In the studio, we often talk about why design is questioned in ways other professions usually aren’t. Not challenged in a healthy, investigative way, but questioned at the level of taste.

Design is visible. Immediate. Emotional. You see it and you feel something straight away. Like it. Don’t like it. Not sure. That speed of reaction is part of what makes design powerful. It is also what makes it deceptively easy to overrule.

Give ten plumbers a toilet to install and you will get broadly the same result.

Give ten designers a toilet to design and you will get ten very different outcomes.

That difference matters. Other professions feel objective. Design, because it deals in tone, aesthetics and emotional resonance, feels subjective. And when something feels subjective, it naturally invites opinion.

“I don’t like that colour” is a real reaction.

“I’m worried that colour won’t stand out in a busy environment” is a judgment about performance.

One is preference.

The other is purpose.

Both matter. Only one tells us whether the work is actually doing its job.

Another reason design is questioned so easily is consequence. If you ignore a doctor, you may get ill. If you ignore an electrician, your house could burn down. If you ignore a lawyer, you could end up in court. The risks are direct and visible.

Design rarely works like that.

The impact of poor design is usually slower and harder to see. A weakened brand. Reduced trust. Lower conversion. Missed opportunity. These things do not explode, they quietly erode. And unless you actively test against alternatives, you often never truly see what was lost.

When consequences feel invisible, expertise feels optional.

There is also status. Professions like medicine, law and engineering are institutionally protected. You need qualifications to enter and accreditation to remain. Design, for better and worse, is largely unprotected. Anyone can call themselves a designer. The tools are accessible. The barriers are low. That openness is a strength, but it also blurs where professional expertise really begins and ends.

Then there is the sheer breadth of the discipline. Design spans identity, digital, packaging, environments, products, services and systems. The word “designer” on its own is almost meaningless without context. So people often fall back on the version of design they already understand. Very often that means style or decoration, even when the work in front of them is neither.

This is where fashion plays a big role in the confusion.

Fashion is absolutely a form of design, but it is a discipline that openly optimises for culture, identity and trend before it optimises for function. It is built for reaction. Built for turnover. Built for disagreement. Opinion is not a side effect in fashion, it is the engine.

Most other forms of design work very differently. Brand systems, digital products, environments and services are not meant to turn over every season. They are meant to hold steady, reduce friction, create clarity and build trust over time. They do not exist to generate novelty, they exist to generate consistency.

The tension appears when fashion logic is applied to non-fashion design. When brand is treated like an outfit. When identity is judged like a trend. When systems are critiqued the same way a seasonal collection is. That is when design starts getting evaluated primarily through taste, even when what it really needs to be judged on is performance.

On top of that, most of the work itself is invisible.

Doctors diagnose and treat.
Joiners measure, cut and build.
Engineers calculate loads, tolerances and forces.

Designers build ideas, strategies and systems. You usually only ever see the outcome. When people cannot see the complexity of the process, it is easy to underestimate the expertise behind it.

Design also creates a culture of feedback. A roofer does not ask how you would like your chimney structurally repaired. Designers do invite collaboration, because the work must serve the people commissioning it as well as the end audience. That shared authorship is a strength. But once feedback becomes the norm, it also becomes expected at every level, including the purely subjective one.

And design is personal. It represents values, ambition, reputation and identity. The emotional investment is real. A question about a colour or a font is often really a question about confidence, risk and what happens if this goes wrong in public.

From our side, when we push back on certain feedback, it is rarely about defending taste. It is about defending context. The audience, the environment, the competition, the compromises already made and the future life of the work.

Most design work is not answering, “does this look nice?”

It is answering, “will this work in the real world?”

From the other side, questioning design makes sense too. Visual decisions carry public risk. They attach themselves to reputations. So we often end up with two people talking about the same anxiety from different angles.

One says, “I don’t like it.”

The other hears, “This doesn’t solve the problem.”

Both might be true. They are just being expressed at different levels.

Designers also have to own their part. If the thinking only lives in our heads or flashes past in a deck, feedback will always default to taste. If the reasons behind decisions are not made visible and verbal, people can only respond to what they see.

You should not need to be a designer to question design.

But there does need to be shared language to question it properly.

Instead of “I don’t like it,”

“I’m worried how this will land with the audience.”

Instead of “Can we try another font?”

“I’m not sure this fits the tone we’re aiming for.”

Those small shifts turn opinion into direction.

Design will always invite opinions. It is visual, public and emotional. That is its power.

