people who do not speak or pay attention to the occasion, and people who dominate the presentation.”

Lumsden agrees. “A pitch is a reflection of our culture. A client is getting to know us, through our performance.”

“We start our chemistry on the way there and keep it going,” Thompson says. “We switch on before we walk on. Smile, make friends with the people who greet us. Go in in a chatty mood.”

Likewise, Lumsden recommends “finding your human.”

“We let that come across. We may swear at technology, make a reference to the biscuits, or the coffee. We look for conversational oases. These are mini pauses, buffers, moments that occur naturally and provide ways to lighten the occasion and inject something of our personality.”

Questions, questions

Lumsden’s approach to questions is “not to predetermine who will answer what.”

“Sometimes the Opportunity Owner will coordinate by articulating their understanding of the question and then pulling the right contributors into play,” he says. “Having questions to ask the client is also a useful way of getting things moving and avoiding a tumbleweed moment.”

Big moments for individuals

It’s important for team leaders to be aware of the different needs of the individuals within the team presenting. For junior members of the team, these occasions can be a daunting experience. They are not only facing the client, they are also performing in front of colleagues.

Consider how you can support them to develop their skills and confidence between performances – in fact a good debrief is helpful for everyone involved.

For senior members of the team, think about how you can support them to take on a role that stretches them in the presentation.

When done well, team presentations create opportunities for personal growth, as well as business growth. Get both of these working together and you’ll make many more successful and satisfying team presentations.

John Scarrott is a trainer and coach, who works with designers and other creative professionals on presenting, public speaking and other communication skills.

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“We need to talk about meetings…”

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

When Shopify’s employees came back to work after the Christmas break in 2023, their calendars looked very different.

Bosses at the e-commerce company had decided to purge all meetings of more than two people. An estimated 12,000 meetings were removed at a stroke – all meetings were banned on Wednesdays too.

“Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson, and we are giving our people a ‘no judgment zone’ to subtract, reject meetings, and focus on what is most valuable,” Shopify’s chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian said at the time.

Later that summer, they were at it again adding a “cost calculator” into employees’ calendar app, putting a dollar value on every meeting, based on who attends, and how long the meeting was.

Asana did a similar thing to Shopify in 2022, removing all recurring meetings and asking employees to think carefully about whether they should be added back in.

Through meetings becoming shorter, or removed entirely, they apparently saved the average employee 11.5 hours a month, or nearly four weeks across a working year.

In The Guardian, one expert asked about the Shopify purge put it succinctly – “Most organisations have too many meetings, and most meetings aren’t good.”

And there it is.

Design, like most industries, runs on meetings – one-to-ones, company updates, team huddles, client pitches, brainstorms, creative check-ins, and more.

In a hybrid or remote work culture, meetings have proliferated – one estimate says meetings jumped 70% during the pandemic.

Of all the issues facing the industry, meetings may not seem like the most pressing (and it’s certainly not the most glamorous).

But in thinking about day-to-day work, and the things that impact it, I’d suggest that meetings are right up there, both in terms of quantity and quality.

“There’s no Mr Meeting coming to fix it for you.”

The first thing, if you think your meetings culture could be better, is to take responsibility for it.

Gillian Davis, an executive coach and leadership expert who works with many creative businesses, says she hears a lot of complaints about meetings.

“People always tell me about these really bad meetings that everyone knows are bad,” she says. “Well, if a meeting isn’t working, put your hand up and say, ‘Hey, maybe we should redesign this meeting.’ There’s no Mr Meeting coming to fix it for you.”

The key, Davis says, to an efficient and productive meetings culture, is to be intentional.

What’s this meeting for? Who needs to be there? Who really needs to be there?

Then you need an agenda to clearly and concisely set out the meeting’s aim, and at the end, you should agree on specific action points that reflect the intention set out in that agenda.

“People might think this stuff sounds obvious,” says Stu Tallis, creative director at Taxi Studio who has helped rebuild the way his company runs meetings. “But agencies are fast and furious, and it’s easy for things like this to slip.”

