Jayne Connell’s first experience of the design industry was a student placement at Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell. “They had this stunning office just off Chancery Lane where everything was designed within an inch of its life,” she remembers.
“Each day you’d put out your lay-out pad, with a black pen on the side. And there had to be nothing else on the desk – you weren’t allowed a cup or anything.”
She thrived in that perfectionist environment, coming back to work there after she graduated. Connell went on to work at Carter Wong, and was later part of the agency merger that created Futurebrand, where she rose to associate director.
But after her husband, Nick Downes, started his own agency from the couple’s kitchen table, Connell left to join him. She is now director of strategy at Interstate, where she has spent the past 25 years building a culture that combines sharp commercial thinking with creative excellence.
Interstate’s work for F1, featured in its new book
The agency has worked a lot in the motorsport world, with car brands like McLaren, Lamborghini and Chinese company Nio, as well as governing bodies Formula E and the FIA, which runs Formula One. Away from the automotive sector, Interstate has also worked with Google, Unilever and the NHS.
As the studio publishes a new book celebrating its 25th year, we spoke with Jayne about her career, the current state of branding, and what she wishes she’d known when she and Downes started their own studio.
Were you always interested in the business side of the industry as well as the creative side?
Yes, I always had a business mind as well as a graphic mind.
At Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell we were sort of kept in the back, but at Carter Wong they would get you involved. I remember being invited to a meeting at Woolworth’s, and being petrified. I didn’t know what to wear to a client meeting.
But I must have passed the test. I know a lot of design creatures don’t want to do that sort of thing, but I was ambitious and I wanted to prove my worth.
A bookshelf in the Interstate studio
Working on Formula One opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. We spent a lot of time sitting with incredibly influential business people, like Bernie Ecclestone, who are tough, direct and very demanding.
But by then, I could stand my ground. I got shouted at a lot, but I learned to not be a “yes person.”
That’s an important skill isn’t it – to know when to challenge clients?
It doesn’t feel great sometimes, and obviously we have to pay the bills.
But when you push your team for excellence, and then you turn around and say, “The client likes this idea and we’re just going to go with it,” then the whole team gets disenfranchised.
It doesn’t get us excited. And nine times out of ten, it’s done us a favour to say exactly what we think. We’ve lost projects by doing it, but often the client has come back later for something else, because we made an impression.
More and more, I believe the only way we’re going to get a voice is by having an opinion.
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry in the past 25 years?
It’s like everything’s changed and nothing’s changed, because it’s about people.
There are so many brilliant agencies. We all do brilliant work. It comes down to relationships. It’s how you build trust with your client, so they come back to work with you when they move between companies.
A big part of business development now is what we call transcend. At the end of a project, we ask anyone who has worked on it, what else could we do, based on all the things you have learned about this company, and this sector?
Our work is not about indulgently beautifying things – our teams know their stuff. And so we’ve extended quite a bit of our work, with clients like the Premier League, by suggesting what the next piece might be.
Interstate’s work for Bapco Energies
How do you build this trust with clients?
We’d never dare tell them that we know more than them, because we definitely don’t. But we use our skills to ask the right questions, get into their mindset ,and understand the business, so we can do an excellent job of wrapping that in some form of an experience.
And you know, return on investment is a tough one within branding. If you redesign a packet of biscuits, and it sells more on the shelf the next day, great.
With branding, it’s reputation management. You’re not going to know if it’s worked for years.
So we have to create our own return on investment, to keep checking, are we doing the best job for this client? And I think we drive that into our client services team and into our creative team.
Communication is the biggest thing. The whole team owns the client, so pick up the phone. Go and have those conversations.
How do you think about the balance between the different teams that make up an agency?
Listening to everyone’s voices is really important, from production to client services. Creatives can’t rule the roost.
I love creatives dearly, and I was one. I can see the ones off in the corner who haven’t listened to the last five minutes of a meeting because they’re onto an idea.
And sometimes that’s fab, but sometimes they’re missing some important parts of the strategy.
How do you see the current state of branding?
Again, it’s all changed but nothing’s changed. There’s a shitload of channels now and so many ways you can express something.