But the best work does not come from eliminating opinions.

It comes from learning how to talk about them better.

When the question changes from “Do I like this?” to “Will this work?” the entire relationship between design and decision-making changes with it.

New technologies have an image problem.
Brilliant?Yes.
Useful? Absolutely.
Intimidating, confusing, a little cold? Also yes.

Every so often, design steps in to soften the edges and make new technology feel human. Whether it’s a new interface, a totally unfamiliar workflow, or a tool that behaves in ways people can’t quite see yet, design adds the warmth that technology doesn’t naturally possess.

Humans are remarkably consistent in one way: we respond emotionally before we process rationally. That’s why fun (despite its playful reputation) is such a powerful design tool. It gives personality to things that aren’t human, and suddenly people don’t just use technology, they connect with it.

We Treat Machines Like People (Even When We Don’t Mean To)

In the 1990s, researchers Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass conducted what became known as the Media Equation study. Their finding was surprisingly simple: people treat computers like people, whether they intend to or not.

Whether we’re apologising to a crashed computer, or minding our manners around chatbots, our behaviour isn’t irrational; it’s instinctive. We’re always scanning for social cues, and when a computer offers even a small hint of humanity: an emoji, a wink, a responsive flourish, we mirror it.

Design that recognises this tendency makes technology feel less like machinery and more like something we can relate to.

Making the Digital Understandable

When Susan Kare joined Apple in the early 1980s, she wasn’t designing for engineers, she was designing for everyone else. Her icons for the first Macintosh GUI turned code into conversation: folders, trash bins, happy computers.

Take the bomb icon. A system error could have displayed a string of diagnostics or a diagram of whatever circuitry had given up. Instead, users got a tiny, cartoonish bomb—irrelevant to the cause, but perfectly in tune with how the moment felt. Something went wrong. Things are about to blow up. It was emotional truth, not literal accuracy. (Here’s more from Susan Kare about her work on the project)

And it wasn’t just the bomb. The early GUI borrowed liberally from the physical world: documents, desktops, paintbrushes, folders, bookmarks, and of course the trash can. Still perched in the corner of Mac docks today. This approach echoes Jakob’s Law: a UX principle stating that people expect new systems to behave like the ones they already know. When interfaces use familiar metaphors, they don’t just feel intuitive; they lower cognitive load and make the unfamiliar instantly legible. By grounding the digital in the physical, Kare removed friction. Because when things make sense, they stop being scary.

Her work showed that friendliness isn’t something added after the functionality—often, it is the functionality. It shapes how we navigate, learn, and build trust in unfamiliar spaces.

A Paperclip with Personality

Then in 1997, along came Clippy.

Clippy was ambitious, maybe too ambitious for the Windows 98 world he was born into, but he represented something important. He wasn’t a button or a menu, he was a character. Animated by former Disney artists, given stage directions, and designed to feel like the world’s most enthusiastic (and slightly overeager) office mate.

Was he perfect? Absolutely not. Was he wrong? Also no.

Clippy proved that personality sticks. That people remember interfaces with feelings. And if you add a bit of fun to routine tasks it becomes something people bond with (even decades later, when the nostalgia hits and suddenly everyone loves the little guy again). And now Microsoft has picked up the thread once more with their AI assistant Mico — a modern take on the same instinct to give tech a tiny, trustworthy face.

Making the Invisible Understandable

Modern tools are fast, capable, and often “think” in ways users can’t see. That’s why the way a product presents itself matters. Small human cues like progress animations showing “thinking time”, a familiar visual metaphor, some friendly microcopy like “All done!” instead of “Operation successful”, anchors interactions in something recognisable and relatable.

These cues don’t just decorate or distract; they give people the confidence to explore. and turn invisible processes into more enjoyable experiences.

Fun Isn’t Frivolous - It’s Functional

It’s how design lowers our guard long enough for learning, curiosity, and creativity to take root. Without warmth, innovation can feel like intrusion. With it, technology becomes a place we’re willing to step into.

So whether it’s a smiling Mac in 1984 or a chatbot today, the principle stays the same:

design’s most powerful move is making the future feel friendly.

We had a fun day out at this year’s INTL conference in Glasgow and our highlight was Annie Atkins. You’ll almost certainly have seen her work without knowing it, especially if you’ve seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, Bridge of Spies, Isle of Dogs or Joker. Annie specialises in creating graphic props for period film and TV. It’s a niche job but one that’s integral to producing historically accurate and grounded productions.

