Having spent the past eight years in the Sates, James Hurst recently returned to the UK, taking a new role as chief creative officer at Zag.
He first moved to California to spearhead DesignStudio’s work there, and went on to hold design leadership positions at three of the most significant tech companies around – Pinterest, Google, and Tinder.
We sat down with his to discuss conviction, learning how to work in-house, and why the design industry needs to rethink its approach to rebrand critiques.
What do you think is the main challenge facing design leaders right now?
One is the derivative approaches you see people taking. That was really pronounced in San Francisco, but you can see it creeping into London too.
There are lots of people that have read a design thinking book, or gone to a design thinking seminar, and they are now set up as the leader.
I think that’s dangerous, because they have tiny bit of buzzwordy language around what design is, and they’re trying to guide a project in a certain way.
They’re just coming up with derivative solutions, based on something from this social post, something from this best-in-class case study, and something from this trend forecaster. They think that adding this, plus this, plus this, must be the answer, because that’s all the right ingredients.
I think design leaders should be standing up and saying no to this way of working.
That’s a deductive solution, and good design thinking is inductive. Absolutely get those ingredients, but then give your teams the space and the oxygen to think about it, to play with it, to have a bit of romance with it.
That’s where the best ideas come from. At the moment, everyone’s looking at the same AI tool to see how they should structure something, and so everything sounds pseudo-polished.
That seems to be a response to a feeling that clients want safer work, that they’re less open to taking creative risks.
I teach a course on how to use artificial intelligence to build your aesthetic intelligence. And a big thing that I try to hammer home is that as long as I have been doing this, clients have always wanted to have creative work de-risked.
Our job is often to go in and show how we’ve been robust in our thinking to ensure we de-risk it as much as possible. But then to say, this is the right solution.
That is what has allowed people to create really brave work, work that’s changed the nature of the relationship people have with an industry, a category, or a product.
It happens when designers have conviction.
One of James Hurst’s creative aphorisms
There’s a squeeze happening now. There are all these tools that give you the baseline average answers, and people think that’s the safest solution.
The number of times I have gone in to see clients who have done their own back-of-napkin, Midjourney, ChatGPT exercise.
I think our role is to use those tools to get to that average response, to give us the foundation to say, “Great, let’s think of something else.”
One of my James-sims, is “Weird the normal, or normal the weird.”. ChatGPT can’t do that – you need people who come from different places, with different lived experiences, who have different stories to tell.
But it’s hard. Agencies are being squeezed by clients saying, “I think the value of that thing is now X, whereas last year it might have been Y.”
So there is a changing financial dynamic on the value of creativity.
What can designers do given those pressures you’ve articulated?
We need to change the conversation, to stop talking about deliverables and start talking about the broader value of creativity.
My prediction for 2026 is that there’s going to be a whole sea of breakthrough brands.
People are going to really buck the trend of this call-and-response creativity. It’s fertile ground for cut-through ideas.
That’s a nicely optimistic way of thinking. Is that something you took from your time in the US?
Certainly in the bit of California I was in, there was this rampant optimism. It was kind of bananas, how you go into any conversation and you’d say, “Oh, I’ve had a new idea for ketchup.”
And people would say, “Oh my God, my uncle owns tomato farms!” And someone else would say, “Oh, my auntie owns a bottling plant!”
And you’re like whoa, I was just thinking for a little barbecue.
James Hurst’s book, Use Design to Design Change
But I do think there’s a real lack of follow through there.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I was working with Design Studio. The number of times I’d leave conversations and think, wow, something amazing is going to happen. And then you’d never hear anything.
Whereas here in the UK, there is probably a healthy dose of cynicism in most conversations.
But when people do say yes, they do actually deliver. Alignment is harder to reach, but then the machinery seems to click into place.
Whereas I think in California, everything is an opportunity, so everyone says yes to everything. But very rarely do they then follow up on those yeses.
You mentioned Design Studio, you joined quite soon after they launched the Airbnb rebrand, which was obviously controversial at the time. We’ve just seen the furore around Cracker Barrel – what’s it like being in the eye of one of those storms?
It was my first week at Design Studio! It was wild – there was so much outrage at the time. People were making up songs about how the logo looked like genitalia.
But I think that’s more proof that conviction goes a long way.
Those teams had conviction, and Brian and Joe (Chesky and Gebbia, Airbnb co-founders) believed in the work.
