Huge fan of Hirst. I know he’s a little Marmite, but isn’t that the point of contemporary art? I feel he will be a reference point in contemporary conversation on the same level as Warhol, Emin and Rand for many years to come.

I was lucky enough to see Away from the Flock at Tate Britain recently. It’s a 1994 artwork and part of Hirst’s ‘putting things in formaldehyde series’ (it’s not actually called that).

Experiencing Damien Hirst’s Away from the Flock

Away from the Flock is a sculpture; it’s presented as a sculpture. It sits unchanged in its glass box and you should experience it as a sculpture. You can walk around it, in a room alongside other artists’ work in a museum with traditional sculpture. It’s unassuming and at the same time it’s unnerving. Quiet, uncomfortable but peaceful.

From controversy to Tate Britain

There are religious interpretations of this artwork that I understand, but that isn’t what resonates with me. I think that thread is somewhat on the nose and you can read about it at length online. Like all good art, this piece endures because it allows the audience, the viewer, to experience it using their own context and interpretation. Originally, the conversation around Away from the Flock was ‘this is just a dead sheep’, ‘it’s not art’. Conceptual artists were entering the mainstream and Hirst’s Natural History series was genuinely controversial.

Damien Hirst’s work, more than 30 years later

More than thirty years later, not only does this work endure, but it has earned its place in Tate Britain.

Like all great works of art, you need to be in a room with this for it to have an impact on you. You can’t just look at an image of it; it won’t make sense otherwise. When you’re with it, in context, in a gallery and as a piece of sculpture, it will make sense and it will make you pause.

Away from the Flock is not a sculpture that dominates the room. Presented at Tate Britain, it doesn’t command its own space like Duchamp’s replica urinal down the road in Tate Modern does. Fountain sits in the middle of its own space, inviting people to walk around it and look for meaning. Fountain is best enjoyed by watching people interact with it. Away from the Flock is sincere. It’s best enjoyed reflectively as you bring your own quiet context, and it will mean different things depending on the stage you’re at in life.

Why are Away from the Flock and Hirst’s equally controversial The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living  (or shark in formaldehyde) still such powerful pieces of work more than 30 years later? Is it context carved from endurance?

Seeing these works through other people’s reactions and news reports back in the 90s, when they were fresh, I found them interesting and new. I found the reactions equally interesting. Contemporary artists were becoming part of popular culture and Hirst was pushing at the very edge of what people were comfortable with.

Seeing Away from the Flock as an adult at 43, presented exactly as I remembered it, unchanged like a photograph and surrounded by my own context, made me pause. It made me reflect. I feel that the more time passes, the better this work becomes.

Preserving Away from the Flock

The reality is that the sculpture needs to be preserved and maintained because formaldehyde only slows the process of decomposition. I suppose that’s the dirty little secret behind Away from the Flock. However, when we encounter it as museum visitors, we are seeing the same sculpture as it was originally presented. Photographs fade and need to be reprinted. Paintings need to be restored. Nothing really lasts forever.

Is this the moment when I flip the article and talk about brands that have carved out meaning through endurance? Branding that infected or predicted the modern zeitgeist? No.

Am I trying to defend Away from the Flock as art? No. It has proven itself to be art.

It’s great art.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the Typeface website is looking a little different. This is the first phase of a new design rollout, a cleaner code base and a focused offering.

December marks Typeface entering its 10th year, a very exciting milestone. The last couple of years have flown by as things have been consistently busy but it is important to practise what you preach and so a new website was in order.

The design of the new Typeface website takes a functional backseat because the real stars should be and have always been Typeface’ diverse client base. This new website is the framework for a celebration of 10 years worth of client relationships, content, design and development.

A focused service offering

Typeface offers three pillars of creative service. Brand, Web, and Photo. Supporting clients of all sizes is something that Typeface excels at and so the addition of photography as a service is something I’m particularly excited about because it opens up an extra avenue of quality for smaller businesses, startups and businesses who are finding their voice.

Creative support for businesses

As well as a complete creative offering for businesses, Typeface also supports your business as you grow; with affordable retainers including social media support, graphic design support, and website maintenance packages tailored to suit businesses of every size.

Typeface is your creative partner.

Doubling-down on human creativity

Typeface has always been a brand-focused creative studio and as we enter year 10 that becomes more important.

Clients, their customers, and users are becoming increasingly frustrated with one-size-fits-all AI solutions, impersonal content and difficult to manage products. Typeface has always applied design-led thinking to create human-centric products. Made by humans for humans, and nothing is going to change there.

The addition of Business Photography by Typeface cements a third pillar in that creative offering. Allowing clients the opportunity to have affordable photography, tailored to their business and their brand. No stock, no AI. Because one size does not fit all when it comes to your business and the way that you present yourself.

