Found material, challenging conventions and going rogue

This week, we interview Alex K. Johns, partner at Further London. Over the past 17 years, he has helped brands and ambitious leaders creatively engage with the future, including Penguin Random House, British Airways, Tencent Games, Ubisoft and Logitech. Alex has spoken and lectured around the world, and his work has been recognised by the Tokyo Type Directors Club, D&AD and the Art Directors Club of New York, among others.

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Alex talks to us about found material, challenging conventions, and going rogue.

Design

What would your monograph be called?

In the Test Kitchen.

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And I imagine it would probably be much closer to a self-published zine than a coffee table book.

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What recent design work made you a bit jealous?

Uncommon’s British Airways campaign.

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It was a sharp idea, beautifully executed. But the bit that I admire most is the work that must have been done behind the scenes to give BA the confidence to run it.

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A small act of rebellion against ‘best practice’, an emboldened client and a clear vision.

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Loads of reasons why not to do it. But they did. And it killed.

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What’s an unusual place you get inspiration from?

I love ideas built from found material.

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Stuff that’s already there, that you pick up, brush off, and say ‘this is interesting’.

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When we worked with the Mexican restaurant, Wahaca, on their experimental offering, I got irrationally obsessed with the metal tray they served their tacos on. It was a beautiful utilitarian object; it sat at the centre of every table, and it was the shape of a big ‘W’.

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A gift of a found object. A ready-made brand. That tray ended up informing everything from the storefront patterns to the custom typography to the custom-built oversize taco tray swing signs that doubled as their logo.

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Name something that is brilliantly designed, but overlooked.

The TfL ‘Baby on board’ badge.

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Disarmingly simple, cheap and effective.

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I really love seeing it work when someone wearing it gets on the bus and there’s that flash of the badge, the moment of recognition, then a bit of a leap up. A brilliant bit of service design.

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What object in your studio best sums up your taste?

A set of cue cards we created for our ‘Creative Test Kitchen’ designed to change how you think about big challenges. We’ve given away dozens of these exploratory decks over the last few years, and I still dip into them daily.

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Part tool, part prototype, part plaything → It’s all the things I love in one object.

Leadership

What feedback felt brutal at the time, but turned out to be useful?

Around the time I became a Design Director, I had the chance to lead a final round creative presentation to one of the most exciting clients I’d ever worked with. It felt like a real moment to step up, and I was all nerves for the week leading up to it.

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On the day, everyone nailed their parts, and we came away full of relief, pride, and exhaustion. In the taxi ride back to the studio, I only got one piece of feedback…

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“You used ‘I’ throughout that whole presentation. Always say ‘we’, never say ‘I’. You’re representing a whole team up there.”

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At a moment when I was hoping for a ‘You smashed it’, I got a crushing but invaluable piece of feedback around collective ownership that has stayed with me to this day.

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What’s an underappreciated skill that design leaders need?

Going rogue.

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I think great leaders build up an intuition for when a process needs a creative intervention.

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A process that’s become paint-by-numbers, a client that’s stopped being surprised, or a team circling the same concepts for days; all strong signals to go rogue.

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One of my proudest rogue moments was in the middle of a years-long process rationalising British Airways’ digital ecosystem. We’d built a great working rhythm and were deep into the information architecture phase, with weeks of logical, smart presentations unpacking sitemaps and top-level navigation under our belt. But I felt it had all become a bit boring. We needed the final IA playback to get its moment in the sun that the other ‘more creative’ phases had enjoyed.

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So for the final presentation, we welcomed BA’s Head of Digital into our studio and rather than subject them to another playback deck, we presented the final answer on a T-shirt. It simply said…

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‘I went to DS to get my IA and all I got was: Discover, Book, Manage’

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A moment of radical reduction. An answer with nowhere to hide.

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A signal of our confidence in the outcome. It was either going to be a grand gesture or get me fired.

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Luckily, the idea landed, the meeting became a folk story, and our client wore the T-shirt at our end-of-year partner review.

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What trait is non-negotiable in new hires?

Great work and good attitude.

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Someone who can challenge us, excite us and scare us with their talent.

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With ideas that take our practice somewhere new and work that’s shifted taste, behaviour or expectations in some meaningful way. Stuff we wished we’d done.

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What keeps you up at night?

It’s still the pitches and the big presentations. The moments where you know you’ve got something special and don’t want to mess it up.

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I’m running it through in my mind, adding the builds, tweaking the slides, finding the beats. Excitement, fear, and butterflies.

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Complete this sentence: “I wish more clients…”

…became sparring partners.

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Fewer asks, more challenges. Bring us big, open questions that don’t have a ready-made answer, and let’s work out how to solve them together.

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Some of the most rewarding relationships I’ve had are with these long-term collaborators.

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The original article can be found here.