We did lots of things with them after that, and there were people who joined the company who wanted to de-risk stuff. And then you had this studio from London making all these different suggestions.
It probably helped that they were both very visually-forward, both Rhode Island School of Design graduates. They didn’t need to be convinced about the power of design.
DesignStudio’s work for Airbnb
My assumption with Cracker Barrel would be that there was a team of people that had to convince another team people, who weren’t steeped in design heritage, about the value and the role of design.
The reality is that most of the time you’re not talking to design-led businesses. You’re talking to people who went to business school, whose job is to make value for shareholders. And they are wondering how you stop this crazy designer from causing a problem.
I think right now you see a lot of projects where, I suspect, there was an awful lot of friction.
But again, I am optimistic. Y Combinator just put out a call for more design-led founders. I would be amazed if in the next decade we don’t see a whole slew of design-led businesses coming out of those networks.
And you see what’s happening with Figma going public – that is going to breed hundreds of micro VCs who really get the value of design.
And that will impact the brands that get created, because studios will be working with design-forward allies who share that conviction.
Why are allies important?
Because creativity is fragile, and there are lots of points when it can fall apart all throughout the process – from presenting it to the client, to shaping the route, and then introducing it to the world.
Design leadership is really about how you keep it all stuck together.
I’ve had it fall apart at every single one of those inflection points, but you learn through those lessons. This is how we can hold this thing together. This is how we can help the people who’ve asked us to do this thing to understand that fragility, so they can advocate internally for it.
There is also a concern though, when you get those pile-ons, that some of it comes from other designers…
We just had a bit of work featured on Brand New, and I was really nervous.
I think Brand New is fantastic, and it’s a privilege to be on there because Armin and the team do so much due diligence. But the comment section can be a bit of a toxic hellscape.
Zag’s work for World Supercross
I saw some ridiculous comments on Koto’s Amazon work. That is such a thoughtful, robust bit of work that we should all be celebrating.
But it’s difficult. I believe that, as an industry, we have to be able to debate work and be critical of it. If not, design won’t evolve.
But maybe we need to get better at framing criticism, so that it’s genuinely interesting, and genuinely helping push the industry forward.
What were the biggest things you learned when you took on in-house roles at Pinterest, Google and Tinder?
My boss at Pinterest was Andréa Mallard, the CMO. I had thought marketing is about telling the rest of the world about a business.
She taught me that, no, marketing is about telling the business what the business is, so the business can start to operate in that way and tell the rest of the world what it is.
I learned so much working with her around the role of how you operationalise yourself within a particular business.
When I first started, I’d been the principal of DesignStudio America, a very lofty title in an agency where we felt we could do anything. I went from that into a company where not everyone listened to me all the time.
People had other agendas, and I learned really quickly that people didn’t give a shit about this stuff. So how do you really show that design is going to make their life easier, and do something for them?
Is that the biggest difference between in-house and agency?
When you’re in an agency, it’s like you’re sitting in a therapist’s chair. Businesses walk through the door and they’re like, help! Nobody loves us!
And you get to do something, and you feel like a hero for a day.
When you’re in a big company, you’re always in a room having to tell people, “This might be a problem.”
And the room is like, why? Is that a thing? Do we care about that? Why are we in this room?
But when you can make something happen, you can make a really big impact. I was really proud that after lots of misadventures, we did end up repositioning Pinterest as a home for creators.
It was very exciting to see the power of having all these different functions of a business come together.
Zag’s work for World Supercross
Why did you decide to come back to the UK?
Partly it was family stuff – my parents are getting older, and my kids are getting older, and we felt quite detached over there.
Also I missed British creativity. That cynicism that we were talking about earlier gives us an edge.
I think we’re willing to push forward with ideas that have a bit of a wink and a nudge – we don’t have to show the sanitised, beautiful thing.
It feels like the creative aperture is a little bit wider here, and I was hungry to come back and play a role in that.
And why was Zag the right fit?
Zag is part agency, part venture studio. I was nervous about the idea of going back into a pure agency setting where we were on the outside of a business all the time, being the service provider.
So I was really interested in the Zag model, about incubating these ventures in a more holistic way.
We’ve got a studio in Soho where we have people coming and we’ll help with everything, from building their leadership teams through to the go-to market strategies, and all the design stuff that goes along with that.
It felt like I could lean into the agency experience to help with the big foundational client stuff, and lean into the in-house experience to help build some of the venture things. It lets me flex in different ways.
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