And if you put some of this best practice in place, then the idea of a meeting starts to shift. Many design leaders told me that it’s come to be seen as a dirty word in their studio – Tallis even avoids using the m-word altogether.

Guanglun Wu, founding partner and chief digital officer at Made by On thinks this is an issue.

“Many people are very protective of their focus time,” he says. “But that can lead to this mentality that meeting time is bad, that it’s unproductive. People become afraid of putting them in the calendar, and avoid them at all costs.

“But it depends what the aim is. Making time to talk to people and collaborate is important – it’s not wasted.”

Badberries’ managing director Natasha Szczerb wrote recently about the tricky balancing act of making time to focus on the clients, and the work, and making time to focus on the business itself.

Recognising the tension between the two, Szczerb says, “was crucial to our survival.”

And of all the operational decisions to make, and discussions to have, few leaders will feel their hearts fluttering at the thought of going deep on meetings.

But take a moment to look at your calendar, and your team’s.

How much time are they spending in meetings of one sort or another? And are you confident that time is being spent as efficiently and as effectively as possible?

Meetings matter, and good leaders will make sure they are planned and used in the best possible way.

And even if you’ve looked at this issue before, what worked for your studio in the past may not work any more.

“Companies evolve,” Davis says. “Their rituals and systems evolve. So meetings should evolve too.”

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How to run better annual studio meetings

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

Although they call it lots of different names, most design businesses run an annual meeting where they look back at the year that’s gone, and forward to the 12 months ahead.

When done well, these meetings can be extremely useful – to celebrate successes, re-establish focus, and course correct where necessary.

But when done badly they can confuse staff, paper over problems, and damage morale.

Gillian Davis, an executive coach and leadership expert who works with many creative businesses, points out there is often a huge gap between the way big client meetings are prepared, and the attention big internal meetings receive.

We spoke with Davis, and three design leaders, to gather practical advice for running more effective annual get-togethers.

Start with why

Davis says the first decision for leaders planning one of these meetings is to work out why they are doing it, and what they want to achieve.

“It’s too easy for these meetings to become a waste of everyone’s time,” she warns. “Ask yourself, what is the one message we need to get through going into next year? And then design the meeting around that.”

That takes clarity, an ability to prioritise what the business needs now, and sometimes self-awareness.

SUN’s Jamie Kelly says their most recent annual meeting was part of a “personal reinvigoration” to address a flatness he felt in the studio, despite a string of successful projects.

“I wanted to use it as a spur, to look at all this great work we’d done, but also to get down and dirty into the things that we hadn’t enjoyed, or that hadn’t gone so well,” he says. “It was about mixing that celebration with some really honest conversations.”

Context shapes content

Communication begins way before the first words have been uttered. Where do you hold the meeting? How do you frame it? What do you ask people to prepare?

All of these decisions shape how your message will land. For example, if a business is reflecting on a challenging financial year,  holding this meeting in a sun-soaked locale with a generous free bar will seem quite jarring. That may seem like an extreme example, but Davis says she has seen proposals that are totally at odds with the story the leaders want to tell.

Number crunching

Many leaders use these annual meetings to reflect on the company’s financial performance and its targets for the year ahead. Work out how much you want, and need to share, says John Wilson, CEO of Universal Design Studio and Map Project Office.

“We try to be open and transparent, so there’s an understanding of where we are as a studio and there are no sharp surprises,” he says. “But I don’t think everyone needs to know everything.”

For Guanglun Wu, founding partner and chief digital officer at Made by On, accessibility is key when it comes to this information.

“We need to explain it in a way that can be contextualised by everybody within the organisation,” he says. “Some people understand what numbers and acronyms mean, and others don’t. So we put a lot of effort into those presentations in terms of the information design, so we can make that accessible.”

SUN’s Jamie Kelly had a neat approach in his most recent annual meeting. He visualised the turnover as percentages related to specific client projects.