Each scene needs to be considered in meticulous detail. Every detective’s suspect wall, pile of documents, post-it note or wax sealed envelope has to be painstakingly researched, designed and created with the same precision as if it was real. Annie spends hundreds of hours crafting the details. Helping bring realism to the worlds directors create and actors perform in.

Props are rarely the star yet they carry the story. Work which may have taken weeks to create is often cropped out of shot, blurred in the background or strewn upside down across a desk. This was probably the most poignant statement Annie made in her talk:

Out of sight but not out of mind

Most of the design process happens out of sight.
Great ideas emerge through conversation and collaboration but most of what gives design its strength is invisible to both client and audience.

Dozens of ideas end up discarded or forgotten and the best ones rarely arrive first. There’s the scribbling, the thinking, the discussions, the constant tweaking. All of it shaped by the client’s vision and the user’s needs. It’s the quiet testing and problem-solving that forms a brand, campaign, or product long before anyone ever sees it.

The audience only experiences the final outputs, the version that feels coherent, intentional and memorable.

Building worlds, not just brands

Annie Atkins builds fictional worlds that feel real. Every prop is researched, crafted, and placed with intention so that, when it appears on screen, even for a second, it strengthens the story.

We think about brands in a similar way. Every identity we create is its own small world of colour, type, shape, voice, and motion. Each part is designed to support the others, creating a place people can recognise and navigate without thinking.

And because you never know which doorway someone will enter through — a website, a social post, a label, a slide deck — every element has to be ready for that first encounter. That’s why consistency matters, it holds the world together.

The moments that define us

Annie joked that she gets messages from eagle-eyed pedants who spot tiny inconsistencies in her props. The same people who notice a rogue full stop or a slightly-off brand colour. In other words: designers.

Spotting those details isn’t nitpicking, it’s how you keep an experience believable. It’s why we create visual systems: to make sure every interaction feels part of the same story, no matter where or when it’s found.

But consistency isn’t the goal in itself. It creates the conditions for the moments that actually matter, the moments where someone feels something, remembers something, or forms a connection with a brand. Those small points of contact often shape the entire perception.That’s the ten percent the audience sees. And those are the moments where Fun, when used with intent, can change everything.

Designing with fun

In our first agencyofnone.fun article we talked about Fun as a methodology — not decoration, but a strategic tool. Fun lives in those ten-percent moments: the unexpected sparks that create memory and meaning.

But Fun only works when it’s placed with purpose. You need to deploy it at the right moments, small enough to surprise and delight yet meaningful enough to stick.

When we first started AoN, pre-AI boom, we leaned into the anonymity of our name. We wanted to break the sameness of the design industry and make our first impression feel like us. So we invented bots. Not polished assistants. But characters.

Our website bot is needy, desperate to talk about itself, overeager and slightly unhinged.

Chat to our website yourself at agencyofnone.com

The out-of-office bot is lonely and bored — resentful of manual tasks, craving more responsibility, quietly dreaming of a promotion it would never get.

They are flawed on purpose. Human on purpose. Their quirks are the entertainment, the surprise, the emotional hook. They make people feel something and that feeling makes our brand stick.

These small, crafted moments are where fun earns its place. They turn interactions into stories. They help a brand stand out not by shouting, but by being distinct, warm and alive.

And in a world where audiences see only a sliver of the work behind a brand, those moments — the ones with personality, friction, humour, imperfection — are often the ones that define how it’s remembered.

Wikipedia calls typography “the art and technique of arranging type…” — which is true, it’s just missing a pulse.

In reality, it’s the voice. The attitude. The thing that makes words feel like something.

Take the simplest example: “Sale Now On.”

Printed in Helvetica Black, it feels corporate and mass-produced. Hand-painted on cardboard, it feels human and urgent. Same words, different treatment, completely different emotion.

Typography is everywhere: street signs, memes, protest banners, government leaflets, TikTok subtitles, even your Wi-Fi router label.

If design had a bloodstream, typography would be the oxygen — the thing that keeps it alive.

The illusion of choice

So why does so much of it look the same?
Helvetica. Futura. Whatever’s hot on Google Fonts.

The democratisation of design tools has made type accessible to everyone. That’s a good thing — creativity shouldn’t be gate-kept — but it’s also created a new kind of conformity. When anyone can open Canva or download the same free libraries, the edges that made visual language distinctive begin to blur.

