Festival of Britain, furniture and a design group, 1951 to 1956.

Conran Design Group carries the name of the designer and retailer Terence Conran, and its story begins in his early working life in London. Dezeen, in its report of 12 September 2020, set out the sequence. Conran worked with the architect Dennis Lennon on a project for the Festival of Britain in 1951, started selling furniture in 1952, and then founded his own design studio, Conran Design Group, in 1956.

The studio came before the businesses that made Conran a household name. Dezeen recorded that in 1964 he opened a Habitat store on Fulham Road in Chelsea with his wife at the time, Caroline Herbert, and that the chain added an outlet on Tottenham Court Road and stores in Manchester, Brighton and Glasgow within two years. In 1973 he founded The Conran Shop on the site of the original Habitat store, and in 1989 he founded the Design Museum in a former banana warehouse at Butler’s Wharf. The same report, published on 12 September 2020, was the one in which Dezeen announced that Conran had died.

The design group did not stay in his hands. Design Week set out the history of the name in a feature by Tom Bawden dated 5 February 1998. Terence Conran set up Conran Design Group, the magazine said, and later sold it to what was then the RSCG Group. The acquired consultancy became RSCG Conran. By the mid-1990s, Design Week said, RSCG Conran had an existing retail design capability.

Terence Conran kept a separate design practice of his own. Design Week reported on 26 August 2004 that David Chaloner, who had been Conran Design Group’s creative director, had joined Conran & Partners, which the magazine described as Terence Conran’s design consultancy, as interior and retail director in June that year. Conran Design Group itself was by then described in the same piece as Havas-owned.

RSCG Conran, Worthington and a revived name, 1996 to 2004.

The present Conran Design Group dates its modern shape to a deal in the mid-1990s. Design Week recorded that RSCG Conran bought the graphics consultancy Worthington & Co, a deal the magazine reported on 9 August 1996, and appointed its founder, David Worthington, to head the enlarged consultancy. The deal added graphics and new media skills to RSCG Conran’s retail work. The new set-up soon dropped RSCG from its name, and in its February 1998 feature Design Week said Worthington had resurrected the name Conran Design Group eighteen months earlier. The magazine added that part of his remit was to provide a design-led vision that Jacques Herail, a director of Havas Advertising, had regarded as lacking.

In February 1998 the group took over Interface RSCG, a literature design group also owned by Havas Advertising. Design Week reported on 5 February 1998 that no money changed hands, that Interface would be subsumed into the larger consultancy, and that the combined business would continue to trade as Conran Design Group from a studio in Clerkenwell, London. The magazine listed the management team: Worthington as managing director, Peers de Trense as business development director, David Chaloner as creative director, and Richard Peach, formerly of Interface, and Michael Thierens as design directors.

The same report gave a snapshot of the client list in 1998. Conran Design Group brought Shell, Oasis, BT, Sainsbury’s and Airbus, and Interface brought Citroën, for which it worked exclusively. The consultancy then offered retail design, graphics and new media, with Interface adding printed literature. Worthington told Design Week he had a scheme to take the group into product design, without giving details, and that he did not rule out working with other Havas groups in the UK, which the magazine named as Real Time Studio and CGI. Overseas, Conran Design Group already ran joint projects with Euro RSCG Design in Paris, another Havas business.

By 2004 the group had a graphics division. Design Week reported on 26 August 2004 that Conran Design Group had appointed Richard Stayte as design director of that division, working alongside graphics design director Alan Watt, and that Stayte had resumed work on the Waterstone’s account. The magazine noted that Stayte had joined Worthington & Company in 1994 and stayed with it through its acquisition by Havas, its merger with Conran Design and its transformation into Conran Design Group.

Founder, sale, revival and a group owner.

A UK branding consultancy’s own identity is an unusual design problem, because the studio’s product is other people’s identities. The name on the door often begins as the founders’ surnames, set side by side, and that choice ties the brand to particular people. When a partner leaves or retires, the studio has to decide whether the name stays, shortens or changes, and each answer says something about how the business sees itself.

Mergers add a second pressure. When two studios combine, one name is usually retired, or both are folded into a new one, and the visual system has to absorb two histories without looking like a compromise. Some studios keep a former name alive as a sub-brand for a period; others make a clean break and let the archive carry the older work.

Studio publications are a third brand surface. Self-published books, journals, posters and seasonal greetings give a consultancy room to show craft without a client brief, and they often travel further than any logo. Case studies do similar work online: the way a studio photographs, captions and sequences past projects becomes its most visible typography, and readers judge the studio by how clearly it explains a brief, a constraint and a result.

A network, a new marque and W Conran Design.

The group changed shape again in March 2024. Campaign Asia reported on 22 March 2024 that Havas had announced Conran Design Group’s rebrand as its new flagship brand and design network, and interviewed its global chief executive, Thom Newton. Transform magazine reported on 27 March 2024 that the network brought together Conran Design Group and the French agency W, renamed W Conran Design. Newton told the magazine that Havas had two brand and design businesses in its family, and he described W as the agency responsible for creating the brand for the Paris Olympics.

Transform set out the proposition behind the launch as “thoughtful design to inspire progress for business, people and society.” It said the offer covered brand strategy, design, experience design and communications and engagement, with sustainability services integrated throughout. In his Campaign Asia interview, Newton linked the positioning to a study the group called Citizen Brands, and argued that growth did not have to be zero-sum for a brand trying to balance commercial and social expectations.

The 2024 identity is the clearest documented account of how the group presents itself. Transform said the identity used a new typographic approach from the French type designer Jean François Porchez, with photography meant to show the regional character of the group’s locations. At its centre is a rounded marque. Lee Hoddy, Conran Design Group’s executive creative director, told the magazine that the new marque, with the D at the centre of the C, was at the core of the identity and served as a shorthand for the group’s positioning.

For a design guide, Conran Design Group shows how a consultancy can keep a founder’s name through a sale, a revival and a network relaunch, with a single rounded letterform carrying the identity. Compare The Partners and SomeOne, two other London design consultancies in this collection. For this guide we use orange, blue and navy with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Conran Design Group’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.