On this Autumn

Here’s a short summary of what we covered, prepared under Chatham House Rule — we explored much more during the session.

Our next DBA Members’ Forum is on Monday 1 September at 4pm BST.

The Discover! Creative Careers programme is back, and this time for a whole month in 2025. This means more time to get involved, more creative career encounters for young people, and more impact. 

If you’re an employer in the design sector, please consider spending some time this November showing 11–18-year-olds what a career in design looks like through in-school, workplace or online activities. 

Head over to Discover’s website where you can explore their industry toolkit, getting started guide and encouraging case studies on what industry employers have done in previous years. Let’s inspire the future workforce for the sector – register your interest today. You can also attend an online information session on 3 September at 12.30-1.15pm. 

What is Discover! Creative Careers?

Wondering where to start?

Running throughout November, the initiative aims to provide opportunities for young people to gain insight into real job roles and pathways.

The DBA is encouraging as many members as possible – especially those in product and graphic design – to support Discover! this year. It’s easy to register your interest now to start getting prepared. There are many ways you and/or your business could help inspire young people, from giving a virtual talk to advising schools on how to engage with industry.

Last year, DBA member BAGGI hosted a fun and interactive brand workshop for A-level students at Strode’s College in Surrey. “We wanted to put something back locally and inspire young people to consider a career in design,” says the brand consultancy’s founder Mark Baxter.

Nurturing future talent and supporting the local community are two things BAGGI are particularly passionate about and Mark believes Discover! is an important initiative to elevate the role of design in society, “so young people can see a future that’s relevant and can make real change,” he says.

“We ran a half day workshop at Strode College,” explains Mark. The session was a mixture of practical, theoretical and team-based exercises, covering areas such as what makes an effective brand, how to approach and interrogate a brief, and the process and roles within a creative agency, as well as a fun quiz and Q&A session. There was great feedback from the students and a number have since been in contact with Mark for advice on CVs and portfolios, with BAGGI currently considering summer work experience.

The agency also works with Bucks New Uni and are extremely keen to support local talent. Of being involved in Discover! “we’re super proud” says Mark, who highlights how “hugely rewarding” it can be for a design team or business to support the initiative.

Mark encourages other agencies to be proactive – “if there’s a school or college you know, get on the front foot and reach out to them,” he says. “Make a difference in young people’s lives by getting them excited about design!” adding how participating in the Discover! programme is “also hugely energising for both sides, and the tutors too”.

“There are so many ways you can get involved, from opening-up your studio for a day, to a one-hour online or in-school talk,” says the DBA’s Chief Executive, Deborah Dawton.

“If you are passionate about design, the richness it brings to your life and the wider world, I’d really encourage you to support ‘Discover! Creative Careers Month’ this November. Simply share your enthusiasm for design – what it’s like to work in our fantastic sector – and you could inspire a young person on a path they’d never even considered before.

Help us make a difference attracting and diversifying the next generation of design talent.”

• At a time when creativity is under threat and facing cutbacks, Rama calls for creative leaders to use their inherent skills of empathy, clarity and creativity to design new models of leadership.
• Driven by a desire to make business more inclusive and to provide leaders with the ability to apply their creativity to how they lead, Rama’s book is aimed at creatives and business leaders. It’s packed full of tools to make leadership more inclusive, impactful and human-centred. 
• It’s important to recognise your strengths but also pay attention to where you may favour one approach over another – great leadership requires balance. If you naturally lead with more empathy, where can you bring in more clarity or creativity? 
• Buy Rama’s book -> Creative Leadership: How to Design the 21st-century Organisation. 
• Clive was inspired by teaching non designers about service design which led him to translate how designers think and approach challenges for a wider audience. 
• His book reframes service design for everyone, showing how putting customers front and centre and prioritising desirability first helps businesses solve the right problems, not just one part of an experience.
• When all touchpoints align around the customer, you create the conditions for lasting, customer-led transformation.
• Buy Clive’s book Redesigning Thinking: How Service Design is Solving our 21st Century Challenges with the discount code DGBREDESIGNTHINK30.