“People could see how the projects they worked on contributed to the overall picture, and how their work has impacted the business,” Kelly explains. “I think the team found it interesting and maybe a bit surprising.”

Who speaks – Leaders

Gillian Davis says that the amount of time taken up by leadership presentations should depend on where the company is and how it’s doing.

In tough times, she says, people want to see and hear from their leaders. In this context, she thinks 90% of the meeting should be direct communication from the most senior leadership. In better times, the teams themselves should be encouraged to present and lead discussions.

Who speaks – Teams

Most leaders like these meetings to include talks from specific teams but there are a couple of things to consider. Davis once saw an 150 slide deck for a company’s upcoming AGM, and every department had its own structure for their individual section.

Some consistency is important, she says, as is avoiding it feeling like a long list of things that team has done.

It’s great to celebrate successes, but it’s even more useful if that involves some reflection on how and why it worked well. Davis thinks “some element of interaction” helps elevate these sessions even further, so other employees can ask questions.

For Made by ON’s Guanglun Wu, it’s all about teasing out what different teams can learn from each other. “What was really interesting about yout project that you want everyone else to know?” he says. “Explain the journey, what you learned and what are the future opportunities where we can be better.”

This dynamic may be different in smaller teams. SUN’s Jamie Kelly runs these meetings as a two-way discussion for his seven-strong studio.

“I pause after each section to ask questions. I want to hear what they think success could look like, so they can push my thinking,” he says. “It’s much easier in a small studio, where there is less hierarchy, to have that open dialogue.”

Who speaks – Clients

At its most recent annual session, Made by On invited a panel of current clients to take part in a fireside chat in front of the whole company.

Guanglun Wu says it added a whole new dimension to the day.

“When you have people come in and talk about their perspective on working with us, and how we enable their success, or how we communicate, then it builds that empathy.”

Be practical and specific

Let’s say leaders want to encourage more accountability in their teams. Saying that is the easy part, but it isn’t enough on its own.

“Explain why you want to become more accountable as a business,” Gillian Davis says. “Say how you noticed it’s a problem. Describe the impact on the business. And then say how you are going to fix it, in a practical, day-to-day way.”

Similarly give people the tools they need to make the changes you want to see. “Don’t just tell people something like you want them to develop their LinkedIn network,” Davis says. “Give them a playbook, a step-by-step breakdown of what that means and how to do that.”

Beware of big surprises

If you want to use the meeting to announce big changes around culture, structure or process, it’s worth getting some people on board first, says Made by On’s Guanglun Wu.

“It’s important to give the people who need to instigate the change early visibility,” he says. “Explain the reasoning to the people it’s going to affect first, and give them a forum where they can give input.”

Then when changes are announced to the wider group, you have a cadre of people who can help explain it to their colleagues, and allay any concerns.

End on a high

Like any performance – and Gillian Davis thinks these meetings do require an element of performance from leaders – the ending really matters. Think about how you want to leave people feeling, and tie it back to that one key message you were looking to land.

Davis once saw a brilliant annual meeting at a big creative firm, which ended on a massive high. People were visibly enthused and excited. Until someone immediately grabbed the microphone to explain the travel arrangements for people who needed the shuttle bus.

See annual meetings as part of a bigger strategy

While these big set-piece meetings are important, they need to work as part of a consistent and coherent approach to leadership.

Gillian Davis says leaders should look at how annual, monthly, and weekly meetings work together, some of which may be for everyone, and others for specific teams.

“I think the monthly meeting should be a super-engaging company health check, and then the teams should have their own weekly rituals, where the real brass tacks of the work is discussed,” she says.

For John Wilson, leadership is ongoing work, that shows up in myriad ways, big and small.

“My gut feeling is that it’s not really about these big single meetings,” he says. “It’s about constantly iterating and refining and re-strategising and re-budgeting.

“The best leaders I’ve worked with are not necessarily always standing up at the front, they are also gently pushing and prodding from behind.”