Typeface creative network

Typeface doesn’t offer products that can’t be serviced in-house and so will continue to work with an extensive network of peers and experts across SEO, event management, PR, copywriting and everything in-between. Allowing clients to tap in to a trusted network of freelancers and agencies that best suit their needs, and always with design and design thinking at the heart of your project.

A celebration of creativity

The next 12 months will be a celebration of creativity, with work from the Typeface archives, client-deep-dives and of course the odd off topic article so check back from time to time and if you’d like to know when new content is published, follow me on LinkedIn.

If you’re a business owner in Manchester, especially in the creative and digital industry then you’ve been seeing my work for a for a few years now. I support a number of local businesses, creatives, developers, PR and SEO agencies with website design and development, graphic design support, photography and branding expertise. Typeface is very much a collaborative offering and I enjoy working with local business owners to help elevate the overall digital scene here in Manchester. Manchester has a thriving digital creative and tech industry, helped in part by an underlying ethos of support and collaboration. It’s exciting to be a part of that and something I’ve always tried to foster with Typeface.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with Manchester SEO aficionado Charlie Whitworth for a few years now.

Charlie originally came to me, like many business owners do, as Whitworth SEO was going through a growth phase. With a new streamlined focus and tone of voice, Typeface produced a confident brand and a great new website to showcase Whitworth.

Manchester has had its fair share of marketing and search conferences but truth be told, things had been a little quiet over recent years. It almost felt that there was something missing from the industry and the mantle hadn’t quite been picked up. With many of the main marketing and SEO/Search conferences being based down south it felt that Manchester was missing an important platform for knowledge sharing and networking. As it happens, a lot of Manchester’s digital scene felt the same way, times had moved on, the scene had shifted and it was time for a new conference format.

The first Hive conference was launched in 2024 to an excited audience and nobody knew what to expect, or how popular the concept would be.

The one where everybody sat up and took notice

2025 saw a further refining of the brand and the format. With speakers including Aledya Soils, Mike King, Lou Ali and a host of marketing and agency names, Charlie cemented Hive as the northern conference to be for agency owners, marketing professionals and people wanting to immerse themselves in Manchester’s rich digital culture.

Hive has very much become its own event now and with Hive ‘26 taking on a larger and more ambitious tone, it was a perfect time to tighten the branding and presentation, to offer more coherency and to build on the creative from the previous two years.

HiveMCR ‘26

While I worked on the creative for 2024 and 2025, I didn’t have the opportunity to work on the original logo. That’s been something of a bugbear for me but with the launch of Hive26 we’ve had the time to invest in the brand from the ground up. This means taking the creative, feel and pedigree from the first two events. Seeing what worked and what could be worked on, and building it in to something that feels like it belongs to and represents HiveMCR and its growing community of creatives and professionals.

A new logo and a refined suite of brand material

Typeface has created a polished, confident new brand for Hive26. A suite of logos for every application as well as a monogram that can be tweaked and repurposed as needed.

A new website and focused online presence

As well as a new brand, a new website was in order to show it off. The Hive website boasts an informative lineup page, individual SEO friendly speaker pages and a clean, refined look.

Social media graphics? We’ve got those covered. From sponsors to speakers, each has its own language and visual style, all unmistakably Hive.

Hive 2026 Speakers

Hive 2026 Expert Training

Much more to come

Marketing for the event is now in in full swing, you’ll be seeing various digital creative shared on linkedin and Instagram over the next couple months. As HiveMCR 2026 approaches, I’ll be working on the physical creative, screens, banners and posters which I’ll be sharing on the Typeface website so check back to see how those turn out. In the meantime, don’t forget to grab your early bee ticket for HiveMCR ’26 while they’re still available and hopefully I’ll see you there.

“Pete’s been on the HiveMCR journey with me from the start, and the brand wouldn’t be what it has become without him. From his first class design skills, to last minute dev requests he’s been priceless.”

– Charlie Whitworth

The articles section of the Typeface website brings in some interesting search queries. I’ve mentioned Aaron Draplin at some point on here, so in case those couple of visitors a month who were searching for ‘Aaron Draplin Font’ were wondering; it’s Futura. In the spirit of SEO, I’ll reiterate below using an h2 tag.

What font does Aaron Draplin use? He uses Futura

And who can blame him it is a gorgeous font, but why does he use it so much and what makes it so useable? We’ll talk about that in a moment because I have a feeling that a lot of people asking this question are design students.

I’m a big fan of Aaron and his work, we share a similar mindset, early drive, and reasons to want to work in graphic design. It’s a notoriously difficult industry to break in to. It was in the late 90s and early 2000s and even more so now. The reality of breaking in to this industry now is that young designers either need to accept wages that are below their worth and the value that they add, coupled with a lack of creative control, or they need to grind by carving out a market and nurturing a scene. Neither of these are profitable ways to start a career, they can and do lead to burnout. Young creatives are often taken advantage of because graphic design as a career is seen as vocational, fun, or something that they’re lucky to be doing. Graphic designers tend to last around 5 years before they sidestep or change industries.