And if AI is your thing, I’m reading How to think about AI (A guide for the Perplexed) – by Richard Susskind – thoroughly recommend it!

Coming up

Our next DBA Members’ Forum is on Tuesday 5 August (Monday is a Bank Holiday in Scotland) at 4pm BST. Further details available soon. 

• Universities in the UK are under financial strain. Tuition fees are frozen but costs are rising, and international student numbers are down due to visa restrictions. Many institutions are restructuring with some closing courses altogether.
• Research excellence helps attract global talent, but this has led to practitioner-led teaching and industry experience among teaching staff facing decline in some areas, weakening the bridge between education and professional practice.
• Success metrics for courses often hinge on short-term graduate earnings, which don’t reflect the longer time careers in the creative industry can take to become established. 
• A recent graduate discussed how six months of experience in industry brought more value and impact than years of study – and given the £100k debt some are leaving university with, there has to be a better way for those who can’t afford the fees.
• Alternatives like apprenticeships and internships are gaining momentum, but they need industry support. 
• Strong industry relationships with local higher education institutions are vital – especially where placements are part of the course. 
• Graduates still face a saturated job market with unrealistic demands for experience. Many bring broad, interdisciplinary thinking, but encounter employers seeking narrow specialism.
• Core design skills of empathy, vision, craft, intuition remain constant. Younger designers are highly adaptive and open to self-learning. They need space to explore, problem-solve and engage with real-world issues, not polish portfolios.
• Design leaders have a role to play – closer ties between industry and education benefit everyone. If we want a future talent pool ready to meet the demands of a changing world, we need to support more flexible, inclusive and practice-rich pathways into our industry.

Coming up

Our next DBA Members’ Forum is on Monday 7 July at 4pm BST. Further details available soon. 

I look at a lot of design agencies’ websites and see variations on the same positioning statements repeated business-after-business:

• We are an agency with creativity at our heart
• We work for purpose led brands
• We work for large multinationals and small starts-ups alike
• We work with brave clients
• Our culture sets us apart

Up to the Light’s latest ‘What Clients Think’ report, published in association with the DBA this Spring found that 61% of clients admit to finding it difficult to establish what an agency is best at when looking at their website. When tens of thousands of design businesses take a broad-stroke approach, the problem is that too many agencies look and sound alike.

While these statements might be attempts to keep the new business funnel as wide as possible, in essence what you are saying is that every company is a potential client – and the flip side is that homogeneity works the other way too, creating a sea of sameness in which you are just another design business. When all agencies look and sound alike it creates a problem for some clients: in their eyes there are then only two differentiating factors to choose on:

• price – who is the cheapest?
• and a response to a brief – which creative do we like the best?

Clients will often ask for a free pitch because they cannot tell agencies apart. So how can you avoid being asked in the first place, or effectively rebut the request if you are?

A good place to start with developing your positioning statement is to look at your parameters:

Who won’t you work with? Cut out all the sectors that are not relevant to you.

What size budgets will you /won’t you work for? Is the cut off £10,000 or £50,000? The structure of your business will dictate what your minimum engagement should be. Simply saying “we usually work on projects with design fees between x and y” will save you a lot of time and wasted effort with businesses who should be fishing in other pools.

Design agencies have a hard time tightening up their own positioning. “You can’t read the label from the inside of the jar,” as David C. Baker says, so having an external perspective is crucial, but essentially you need to do to your business what you do for your clients. Be creative and use your expertise to differentiate your business. Don’t become the cobbler with the barefoot children, as the saying goes. Visit the DBA Experts Register for support from experts who can help you “read the label.”

When clients find it difficult to differentiate agencies, this can be particularly frustrating when they look at a website and cannot easily understand what it is the agency does. 70% of clients prefer a statement on the home page that sums up what the agency is all about, while 56% of clients believe that agency websites lack clarity around the agency’s positioning and offer.