Transform magazine caught up with Paul Worthington ahead of his keynote at the Brand New Conference, a two-day corporate and brand identity event held this year in Austin, Texas. With extensive brand design experience, he founded Invencion, his own strategic brand innovation consultancy, in 2011 after a decade at Wolff Olins. Used to telling it like it is, Paul discusses his career highlights, what good branding really is, and what the advent of AI will mean for the world of brand design. .
What is your favorite work that you have produced in your career?
I’m going to give you two things that are quite radically opposed to each other. The first is not a job, it’s actually a pitch. In 2011, we [at Wolff Olins] launched and won a really important global unification job for Microsoft, which was probably the biggest and most important branding challenge at the time, because at the time, they were the biggest company in the world. The reason this is important is that after 2008 we were really hit by the financial crisis. By winning this job, it allowed me to leave. By winning this position, he created the financial stability the company needed. That’s when I felt like I could step back and leave the company and leave it in an incredibly healthy place. I left a lot of people who were friends and felt like I left them in a really strong place.
The second thing is going to be completely different, which is actually the newsletter that I write, that I’ve been writing for about two years now. The reason I’m incredibly proud of it is that I get a lot of emails from people telling me that it’s incredibly helpful to them in their careers and in their work, and that they appreciate the ideas and links to information that I provide. I think once you hit a certain age, helping the next generation through it is super important. There’s so much bullshit and snake oil in our business that helping to reduce that for people and helping them see what really matters is really important. And, as an independent practitioner, I don’t have a team that I can do that with directly. To be able to do this remotely to a thousand people is really important to me.
Throughout your career, you have worked on projects for large global companies as well as small start-ups. Do you prefer to create work that solidifies a brand within a category, or do you prefer to create work for category disruptors?
I do not care. I like working for very good people. I used to judge myself when I was young against big jobs, big clients, because I come from the middle of nowhere. Being able to say “I did this work for GE”, “I did this work for Citibank”, or “I did this work for Microsoft”, these large, complicated, difficult clients, that was the measure that I used to judge me against. But, as you get older, you think none of that really matters. And the disruptors are fine too. I really like working with disruptive brands; it’s another part of the brain that you use. But what I always come back to is that I really enjoy working with good clients. I really like working with good people. I really like working with people that you actually have a meaningful impact on and do and do things. If you’re big, if you’re small, if you’re an established brand, or if you’re a disruptor, or if you’re global or national, I actually don’t care about any of those things. I care whether this work is useful to them. Does it help them succeed? Do they like it? And do they like me because of it? And are they good people?
How to do you to differentiate a good design from a bad design?
I think the reality is that we’re in a place where good design is the new bad design. There is no more bad design. So what has happened in the last ten years is that design employment has literally exploded and the number of companies employing designers has gone from a fraction of a percent to all. We’ve gotten to the point where good design, like a well-designed experience, is table stakes. You have to have it or you are literally uncompetitive. As a result, there is no bad design. It literally doesn’t exist at the crafting level. But, because these are table stakes, it raised the bar across the board. It means good design is bad design, which means we need more than just good design. We need something else to be effective, to stand out, to differentiate ourselves, because there was a time, quite literally, when just applying the right, solid design know-how to a business based on category could really make her stand out. and differentiate it because it was a category where there was none. It no longer exists. I don’t know if there is a category anywhere, B2B or B2C, where this is. I think that’s the new reality we have to face.
Are the designers of the modern era in danger of forgetting who is what?
I think there is a risk that design will become very self-referential, that there will be selfish craft snobs, that there will be self-styled arbiters of taste trying to dictate terms. And, as a result, we forget the basics, which is that good design does not equal good branding. In fact, I would appreciate a bad design that stands out and differentiates because that would actually be good branding. We have to stop equating the two; good design and good branding are not the same, they are different things. We’re at a time when there are a lot of people, very serious designers, claiming to be brand designers, who see themselves as arbiters of taste. They literally set their clients’ money on fire because this stuff doesn’t work if it’s fucking all the same. It’s not rocket science, it’s actually very simple. But we forget, I think, because we’ve become so self-referential.
Additionally, the design has been captured by engineering. Much of design today actually embraces the engineering mindset. And when you embrace the mindset of engineering, you embrace the language of engineering. We hear that all the time: it’s efficient, it’s scalable, it’s usable, it’s useful, it’s practical, it’s functional. These are not the words or the language of branding. The words in the language and branding are emotional and different and sexy and weird and whimsical and cool. It’s just a different language. When you use the language of engineering, you think like engineers. And when you think like engineers, you produce work that an engineer would produce. I think that’s one of the things we have to come back to, that’s why we have to lose the language of engineering, because when we use that language, it actually creates worse work.
What do you think the relationship between design and AI will look like? And what might be the consequences for many people working in design?
I think if you look at what technology does, it does three things. And that’s historically, from the wheel to the Gutenberg press to the plane, you name it. He takes things that are expensive, he makes them cheap. He takes hard things, he makes them easy. And it takes things that were slow, and it makes them fast. When you do that, you remove all those constraints, and then you build new things on top of them. So yes, you are losing jobs.
The hitting pool is a very good example of this. There were once armies of people, mostly women, working in corporate offices and typing identical documents. They typed it over and over again because companies needed multiple copies of the same document, and it was the only way to do it. And then the Xerox machine arrives. The Xerox machine makes that thing that used to be slow and expensive and hard for your brain to do all day and make it easy. All these people have lost their jobs. More strike pools. But it also, when you add computers and when you add other things, creates a whole new set of jobs. And if you were to ask anyone today if they would like to go back to working in a typing pool, they would look at you like you were crazy. I think we have to look at it through that lens. Yes, people will lose their jobs. I don’t know who will lose their job. I don’t know how many people will lose their jobs. It will happen.
But that’s not the interesting thing. What’s interesting is what awesomeness do we build next and what are all the new jobs created that take us somewhere different? You know, the Gutenberg press transformed the written word, which in turn transformed the dissemination of ideas in society and was directly linked to the rise of democracy. Without the Gutenberg press, there would be no democracy. I have no idea what these new things are going to be AI-wise, versus design-wise, and I’d be crazy to tell you that I did. But what I can say is if you’re where you’re doing something slow and hard and expensive and it’s replaced by something fast and easy and cheap, you have two choices : you let that wave crash just above your head or you take out your surfboard. Make your choice. This is not me saying it. It’s just what we’ve seen throughout history when it comes to technology. This new stuff will be no different.