The beginning of a design career is incredibly stressful. You’ll be second guessing yourself constantly because everybody else’s opinions carry more weight than yours, but if you can stick with it, gain that experience and do it on your own terms because you love it; it won’t get any less stressful but I promise you it’s worth it.

A designer’s argument for using two or three fonts at a time

Back to (the) Futura. There’s a reason Aaron uses Futura so often and it’s not because of laziness, or a lack of typographic knowledge. It’s experience and the ability to use the typeface as a building block to bend and hone to any application.

I have my favourite typefaces, and they tend to be simple. I’m familiar with them, I understand their architecture and how well they can be applied to a project. When designing a logo, choosing a font to work with is usually the first step before customisation and redrawing to create something unique.

There is no standard “creative process” for all projects. Sometimes a brand calls for familiarity, sometimes it needs to be unique and disruptive. All business are different and so are their goals. Expectations are important and so companies either meet and exceed what’s expected of them, or they throw the book out completely to stand separately from their competition. Nobody chooses a company to work with if that first impression doesn’t at least meet expectations.

This doesn’t mean that the designer starts from scratch every time they produce new creative though. Instead they reference their toolbox for processes that they can build on, re-apply, alter, change and reshape. Over the course of a career that toolbox gets bigger, the designer’s experience becomes a selling point and knowledge becomes the product.

Futura is a toolbox staple, it’s a workhorse. It’s not trendy, it’s timeless. Draplin doesn’t hide behind novelty; he builds from solid, understandable foundations. There’s a lesson there for young designers chasing the next viral typeface. Good design isn’t about chasing trends and using every tool you have it’s about knowing which tools to trust. For Aaron, Futura is one of those tools. 

My font toolbox

I have two approaches to lettering. If a company is mainly digital or leans in to a technical industry then I reference and use the fonts in my toolbox as starting points. If something is physical, a space, a building or relies on human interaction then I tend to start with a pen and pad.

I have some favourite fonts in my toolkit that I use quite a lot as starting points for logo design, I also find that as I’ve been working with the same typefaces over a few years I tend to navigate towards thick, sans-serif fonts with straight lines, smooth curves and well adjusted visual proportions. These types of fonts lend themselves to adjustment because they act as a grid for each letter. Familiarising yourself with a couple of fonts, outlining and treating each letter as its own individual shape to be adjusted and tweaked is the secret to being an amazing logo designer. That, by the way, is why Helvetica is the Golden Child of graphic design.

The current Typeface font toolbox

Fonts in heavy rotation at Typeface:

• Circular
• PT Sans
• Acumin Variable Concept
• DIN
• Interstate

Futura alternatives

If you like Futura, you might also like:

• Montserrat (free on Google Fonts)
• Avenir (Frutiger’s refinement)
• Twentieth Century (Monotype’s take)
• Neuzeit Grotesk (similar Bauhaus DNA)

I recently hosted a webinar with CIMSPA, you can view the webinar along with a host of other great and free to use content over on the Digital Marketing Hub (a Typeface website, more to come on that).

The Digital Marketing Hub, a free online resource and learning hub, it’s geared up to help anyone involved in sport and physical activity in England improve their digital marketing. While a lot of the content on the DMH is geared towards professionals in the leisure and sports industry, there’s a huge amount of great content there which can apply to all types of businesses; it’s a great resource so do check it out. The following has been re-written to apply to companies in a more general sense, so if you’re wondering where to start with your website, or how to improve your online presence then this article is for you. Let’s get started.

I’ll be breaking this article in to three separate posts:

• Section 1 – Making your website relevant and easy to understand 
• Section 2 – Building branded assets 
• Pulling all that together – Optimising your website for humans 

Section 1 – Making your website relevant and easy to understand

There’s a whole industry based around manipulating google. Paid search campaigns can be valuable, as long as the pot at the end of the rainbow is geared up to convert.

Any off-site SEO you invest in is going to succeed or fail based on the quality of the endpoint, your website.

From a content creation and optimisation point of view, you don’t need a huge amount of technical
knowledge to create something that’s easy for google to find and navigate. As long as you don’t try to pull any tricks and simply design for human beings, you’re already doing better than 90% of the web.

Google is designed to act like a person, if your website is easy for people to use, easy to navigate and the
information is relevant to them then It’s going to get on well with Google. Not just in the short term
either; you can — and should — tweak and test your content to refine your search visitors and granulate your audience. As you build on your website and make it more relevant, you’ll start to see long term impact.

