Design education with reverence and care
Our deepest purpose at Future London Academy is to nurture creative communities around the world, uniting professional designers while helping them learn and make the world a better place. In essence, we are forward-looking: our teachers always strive to shed light on the latest tools and frameworks at their fingertips. It’s what distinguishes us from typical universities. Our work as a company is also guided by the same principle. For instance, we actively use DALL-E and ChatGPT at the concept stage.
Touching on our curriculum, we approach everything with great reverence and care. We spend a lot of time cultivating a high-calibre roster of teachers who are leaders and experts in their field.
We are a team of designers and creatives, so we do really understand what is useful and interesting to our students. It helps us create products that we would gladly take ourselves.
Marketing-led design
Our workflow is pretty standard: everything starts with brainstorming and conceptualization, then at the end of the day we move on to visualization. The most extensive assignments we have include course branding. We also help with business tasks such as creating ads, social media content, and presentations. Managing this kind of flow, we constantly have to learn a lot on the fly and think outside the box.
On the other hand, with great responsibility comes great impact. It’s what sets our design team apart. We are business-oriented and marketing-led with everything we do.
We think of not just the image but whether it makes sense to our users, whether it attracts attention, and whether we are saying the right things.
Branding reminiscent of a quest
One of my favorite designs is for a webinar series on design leadership we led in the fall of 2022. Along the series, we discussed with Chief Creative Officers at Mejuri, BCW Global, Atlassian, Saatchi & Saatchi, and R/GA how to get promoted to a top leadership position, what qualities this role requires, and how to manage the challenges that come with it.
The series landing page was made with Readymag. We wanted it to stand out from the conventional attitude or mood that arises when people talk about leadership — that's why it resembles a SuperMario game.
After all, the path to a leadership position is actually thorny, reminiscent of a quest where you have to jump over obstacles, get into some magic mushroom to get stronger or earn extra lives to win.
In life, I think there is a similar story: you go through a bunch of quests, overcome obstacles, mature, then fall into some abyss before your game starts all over again. All of the visuals I did for the project were based on this concept.
The webinar website had a few flying icons, a font reminiscent of a console game, and a control panel above the content display. There was also an Eventbrite embed that participants could use to sign up for live webinars, backgrounds for Zoom, as well as covers for the YouTube channel and public announcements. The conundrum was how to make such different design assets work together in the same style.
Though I crafted this project by myself, from the idea to the last cover, it didn't take more than a couple of days to assemble in Readymag. As a result, about 700 spectators signed up for each webinar, with each recording watched by an average of 500–700 people.