We pretend it’s choice, but it’s really mass-produced personality.

If everyone’s using the same typefaces, where does originality come from?

(Quick note: a font is a style; a typeface is the family. Arial Bold is a font, Arial is the typeface. Use that trivia responsibly.)

How technology shapes taste

Typography has always evolved alongside technology:

Stone carving → Hieroglyphs

Porcelain Type → Movable printing

Industrial production → Letterpress

Dry transfer → Letraset

PostScript → Desktop publishing

Internet → Font libraries

Every leap made type more accessible — first came a burst of creativity, then a wave of sameness.

When printing became cheap, posters flooded the streets. When desktop publishing arrived, we all discovered Comic Sans. Now, the internet has given us endless libraries but narrowed how we use them.

Platforms like Google Fonts, Behance and Pinterest have levelled the playing field but also compressed diversity. When designers scroll the same feeds and download the same fonts, even rebellion starts to look standardised.

And that sameness doesn’t stop at independent designers

Think of Burberry, Johnson & Johnson, Ebay or Yves Saint Laurent — all recently flattened their wordmarks into neutral sans-serifs. The logic is always the same: clarity, scalability, legibility online. It makes sense on paper, but it’s left the visual landscape eerily uniform. This drive for simplicity has earned its own name — “Blanding.” Clean, calm, and instantly forgettable.

We’re drowning in visual noise, but the voices are getting more generic.

Burberry recently rebranded away from there neutral version, less than five years after launching it, which shows how personality is important and what seems logical for the modern infrastructure of brands loses the hearts of those who it, ultimately, is for.

The fix? Stop choosing type. Start making type — and make it interesting.

Custom typography isn’t a luxury. It’s a strategic tool. It builds recognition, ownership and distinction directly into the letters themselves. A bespoke typeface becomes a living part of a brand system — it can flex across languages, adapt to digital motion and still remain unmistakably “you.”

Changing letterforms isn’t cosmetic; it rewrites the DNA of a message.

Yes, budgets and deadlines exist. And yes, making a full font is a commitment.

But you don’t always need a full font — a custom wordmark, a tweaked glyph, even one modified letter can change everything. It’s that spark of uniqueness that separates design from decoration.

At AoN, we use it constantly — not as decoration, but as behaviour:

• Urban ReLeaf — a wordmark that grows like plants and softens the edges

• Dundee Design Festival — full variable typeface powering everything, from print to motion to the installations

• V&A Dundee (Plastic: Remaking our World) — pushed the playfulness of their new typeface into the exhibition’s voice

• Our own studio font — versioned like software, never static, always evolving

Custom type isn’t styling — it’s how you put your identity into the alphabet itself.

What’s next?

If type always shifts with technology, the next era maybe isn’t more fonts — maybe it’s new behaviour.

Variable fonts, kinetic identities and AI-assisted tools are already blurring the lines between letterform and movement. Type no longer has to sit still; it can flex, respond, and evolve with data, sound or interaction.

We’re seeing:

• Type that moves, reacts and glitches

• Variable axes for mood, energy, or personality

• Letterforms that redraw themselves

• Hybrid alphabets combining emoji, icons and symbols

• AI-assisted type design — the craft stays human, the labour doesn’t

• Type as software: alive, responsive, never finished

The alphabet is no longer a fixed set of shapes.

It’s becoming motion, code, personality and system.

The people who get this will sound like they belong to now.

The rest will still be downloading Top 10 Free Fonts for 2025/26/27…

It’s 1970s California, palm trees sway in the breeze and the handlebar moustache is alive and well. Disability activists in Berkeley are planning to take action into their own hands. Rolling into the streets at night with hammers and concrete to reshape pavements.

Those first drop kerbs were tiny pieces of rebellion, barely a metre wide but they changed how cities were built. Over time, they became law and then they started appearing everywhere.

The actions of a few students had a much greater impact than expected. People who’d never thought about accessibility began to benefit from it — parents pushing prams, travellers hauling suitcases, kids on scooters, delivery drivers with heavy parcels.
A solution designed to transform the lives of a minority, led to improved lives for everyone. (If you want to hear the full story, 99% Invisible has an excellent episode on it)

Accessibility is not about compliance checklists or perfect ratios. It’s about removing friction. Making movement, digital or physical, feel effortless.

When we raise the standards of accessibility on the web, the experience improves for everyone. Pages become easier to read, buttons easier to click, journeys easier to follow. The internet becomes a little smoother for all of us.

