Conceptual work has been a consistent undercurrent since the beginning of my career as a designer. It’s a place I can create without restriction. No briefs, budgets, or the need to explain decisions. Work in the conceptual world is based on instinct, and I suppose more akin to art than design. I would make posters that didn’t need to exist.

Build identities for imaginary companies. Push typography to a point that would never pass a brand guideline. Experiment with materials and mediums simply to see what would happen. There was no audience to satisfy and no outcome to optimise - just ideas moving freely.

Client work is different by nature. It has to be. It’s about solving problems. It demands clarity, structure, and scalability - it needs to not only work at its base level, but a lot of thought has to be given to how easily a visual system can be rolled out. This is especially true for larger companies. There are stakeholders to consider, commercial outcomes to hit, systems to build that extend beyond a single expression. It requires deeper thinking because you are quite literally shaping the future of a company and the people behind it.

Conceptual work, on the other hand, is devoid of all of this.

Neither is better for the development of a designer. They simply serve different roles. One builds frameworks. The other stretches them. But not enough designers allocate time for conceptual work and personal projects. There are connotations that come with it. Maybe you worry people will think you haven’t got much client work on because you’re sharing conceptual projects. Or maybe you struggle to act without a precise brief to respond to.

Either way, it’s easy to neglect the unstructured space.

What I’ve come to realise is that most of the discoveries I rely on in client work didn’t originate inside a brief. They came from moments where there was no restraint. When you remove expectation, ideas evolve in directions you wouldn’t normally allow. You combine typefaces that shouldn’t work together. You create compositions that feel unbalanced but alive. You test material finishes that you’d be afraid to show a client.

In that absence of structure, instinct takes over. What people know as “flow state” becomes very real. You stop designing to justify. You start designing to explore.

Many of the visual directions I now feel confident proposing were once just experiments with no destination. They weren’t strategic at the time or commercially sound. They were simply explorations. But those explorations built a visual vocabulary and sharpened my taste. They made certain decisions feel intuitive rather than risky.

When I return to client work, I don’t bring those conceptual pieces with me as finished solutions. Rather, fragments of those projects have a way of giving me the confidence and perspective to push something slightly further than feels comfortable.

Conceptual work has become a way of keeping ideas fluid. A reminder that design is not only a service - it is also a practice and, at times, an art form.

Conceptual work is where ideas are allowed to run.

Client work is where they are shaped to move with purpose.

Both matter. But without the first, the second risks becoming mechanical.

And for me, that unrestrained space is still where everything begins.

Shot of the good stuff.