The Invisible Ninety
The hidden work behind the moments that matter.
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:
“It’s not about the ninety percent of
stuff you can’t see — it’s the ten
percent that you can.”
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.