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Pentagram’s galloping horse logo steers TwelveLabs rebrand

Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell have created a dynamic equine identity for AI video company TwelveLabs.

Based between San Francisco and Seoul, TwelveLabs describes itself as “the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform.”

Unlike generative video tools which help users create videos from scratch, TwelveLabs uses AI analysis to help people understand their existing videos at a very granular level, which makes them more searchable.

Co-founder and CEO Jae Lee explains that communicating this difference – between video generation and video understanding – was at the heart of their work with Pentagram.

“In the middle of last year our models were improving pretty rapidly, and we thought we needed to up our game in terms of our storytelling, why we matter, and to match the design, the tone, and the messaging to our ambition,” he says.

Lee described the previous branding as “straight out of Silicon Valley” and they chose Hudson–Powell and his team due to their tech-savvy design practice.

In creating a new identity, it was important not to be “lumped in” with other generative AI video companies, Lee says, but also to differentiate themselves from other video analysis tools.

“Our competitors essentially do frame-by-frame analysis, but we look at it temporally,” lead product designer Sean Barclay explains. “That’s what differentiates us, and we wanted to convey that secret sauce.”

“On the first call, they had me at temporal reasoning,” Hudson-Powell laughs.

His team had to avoid the visual cliches AI tools tend to embrace – “it’s a very noisy category with lots of sparkles.”  But they also had to capture and communicate TwelveLabs’ offering in a way that was accessible and exciting, but not dumbed down.

“We had a distinct stream of work that wasn’t strategic or creative – it was just understanding the technology,” Hudson-Powell says. “We kept asking them, could we imagine your technology to look something like this? Or this?

“We were trying to put some kind of conceptual apparatus around the technology, to see if we could find a visual communication language that we could start to build on.”

“Jody was very good at pulling out those threads about what video looks like in our brains,” Lee says.

Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs

The Pentagram team homed in on the core idea of “video as volume” rather than a timeline, and they built a series of thread-based diagrams to help explain how it works. This visual motif could be scaled across the touchpoints, from product pages to sales and branding.

“You get this graphic stretch, so you’re speaking to different audiences with the same concept,” Hudson-Powell explains.

The horse logo was grounded in what Hudson-Powell calls TwelveLabs’ existing “lore” – Lee says they were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 animation of a horse, and he likes the metaphor of a user as a jockey steering their technology.

The logo – which has 12 layers in a nod to the company’s name – is often used in motion, galloping across a screen.

“We worked a lot of animation into the identity,” Hudson-Powell says. “Animation can be quite frivolous, but we did it really intentionally. The logo gives you this feeling of perpetual motion, this rhythm at the heart of the brand, which is really important.”

The team chose Milling for the typeface for its combination of “technicality and soft edges” and the visual identity uses the LCH colour system, which, compared to RGB, represents colour in a more similar way to how our eyes perceive colour.

“You can match any two colours and they’ll be harmonious, which you don’t get with RGB,” Hudson-Powell says. “We can find infinite combinations.”

There were also three colour subsets for TwelveLabs’ three key features – pink-purple for search, orange-yellow for generate and green-blue for embed.

Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new colour palette for TwelveLabs

Lee says the new identity has resonated with investors, employees and most importantly, customers.

“It’s given them this confidence that they’re working with not only a super-technical team, but also a team that cares deeply about video,” he says. “So we can communicate with our science community, but also with the people who are building the content we love consuming. There’s a duality which feels really connected.”

Barclay agrees, and adds that it helps people grasp what TwelveLabs does – and what it might do for them – more quickly.

“It’s definitely improved our website tremendously in terms of telling a better story,” he says. “Before it took a lot of time to comprehend what TwelveLabs is, and what we’re offering. We have definitely shortened that.”

Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new logo for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new icons for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs

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The National Gallery opens its members-only Supporters’ House

Studio Linse has designed the National Gallery’s first members’ area.

