Insights Fran Johnson
Fran’s specialist knowledge lies within the sometimes elusive world of brand strategy. Her expertise also spans brand design and business strategy - teamed with much wider interests such as politics, the arts and culture. Fran asks the right questions and often the hard ones. She understands the practical measures needed to form strong, smart brand foundations - and provides insights centred around ‘how you get the most out of your brand’.
Q&A WITH Fran
Inclusive Branding: Accessibility in Brand Design
Accessibility in branding usually means a contrast checker and an alt-text pass. But a brand lives on shelves, shopfronts and phone scripts long before it lives on a website — and inclusive design has to follow it there.
UX and Branding: Why Experience Shapes Identity
Ask most founders to describe their brand and they'll reach for adjectives — bold, warm, trustworthy. Ask them what happens the moment someone actually uses the product, and the conversation gets quieter. That gap is where brands are won or lost.
Updating vs rebranding: how to tell which one you need
A tired logo and an outgrown brand look similar from the inside, but they call for very different responses. Following on from our last post on when to rebrand, we dig into the distinction between a refresh and a full rebrand — what each one can actually fix, and how Mastercard, Jaguar and Gap all landed on different sides of that line.
Sustainable & Ethical Branding in Practice
Sustainable and ethical branding goes far beyond visual style. It’s about alignment, adaptability, transparency, and longevity — creating brand systems that reduce waste, build trust, and genuinely reflect an organisation’s values over time.
How AI is Reshaping Brand Identity
A failed attempt to generate a logo with AI sparks a wider reflection on creativity, authenticity, and sameness in design—and why human designers still play a vital, irreplaceable role in shaping distinctive brands.
Brand Guidelines in practice
A logo or colour palette is just the start of a brand. What really makes a brand coherent over time is guidelines — the set of rules, principles, and tools…
Branding for Charities: Why It Matters, What Makes It Work
Effective charity branding is never about surface-level aesthetics, but about clarity, empathy, and long-term usefulness.
What business leaders should ask of designers
When leaders ask the right questions to designers, design can support and extend the core business / charity strategy.
Crafting a Personal Brand as an Academic: Why It Matters
How do you go about building a brand as an academic? Thoughts on brand strategy and brand identity using two case studies.
How brands can grow over time
Using Charnwood Brewery and its micropubs as examples, we look at how a brand can be flexible enough to grow over time and stay strong.
2024: The year of the maternity leave
If we’ve seemed a bit quiet recently, 2024 was quite the year for a dozen eggs. We grew in numbers, but not in the conventional business sense and found ourselves…
Our top branding agencies in 2023
Taking a look at the latest projects from the top branding studios in the UK and beyond. From packaging to signage and typography to illustration.