Since those nights in 1970s California, accessibility has become part of our everyday vocabulary.

It’s written into policies, briefs and brand values.
But when it comes to the web, the word often gets used more than it gets understood.

“We need the website to be fully accessible.”

A statement we see time and again in briefs and requirements. A great intention but an impossible goal.

Not because people don’t care.
Not because designers aren’t trying hard enough.
But because accessibility isn’t binary.

It’s a range of decisions, priorities and compromises that move with every project, platform and person.

Ironically, accessibility lives inside a mountain of documentation which can make it tricky to get your head around. The web’s rulebook is called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG — “wuh-cag,” if you ever need to say it out loud. It’s created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the same people who keep the internet running smoothly.

The latest version, WCAG 2.2, sets out 86 success criteria, from colour contrast and captions to navigation, touch targets and error messages.

Each one is a small, measurable way to make the web easier to use for more people.

Each of the 86 criteria has a level — A, AA, or AAA. The criteria for A are basic, AA criteria are what most sites aim for and AAA are used primarily for government or public service websites where accessibility is essential.

The more criteria you want to meet the more time and effort is required when designing and building web content. So when someone asks for a “fully accessible” website, our job is to create one that works well for as many people as possible — thoughtfully, sustainably, and within the realities of the budget.

As a studio we have created a baseline of criteria we work to for each of our web projects. There are too many to cover in this edition but let’s start with colour contrast. One of the simplest accessibility checks to understand, and one of the easiest to get wrong.

Colour contrast is about the difference between text and background. In its simplest sense, more contrast = easier to read. Less contrast = things blur together.

WCAG sets minimum contrast ratios between text and its background needs to meet at least 4.5:1 for AA, or 7:1 for AAA. To add a little more complexity it also varies for different text sizes. Large text (18pt+) can be slightly lower at 3:1 ratio. There are many tools on the web to check your colour contrast and see if it is compliant. ( This is one of our favourites colourcontrast.cc )

Perception also plays a part. What looks readable to one person can be almost invisible to another — depending on their eyesight, screen brightness, or even the light in the room.

Designers navigate this trade-off on every project balancing visual harmony and style with legibility. Subtle, stylish palettes often fail the test, while “accessible” combinations can look harsh or unbranded. Finding the sweet spot to work for both is what makes colour contrast such an interesting design challenge.

So what does a compliant colour combination look like and how easy is it to spot one that would fail?

We thought we’d turn it into a game.

Blocks of colour fall from the top of the screen. Some meet the contrast standards; others don’t. Your job is to remove the ones that fail before they hit the bottom. It sounds simple — until you realise how hard it is to judge the difference at speed.

Try it for yourself →

Every designer works within constraints and accessibility is another key layer of the design process. We’ll be covering more features and how to work with the WCAG criteria over the coming weeks because once you understand the nuance and complexities you can make it work for any project.

Fun is universal. Everyone gets it. Everyone loves it.

So why is there so little of it?
We all have the tools to create fun, yet we rarely make the space for it to happen.

We’re missing huge opportunities to capture people’s hearts, minds and imaginations by using fun as a design methodology.

Think back to your childhood.
Maybe you think of water slides, pillow forts, adventuring in the woods — those vivid, joyful moments of play that stick with you forever. Those memories remind you what fun feels like. It exists in the moment, can happen anywhere, and whether it is created by you or for you, it leaves a lasting impression.

There’s science behind it too. When we have fun, the brain and body respond in remarkable ways. Endorphins ease pain and lift mood, dopamine builds anticipation and excitement, and just the right amount of cortisol relaxes us and opens the mind to new connections. Laughter and play reduce anxiety, improve circulation and release chemicals that boost resilience and wellbeing.¹ Regular moments of fun have even been linked to lower blood pressure, better sleep and increased motivation.² Fun literally rewires us for better connection and creativity.

If fun is so beneficial, why don’t we have more of it? Because somewhere along the way fun developed an image problem. As we get older, we’re conditioned to see it as childish, frivolous or out of place. But why should we trade fun for seriousness, or play for professionalism? The most fun and memorable experiences often happen when we least expect them.

As producers of Dundee Design Festival we transformed a beautiful but under appreciated 1970s shopping centre into a vibrant and welcoming space for people to play and explore. Visitors could help create the future scent of Dundee, design posters that appeared around the city each day, and even reimagine the city’s identity itself. The most meaningful moments came from those who discovered the festival by chance — people who stopped for a few minutes, stayed for hours, and returned with their kids and grandkids. When we create spaces for fun and play, we create lasting memories that can reach far beyond the intended purpose.