The National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square celebrated its 200th birthday last year.

Its membership programme – whereby supporters get unlimited free exhibition access and access to exclusive events – is only ten years old, but it plays an important part in the gallery’s revenue mix.

There are currently around 60,000 members, boosted by the huge success of the gallery’s Van Gogh show, which ran from last September until January, and was the most popular ticketed exhibition in the gallery’s history.

Each room in the National Gallery Supporters’ House represents a season

Chief commercial officer Susan Noonan, who joined from the Royal Academy of Arts 18 months ago, expects membership numbers to fluctuate. But the National Gallery’s NG200 vision focuses on the membership experience, aiming to create a world-class welcome for its supporters.

To that end, Supporters’ House is a dedicated members’ area for people to “socialise, dine and unwind.” A new House membership tier offers access to the space as part of a package that costs from £130/year.

For inspiration, Noonan and her team did extensive research across a range of hospitality, from hotels and clubs to museums, galleries and membership organisations.

“We also surveyed our own membership and support base extensively to understand their needs,” she says.

Supporters’ House is in the oldest part of the National Gallery building.

The front door of the Members-only Supporters’ House on Trafalgar Square

Its entrance, which is to the west of the gallery’s main entrance on Trafalgar Square, was formerly used by security staff. Inside, the ground floor was a warren of curators’ offices, stock rooms and store rooms.This space has been opened up and divided into four rooms – a lounge and bar, restaurant, private dining room, and ‘salon’ or event space.

“We wanted it to feel like it’s always been there,” says Noonan of the design.

“The initial wish was that it has an echo from the gallery, that you feel you’re in the National Gallery,” says interior designer Job Hoogervorst of Studio Linse.

The Amsterdam-based studio has form in this sector, creating hospitality spaces for London’s Royal Opera House and the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands’ own national gallery.

To articulate this link with its surroundings, Studio Linse looked at the paintings housed in the gallery and its furniture archive.

The designers homed in on the Northern European landscape painters and took inspiration from the colours they used, and the seasons that they often depicted.

The designers then developed a concept with each room representing a season. So the restaurant is described as winter mist and decked out in blues; the pink salon was described as summer blush. Meanwhile the private dining room – the house’s centre piece – was defined as the sun.

These colours were used to saturate each space, from the walls, window shutters and high ceilings to the furniture and curtaining. “The place is quite architectonic,” says Hoogervorst, “so it is as if each room has been dipped in a colour.”

Woven silk wall panels and damask curtaining in the new National Gallery Supporters’ House

A high gloss paint was used on walls to embrace their imperfections, he adds. Much of the fabric, including woven silk wall panels and damask curtaining, came from Gainsborough silk weavers in Suffolk.

When it came to furniture, Studio Linse wanted to give the rooms a classic British feel. In the archive, they discovered pieces that had been used in offices and galleries.

Those brought out of retirement include lounge chairs which were reupholstered in Gainsborough fabric; several detailed, circular tables in the restaurant; a low dark wooden cabinet in the private dining room and a grandfather clock in the lounge.

While the leather banquette in front of the bar is a new piece, it was inspired by existing gallery seating.

The lounge area at the new National Gallery Supporters’ House

The studio played around with different heights and seating possibilities. The restaurant’s tables and chairs are standard height. But in the lounge and salon the chairs and tables are lower to make it feel “more relaxed and casual.”

There’s a risk that members’ clubs and areas get too popular. Could Supporters’ House become a victim of its own success, where over-crowding will turn members off and away?

“We’ll be watching very carefully and monitoring take-up and occupancy, as well as listening to feedback from supporters,” says Noonan. “We anticipate that we’ll be able to look after everyone.”

What’s more, the tiered membership system allows people to opt in or out of access to Supporters’ House, depending on their needs.

The original parquet floor has been refurbished
Internal arches, which had been filled to create back-of-house rooms, have been opened up

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Design Bridge and Partners create kintsugi identity for Gen-All

Design Bridge and Partners have created a kintsugi-inspired new look for Gen-All, a charity that promotes intergenerational work and best practice.

