Brand and narrative for emerging technology.

How I became a designer by accident

I studied media in Bristol and graduated in 2011 into the aftermath of the financial crisis. Teaching English abroad was an excellent side-step - first at a Hagwon in South Korea, then teaching unemployed people in Seville to look for work elsewhere in Europe, with a couple of years back in Bristol after that, working in e-learning at a small-scale boutique media company. What I had really wanted to do was make documentaries.

That's how I ended up teaching at a university in Shenzhen, which in 2016 I thought was the most exciting city in the world - the place cool young Chinese people went to do interesting things. The plan was to learn Chinese and make documentaries for YouTube - becoming one of the only English-language media outlets in the city. I'm still on phase one. Turns out learning Chinese takes a really long time and is very hard.

Learning to use my superpower

The first time I met my new boss at the University, she told me she wasn't sure "how I'd been hired without a master's degree - well done" - and that I should look at doing one if I wanted to stay more than a year. So I went looking for one that would enhance my creative practice. I knew how to make things look good on video - but I didn't understand the fundamentals of aesthetics and why they looked good. At an open day in Hong Kong, a professor sold me hard on graphic design as the place to start. It had never occurred to me before that point.

There were three of us on the course, and the other two were much better than me at making good-looking things. So I focused where I had an edge - storytelling - and wrote my thesis on that.

Getting three years' experience in a year and a half

I graduated in the wake of the Hong Kong protests and the start of COVID, as branding agencies across Hong Kong shut down or moved to Singapore and the Microsoft graduate track I'd been on was cancelled. I was unemployed for a long time - I got really good at baking bread, and I'm pretty sure I personally reached out to every person in Hong Kong with "Creative Director" in their LinkedIn title - until Branding Records offered me half a job: well, more than full-time hours but at half the pay, shared with a friend from my Master's programme. I took it.

I was hired to hands-on project manage visual work, but they kept handing me the thinking instead - positioning, narrative, and strategy. Eventually that became a Strategy Director role.

Episode IV: A New Hope

When the Filecoin Foundation hired me, they told me: if this works, it will be impossible to censor the internet. After the last few years, that was exactly what I wanted to be working on.

For the last five years I've led creative at the Filecoin Foundation, building the function and the brand from close to nothing. We ran a venue at Davos and built a giant spaceship at Web Summit, all designed in-house.

But what I'm proudest of is the philosophy we worked on for the team: designing tools, not artifacts. We were never going to be able to support the graphic needs of an entire open-source ecosystem by hand, so we built things that empowered people who aren't designers to put out good work. One key exception being our corgi mascots - which came from picturing someone rushing through an airport, trying to find a present for their kid before flying home.

The hero's journey is a loop

Across media, teaching and design, I've been doing the same job the whole way through - finding ways to help people understand the world better. As a creative, my unique strength is my ability to imbue craft with narrative. Understanding the story my audience is telling themselves, and working out how to weave my perspective into theirs.