But you’ve still got to come up with a great idea, and you’ve got to be able to justify it to the client. That’s the bit I think will be the creative currency going forward.
Interstate’s work for the Premier League
With ChatGPT, you can ask it to come up with a strategy, and it will churn something out. But you still need human understanding to bring it all together.
We bang on a lot about the fact that a brand isn’t a logo, but it’s true. It’s an approach, a personality, a set of guiding criteria to make a lot of judgments, one of which will be the visual expression.
We’re debating at the moment where the value goes. How much will a client pay for strategy, for identity, for campaigns, for production?
We still think the value is in the big idea, in coming up with something that someone else hasn’t.
Do you think the role of strategy has changed? Has it become overcomplicated?
I don’t like the idea of strategists sitting in a room doing strategy. For me, that’s not a creative process. You need the creative mind, the UX mind to feed into it. A good strategist can say, “You’ve got something there. I know how to mix it in.”
You’ve got to have a sense of how that brand strategy is going to be interpreted into a creative world. I think some strategies are quite weak because they’re done in isolation and then it’s, “Here’s the strategy. Now turn that into creative…”
It comes down to listening and relationships again. The best strategy comes from asking the right question to your client.
Is there a piece of work the studio has done that really sums up the Interstate approach?
Probably the work for Nio, this amazing electric car company in China founded by William Li.
He hired Martin Leach, the ex-president of Ford Europe, who came to us and said, “I haven’t got a name. I haven’t got a car. I haven’t got a design. I just have a wish and that was it.”
Interstate’s work for Nio Sport
We had to build the brand story and the proof points before anything else. So we said, let’s start by sponsoring a winning motorsport team. And we created Nio Sport, with lots of branding, visuals, film, websites, events and goodness knows what else.
When they launched the car 18 months later, another agency did the actual automotive brand, but it all started with the work we did.
What did you learn working on that project?
They practised something called “vision action upgrade,” which is a business approach where you have an idea, you action it really quickly, and then you look at where it needs upgrading.
It petrified us to start with, because for designers it can feel like a bit of a nightmare. We’re used to checking things to death before they go out – the spelling, the word spaces, the colour, the motion edit.
But we came to love it. It tested us on all levels, but it keeps things moving. You just need the right people in the room who don’t think, “Oh that’s a mistake.” They think, “How can we improve it?”
Interstate’s work for Nio Sport, featured in the new book
Compared to your days as a young designer, how has creative leadership changed?
I think historically, creative agencies were fairly terrible at doing appraisals. You got the odd random coffee somewhere and then you realised that was your appraisal.
And there was this whole thing about focusing on people’s weaknesses or things they didn’t want to do. We threw that away quite early on here.
For a middleweight designer to become a senior, they shouldn’t have to start presenting to clients. Sometimes we can see that every bone in someone’s body doesn’t want to do that.
So how can we play to someone’s strengths, so they can still be a senior?
Interstate’s work for F1, featured in its new book
Another key thing is to recognise that there is a difference between a design mind, a creative mind, and a creative technologist mind.
You have pure graphic designers, although they don’t teach that as much anymore. There’s a creative mind, which is a lot more conceptual. They think in stories, but they can’t necessarily design something. And then you have the people who are great at the UX/UI stuff.
It’s about helping guide people in their careers, especially if they they think they are one thing, but we think they’d be better focusing on something else.
What is one thing you wish you’d known when starting Interstate 25 years ago?
I wish I had thought more about the importance – and the challenge – of building a leadership team for the future.
It takes time, patience and instinct to recognise the people who share your vision and values. Finding those like-minded business souls early on is essential, positioning them to carry the business forward, especially in an ever-changing political and economic landscape.
Then comes the difficult part – the boardroom conversations, the consequences when things go wrong, the promises that never materialise. Around the table, you’re friends, but you’re also bound by responsibility – and that balance can be hard to maintain.
If you run a creative agency, you’ve found the ones who can make an idea work. But when you start searching for your next generation of leaders, you’re looking for that rare individual who can hold both imagination and responsibility in the same hand, and not drop either.
The new Interstate book
The new Interstate book packaging
The new Interstate book