I have always believed my role as a designer is to be a 'chameleon'.
To become whatever my clients need me to be.
To set aside personal preference, hold back creative ego, and build entirely for the brief. To identify so deeply with a client's audience that my own tastes become irrelevant.
And I've been proud of that. Genuinely. I've launched brands, websites and digital products that look nothing like one another — different personalities, different tones, different worlds. If you lined them up, you'd struggle to find the common thread (other than very happy clients and utmost quality and attention to detail of course).
But lately I've been asking myself have I been so good at disappearing that I've made myself invisible?
In an age of AI-generated mediocrity, where unremarkable design is cheaper and faster than ever, I'm starting to wonder whether being a chameleon is still what our clients want.
Because what AI cannot create is a unique personality. Ours. The desire to leave something of ourselves in the work — a creative sensibility so considered and so consistent that it shows up in everything it touches.
And that, I'm realising, is what authenticates craftsmanship.
The more I consider this, the more I realise that the most sought-after creative minds in the world have this. They have personal taste and a unique flair that they've developed over time, and it shines through in every piece of work. Their clients love them for it.
Hans Zimmer has scored films as different as Gladiator, The Lion King and Interstellar. Yet when you hear the build and the tension between electronic and orchestral, you know who made it. His sound emerges through a deep understanding of what emotion the director has asked for, but his fingerprint remains.
Saul Bass designed for Hitchcock and Scorsese but also created logos for United Airlines and AT&T. Briefs that couldn't be more different. Yet his ability to reduce complex ideas to their simplest, most essential visual form runs through every single one. Instantly, unmistakably his.
Tadao Ando works across houses, churches, museums and galleries. Raw concrete and natural light choreographed with the precision of a stage director, the relationship between inside and outside remains unmistakably Ando's across wildly different projects and scales.
Each of them has leaned into a style, and the right clients seek them out for it.
Function & Form has always had values and purpose. They're in the name. Our purpose is found in function, and form is an organic by-product of care for detail and experience.
What I've held back until now is a creative sensibility to sit alongside that.
A feeling.
A recognisable quality.
Something that makes a piece of work unmistakably ours.
Something for prospective clients to seek out.
A maker's mark.