Gen-All co-founder Judith Ish-Horowicz has run a nursery within a care home since 2017. She received lottery funding to create a new body bringing together different organisations in the space to share best practice.

“We were aware that there was a lot of intergenerational work going on, but there was no understanding of what was actually impactful,” she explains.

The new Gen-All logo by Design Bridge and Partners

Ish-Horowicz worked with the Beth Johnson Foundation to revive the Centre of Intergenerational Practice and Research and Development (CIPRD). She met Design Bridge and Partners’ Chief Strategy Officer Matt Boffey because his daughter attended her nursery and he offered to work on the project pro bono.

“Everyone recognises that stronger relationships between the generations create some really positive outcomes for society, especially in this moment where we’ve got demographic change and stretched resources,” Boffey says.

“We wanted to create a compelling brand that people could get behind, so it could become a beacon to attract different partners.”

Design Bridge and Partners’ visuals for Gen-All

Boffey and his team felt the name CIPRD “took a lot of unpacking” while Ish-Horowicz is more blunt – “It was a terrible name.”

They hit on Gen-All as a simple and immediate way of capturing what the organisation stands for. “Intergenerational work is about all the generations rather than just the extremes of the very young and the very old,” Boffey says,

“So we wanted something that could represent that broader sense of inclusivity, and something that wasn’t too abstract.”

He says this immediacy was particularly important for a small organisation with limited budgets.

They created a simple wordmark using the new name in Hepta Slab, with the hyphen also acting as a visual metaphor bridging the generations, and the various organisations Gen-All wants to unite.

Senior designer Leanne Kitchen explains that the logo was kept deliberately neutral because of the very busy and colourful assets that were developed for the broader identity.

This was built on the idea of fragmentation, which applied across generations as well as among the intergenerational practice community itself.

“We wanted to translate that into a very clear message and we liked the idea of filling the gap, to bring the generations back together,” Kitchen explains. This led them to kintsugi, or golden joinery, which is the Japanese act of repairing broken objects with a lacquer that reconnects the pieces, but doesn’t hide the fact it has once been broken.

“We liked the idea that it creates something new, but embraces the past and its previous fragmentation,” Kitchen explains. “We’re not shying away from where we’ve been, and just trying to glue it back together. Using kintsugi creates a more meaningful whole.”

Design Bridge and Partners’ visuals for Gen-All

And so the visuals are created from repaired ceramic pieces that represent different generations, with contrasting imagery attached together. There was also a neat historic link to the Beth Johnson foundation, which is based in Stoke, the heart of the Potteries.

They held workshops at Ish-Horowicz’ London nursery to create the first pieces, where they also collected stories from participants about how bringing together young and old had benefitted their lives.

The team later used AI image generation tools to expand the visual assets and create a broad suite of imagery for Gen-All’s digital channels. And the pottery theme extends into lots of nice touches, such as using stacked plates to create a chart to share key stats in the Gen-All newsletter.

Boffey says it’s important for Design Bridge and Partners to take on projects like this alongside its big-name client work.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to take the talent we have and create a different type of impact with a different type of partner, which is no less important than furthering the ends of our commercial clients,” he explains.

“It’s very motivating to our people, and it gives them an opportunity to stretch themselves in new directions. We get lots of people wanting to be involved and we don’t ever treat these projects as a hobby or a side project.”

For Ish-Horowicz, the impact of the rebrand is already being felt, with renewed interest and engagement across the UK, as well as new connections around the world, from the US and Sweden to Israel, India and Turkey.

And she is excited for how the new brand will help further this work, which she has committed so much of her life to.

“For the first time we are connecting people together, so professionals in this space can support each other and bring the level of impact up,” she says. “It’s no longer coming into care homes and singing at somebody at Christmas. Now we are all singing together, and singing from the same song sheet.”

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