From Air Jordans to Freehand and font licenses, I’ve surfed every wave of creative tech and taste. Here’s how that shaped my path to brand strategy.
It all started with a sneaker
I didn’t grow up making zines or burning CDs. I grew up obsessing over sneakers. Specifically, the kind that Tinker Hatfield was dreaming up at Nike: the Air Tech Challenge, Air Jordan VI, Air Max 90, Air Huarache. To me, those shoes weren’t just footwear – they were futurewear. Sculptural, daring, weird. They sparked a lifelong fascination with the intersection of function, form, and culture.
Later, I fell hard for Italian industrial design. Gio Ponti’s Superleggera chair. Olivetti’s ‘Valentine’ portable typewriter. Anything that had been blessed by Achille Castiglioni. I loved how these objects did so much with so little. Elegant, surprising, smart. They didn’t just look good, they made a point. Last year I was fortunate to visit the ADI Design Museum in Milan, that has permanent exhibits of all those items I’d lusted over as a teenager.
Graphic design came later, through the back door.
ADI Design Museum, Milan
My first brush with digital design wasn’t through Photoshop or Illustrator – it was Notepad. I’d discovered you could build websites using raw HTML and a mess of inline styles, and that was all the invitation I needed. This was before CSS became common, before web fonts, before real layout tools. If you wanted something to look half-decent and work, you had to hack it into existence, line by line, table by table.
Designing in that context was all trial and error. I’d write a few lines of code, hit refresh, and stare at a broken page, wondering if I’d forgotten a <td> or closed a tag too early. There was no Stack Overflow. Tutorials were sparse. You trawled through obscure forums, hoping someone else had posted a workaround for whatever nightmare you were trying to solve – usually involving some combination of transparent .gifs and absurd nesting.
But that hunt – trying to make something beautiful and useful with barely any tools – lit something up in me. The constraints forced creativity. The problem-solving taught persistence. And, without realising it, I was learning to think like a strategist.
From pixels to purpose
Design, at first, was pure surface. Typography. Layouts. Colour theory. But over time I realised I was more interested in why things looked the way they did. Why Helvetica felt trustworthy. Why minimalist websites felt “premium.” Why some brands got under your skin and others faded into the background.
That’s when brand strategy started tugging at my sleeve. Quietly at first, just questions. Then briefs. Then full-blown frameworks.
The further I went, the more I saw that good design without strategy is just decoration. But good strategy with design? That’s when things start to click – inside organisations and out.
The blessing (and curse) of being a Xennial
Being a Xennial means I’ve lived through just enough change to understand it intimately, and just enough analogue to respect what came before.
I remember what it was like to print final artwork and hope no one noticed the typo. But I also remember the thrill of building interactive PDFs and finally understanding how to automate a grid layout. We Xennials learned to design in scarcity, which made us resourceful. Then we entered abundance, which made us adaptable.
And that mix? It’s weirdly perfect for brand strategy.
We’ve developed an instinct for when to go deep and when to ship fast. We’ve learned how to sit with ambiguity and still make progress. We’ve built brands before social media existed, and now we build them to thrive on 15-second videos.
Strategy didn’t kill the creative, it clarified it
What surprised me most about moving from design to strategy wasn’t how much I had to learn, it was how much I already knew.
The habits I’d built over years of design – observing, pattern-matching, simplifying – were all tools I could use to help organisations find clarity. Strategy didn’t replace my creative work. It gave it direction.
Now I spend more time talking than drawing. More time listening than layouting. But the goal is still the same: to create something that feels true, looks great, and actually works.
Advice for designers flirting with strategy
- Chase the why, not the wow.
Great design is seductive. Great strategy is sticky. - Steal like a scholar.
Learn from industrial design, architecture, literature – anything that sharpens your eye and your judgment. - Make peace with ambiguity.
Strategy isn’t about right answers. It’s about useful hypotheses. - Respect the craft.
Strategy is its own discipline. Don’t just rebrand yourself after a good podcast.
Looking back, and forward
Today, I help organisations articulate who they are and why they matter. That includes logos, yes – but also narratives, structures, cultures. The whole messy, beautiful system.
I still love beautiful things. But now I’m more obsessed with coherent things. Brands that hang together across touchpoints. Ideas that resonate at every altitude. Teams that know who they are and how to show up.
Being a Xennial gave me a unique vantage point. Not quite digital native, not quite analogue dinosaur. Somewhere in between. Curious. Contradictory. Comfortable in transition.
Which, as it turns out, is a pretty good place to build brands from.