Creative Director

I know I’m sticking my neck on the line a bit by saying this – but I still believe in the value of good design.

A good identity should stay around for years – if you’re lucky, maybe for generations. But they only hang around if they give something. We’re all hard-wired to warm to a kind of ‘rightness’ – and an investment in care and thoughfulness and craft speaks meaningfully to every stakeholder. Take care with it and over time and it will become an organisation’s shorthand for their unique way of doing business.

Everyone asks me (because I’m old) ‘are you still on the tools‽’ – and yes, I am, because to be a creative director it’s important to create as well as to direct, but I partner with and lead design and production teams too to deliver beautifully-crafted and long-lasting work.

Arbah Capital

Being in Dammam at the very beginning of the MBS era was interesting. Arbah, like the region that they came from, was treading a delicate balance between a comfort in and respect for centuries of bedouin tradition and a huge desire to embrace the modern world – devising wealth management products that could intellectually and morally do both. My job, as I saw it, was to embrace that duality and tell a story with their brand that celebrated it.

We rebranded the theatre to make the arrival of Kevin Spacey as artistic director

We took backstage photos to celebrate the theatre – like this one of Sir Ian McKellen

We designed a custom font for the theatre

The history of the theatre was commemorated in a book

Julian Anderson was our backstage photographer, capturing the life of the theatre

We proposed swapping the traditional programme for a newsstand magazine

Our first ad linked Gielgud's time at the theatre with Spacey's

The Old Vic

I was lucky enough to create the brand for this London cultural powerhouse in what was a pivotal perfect storm of creativity for them. Impressario Sally Greene had brought in Kevin Spacey and David Liddiment to shake up the theatre, and to elevate it back to its Larry Olivier-led heyday – everything about it felt electric.
It felt important to do justice to it – to design something that embodied the smashing together of Hollywood glamour and Theatreland heritage.

Indian Railways

My favourite job that never went through! Working with the wonderful Sujata Keshavan in Bangalore, we used to see lots of higly-politicised Indian government logo design briefs come through the studio, but this was the best. The sixteen arrows represent the sixteen regional business that make up the network, each one a uniquely different brilliant meander through the country. Because Indian railways aren’t about trains so much as they’re about the possibilities of travel.