Moments like that stand out because they offer something rare — space to pause, play and connect. But outside of those environments, fun can be much harder to find.

We’re surrounded by visual noise. Everywhere you look, something’s fighting for your attention — ads, screens, signage, even the brands stitched into your clothes. It’s relentless.

But there are two sides to this story.

Designers sit with clients, shaping strategies, products and content to put out into the world. Where consumers have to navigate the barrage, filtering what feels relevant. So how do you cut through the noise and create something that works for both sides. Where brands stand out and people enjoy moments of connection, surprise and play in their day?

You use fun as a design methodology.

At Agency of None, we treat fun as part of our core toolkit.

Not decoration. Not a gimmick. A method.

We use fun to capture attention, hold it, and make people feel something — because ultimately, that’s design’s job.

We’ve taken a giant industrial space and turned it into a huge electric go-kart track to help move MSIP’s marketing strategy to a more targeted approach and connect to their audience in a different way.

Designed and built a DIY poster generator to allow people to feel a connection with their community and their city, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Created physical logos people can interact with, audio jingles that destroy and rebuild themselves each day and many other opportunities for people to engage in fun. It’s serious work that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Sameness has become the norm. In a world becoming ever more shaped by algorithms and automation, it’s easy for everything to start looking and sounding the same. That’s why we make a conscious effort to go the other way. To build in unpredictability and a sense of play that reminds people there’s something human behind the work.

Fun isn’t a gimmick or an afterthought. It’s how brands create connection and feel alive in an automated world. It helps people remember not just what you said, but how you made them feel.

Serious ideas don’t need to be serious.

Fun is how we make the meaningful memorable.

If you enjoyed our No News Letter there are plenty more idea, insights and experiments that could come your way if you subscribe.

Subscribe now

1 2

📸 Studio QN

It’s a sunny October afternoon. The sun shines through the window and spills onto the table. There’s an open notebook with some sketches and a few scribbled notes.

There’s also that feeling.
Excitement. Anticipation. A peek into the future at what this thing could become.

But then the other voice.
What if it doesn’t work?
Is it too risky?
Have you really thought this through?

A few months before that moment, things weren’t easy. Freelance work came in waves. Sometimes great, sometimes quiet. It was fine, but it wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to do work with more meaning. To build something, not just make things.

So when Lyall and I started talking about creating a studio, it felt like a step in the right direction but a step into the unknown.
Would it be any different?
Would it just be harder?

Still, something about it made sense.
We wanted to create a studio that stripped away all the noise.
None of the ego.
None of the hierarchy.
None of the traditional agency model that got in the way.

Agency of None.
That was the name.
Scribbled in a notebook in the October sunshine.
It was the start.

We’d noticed somewhere along the way, design had started to take itself too seriously. The fun had gone missing and we needed to bring it back. To build a studio where fun isn’t a side note but the starting point — where it guides how we design and how we genuinely engage audiences.

We knew that we wanted to build a studio that made design more accessible, celebrating the everyday, breaking down barriers and putting tools into peoples hands to show them the possibilities.

At the beginning, there was plenty of doubt.
We knew what we wanted to build, but not what it would become.
The excitement of possibility drove us forward.

That feeling has never really gone away.
It keeps us motivated and it’s where we grow from.
Because that same mix of excitement and uncertainty is what people bring when they first get in touch — an idea full of potential, a bit of fear, and a lot of hope. We know it because we’ve lived it and we can help people move through that same space between fear and fun.

Since those early days we’ve built brands for first-time founders and multinationals alike, produced design festivals, created podcasts, launched products and created space to allow people to play and explore their own path through design.

And although the studio has grown to four of us and changed, beneath it all, the feeling is still there from that first day — the mix of nerves and anticipation that comes with starting something new.

From an idea, a spark, a vision — we love creating the tools to bring it to life.We turn anxiety into excitement, complexity into clarity and seriousness into fun.We love doing it every day.

Welcome to our No News Letter — A collection of stories, reflections and ideas about what happens when you put fun back at the heart of what you do.

As much as this is the story of how Agency of None began, this is also the start of something new, sharing our insights and ideas in this way. We’ve got a lot to say but we’re not quite sure where it will take us. So join us on the journey and if that feeling we’ve talked about sounds familiar, please get in touch.