Mapping London’s Design Economy

That’s why the Design Council enlisted us to distil and transform insights from its Design Economy report into a visually striking poster for the 2022 London Design Festival.

The brief: create a large-format map of London’s unique design communities and showcase the impact of the capital’s design economy.

The final poster would be shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum but it also needed to seamlessly translate to social media. Other challenges included pulling out London-specific insights from a broader UK dataset, testing different ways of mapping boroughs and laying out multiple visualizations into a cohesive narrative.

Our iterative design process, including large-scale accessibility tests, ensured real-world impact. Sections of the poster were taped up around our studio for weeks, refining font sizes, colour scales and readability at a distance.

The visuals and narrative of the London Design Economy map catered to policy makers, making a case for investing in different design disciplines across the capital. It also engaged the broader design community – letting people in different disciplines find themselves in the data.

This collaboration lives on as a visual representation of London in the Design Council's broader Design Economy research.