1 Optimising the homepage

• We use the homepage to drive users to relevant parts of the website. An index page is a dated way of thinking about things, think of your home page as the front cover and inside two pages of a magazine. It needs to be:
• interesting enough for people to want to click in to the website and informative enough to pique their interest.
• It also needs to offer immediate tools for contact and interaction.
• Your home page should show a vertical slice of the company, while being clear to understand and easy to use.

The homepage should contain:

• Value proposition, inviting the user to learn more about the company and the unique way you work — Usually presented as a hero area, it should be informative and lay out exactly what you offer. What do you offer? It’s usually an outcome or a result.
• Your service offering, showcasing core services.
• Tell us about the company and invite us to discover more – Use words like discover and learn, the web is littered with read mores.
• A general contact form, with a dropdown allowing the user to specify the service they’re interested in.
• News and resources, for the curious.
• Any professional credentials and qualifications.
• A call to action.
• Optional: a data capture, such as a download
• Contact details – Ideally these should always be optional and you should have multiple points of contact.

2 Service offering

The idea is that we should give the user relevant information on each service or product. —
That would include pointing them to relevant articles in the blog, FAQS, etc. Each service page should contain elements that are relevant to that service, right down to the final CTA

We want users to keep clicking around the website, absorbing more of your company while they
decide whether or not to contact you.

If you have a more general service offering that applies to different sized clients. It’s a good idea to
present services as audience personas. Break your client base in to three individuals. Each persona (small business, department manager, team leader), will have their own sets of needs and goals.

A Persona can even be a type of business businesses (small, medium, enterprise) It can be a goal or set of goals or a combination of products and services.

Tell these personas how your product can apply, scale and adapt to the different issues they’d face.

3 Relevant content

Google naturally looks for relevant content, instead of trying to cast a wide net, keep your content
relevant.

Optimising your website for the type of client you want to work with means showing your potential
client that you’ve thought about and can answer their questions. That’s easier to do if you’re using your website to reinforce your service offering by showing examples of past client success, laying out your processes and talking about your approach.

It’s much more difficult to appeal to everybody, you’ll find yourself doing more work for less impact. Start by taking a look at your client base and breaking them down in to three personas to market to.

4 Show what you do

Testimonials aren’t one-size-fits-all. Some companies can talk about their clients and some can’t. You can’t help it if you can’t talk about your work, but you can use storytelling to speak about client goals and show expertise with examples of how you’d deal with those problems.

The point of a testimonial is to wrap your product and product outcomes in to a story that your user can relate to. Lay out the goals for the project, and then show the outcome. Because I work in a visual medium I can literally show what I do, but a quick quote or testimonial from the client does the same thing. A great testimonial page would include those client goals and show how you’d use your processes, frameworks and products to answer their questions. Include relevant articles and blog posts, and highlight services to lead in to. Offer a way for the user to enquire about the service spoken about, and invite them to find out more about your service offerings.

5 About the company

Most about pages are unreasonably dry. Which makes no sense. Nobody knows more about your company than you do, and If I’ve hit your about page then I want to know more about you. Show yourself and your staff. Headshots and photography go a long way here. Decent headshots should be one of the first non-logo brand assets you consider paying for. And do pay for them, find a local portrait photographer who works in a style that you like and let them do their thing. You’ll hate your headshot, that’s normal; everybody does.

Talk about your staff if you have them. They’re your best assets, your brand ambassadors and they’re probably the people who will be interacting the most with your clients. Show them off.

Show company-related blog posts Show social feeds and give users the option to interact with you via those Tell us about the company, where did you start, why did you start. Tell us about your ethos and your goals. Do your morals drive the business? Tell us about that. Big wins, landmark clients, shining testimonials. Anything that shows you company in the best light. 

A year is a long time so don’t try to do everything

The idea is to rethink how we approach our company website, and to think like the end user, form habits but not to chain ourselves down. Talking about your business and your successes should be the fun part, so make it easy to talk about those things. Whatever you do, don’t try to do everything all at once. Some businesses will benefit from a more personal touch, some businesses are results orientated and highly polished.

Different types of client react differently so it’s important to look at your client base and meet their
expectations. You know what they want and how to get them there so use your website to showcase that.

Don’t burn yourself out

Treat your website like any other client. Put time to one side each month for your business. — And don’t worry about finishing anything.

Ask for help, and lean on your network.

You’re not all competing in the same space for the same clients and by sharing knowledge you elevate your industry.

Things to keep in mind

• Know your brand and your tone
• It’s important to keep things on brand and to keep your tone consistent.
• Look at your competition and take notice of what they’re doing, but don’t copy them.
• Don’t follow trends because trends date very quickly.

Sit down, make a brew. If this is your first time here then have a click around and when you’re done; tell your friends.

Typeface has muscled its way on to the Colony Sonos System. Joining design comrades Likely Story, musician Jack Yeates and Typeface’ favourite brand and web partner, Partisan.