A family story turned into an agency name.

Handsome Frank is a UK illustration and animation agency based in London. Its founders are Jon Cockley and Tom Robinson, who are cousins. It’s Nice That, in a feature by Rebecca Fulleylove published on 4 November 2015, said that Cockley set up the illustration agency with his cousin Tom Robinson in 2010. A 2023 speaker profile for the Brand Impact Awards, published by the awards organiser, also says Cockley co-founded the agency in 2010.

The name is a piece of family history, and the agency tells it on its own website. The company says that one afternoon in 1945 a man called Frank met a woman called Kate on a railway platform, and decided there and then that he wanted to marry her. In the agency’s telling, the couple went on to have three daughters and, in time, eight grandchildren. Two of those grandchildren were Jon and Tom. So “Frank” is the founders’ grandfather, and “Handsome” is the family’s affectionate description of him, a joke the agency repeats in its own copy.

The same page explains how the business began. The company says the cousins met in a London pub in 2010, at a point when both had reached something of a crossroads. Their careers in publishing and design had carried them through most of their twenties, and time spent travelling had widened their view. The agency adds that both were about to become fathers, and that the prospect of fatherhood acted as a catalyst to start something new. Handsome Frank, it says, was born from that conversation.

The name gives the agency a voice that is warmer than a list of services. The about page answers the question “But who’s Frank?” before it describes any work, and it presents the agency as a close-knit team. Today the company describes itself as a UK based illustration and animation agency that works mainly with clients in advertising, design and publishing, from large brands to start-ups.

Publishing and digital design, before the agency.

The two founders came from different sides of the creative industry. It’s Nice That reported in 2015 that, before Handsome Frank, Cockley had worked in publishing for ten years, for titles including Creative Review and Design Week. The Brand Impact Awards profile from 2023 also says he spent a decade in publishing for those two London titles before founding the agency.

In the 2015 feature, Cockley chose books from his own shelves and used them to tell parts of that story. He said he worked for a relatively brief period in 2006 at Intersection, a magazine that at the time was run out of a studio flat in Old Street, after leaving the relative comfort of a big publishing house where he worked for Creative Review. He told It’s Nice That that adapting to an unstructured way of working was hard, but that the period was formative, and that the magazine’s founders were a large contributing factor in what he went on to do by setting up Handsome Frank. He also recalled that, while at Creative Review, he helped host a tribute to the advertising writer Paul Arden, held in a Westminster church.

Robinson’s background was in design. The agency’s own account says the cousins’ careers spanned publishing and design. In an interview with Indiantelevision.com, published on 30 September 2016 during their visit to Jaipur for the Kyoorius Designyatra conference, the two described dividing the work by skill: Cockley said that if a brief was very technical and needed animation or CGI, Robinson was more likely to pick it up.

That interview is also a useful record of how the founders described the job itself. Robinson said that when choosing an illustrator for a project they keep an eye on the commercial side, so that the client will respond positively, whether the result is a print advertisement or a television commercial. Once a project starts, he said, their involvement varies: some artists deal directly with clients and simply copy the agency in, while others prefer the agency to stand between them and the client. Cockley drew a line between an artist, who creates for themselves, and an illustrator, who is hired to bring somebody else’s ideas to life.

A family name, a small team, an international client list.

Illustration agencies and type platforms sell other people’s work, so their own identity has a peculiar job: it has to stay in the background while still being recognisable. For an agency, the name is often the most important design decision. Some take a founder’s name, some a playful noun, some a plain description of what they do, and each choice sets a tone before a single portfolio image loads. The roster itself then becomes part of the brand. Which artists an agency represents, how their work is grouped and how evenly it is presented all say something about the house’s taste.

Type platforms face a similar problem with fonts. A marketplace or specimen site has to present many designers’ typefaces in a consistent frame, so the platform’s own wordmark, interface type and colour usually stay quiet. Specimen pages, sample sentences, filters and test-drive tools carry much of the character.

For both kinds of business, the website is the main brand surface. Navigation, image cropping, grid spacing and the tone of short biographies do the work that packaging does for a consumer product, and a redesign of the site is often the moment the identity visibly changes.

From a UK plan to work far beyond it.

The founders say they did not expect the agency to travel. In the September 2016 interview with Indiantelevision.com, Cockley said that when they started they thought they would only operate within the UK, but that over the following five years people from many countries had approached them to work with their illustrators. He listed work in Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, the US and across Europe, and said the agency judged a brief on whether the project would be exciting rather than on where it came from.

The same interview recorded how the business was organised at the time. Robinson said there were four people who took turns to handle things, with one handling editorial and design work while another dealt with the client. The agency’s own about page today also describes an agency of four, naming Stuart and Dario as the colleagues who joined the two founders. On marketing, Robinson said that there are rarely enough hours in a day for creative people to promote themselves while they are busy making work, and that a second voice spreading the word helps; Cockley said that it is the work in an illustrator’s portfolio that wins them more work.

The illustrators named in independent coverage give a sense of the agency’s range without needing a count. It’s Nice That named Malika Favre, Jean Jullien and Thibaud Herem among the illustrators the cousins represented in 2015, and the 2016 interview again mentioned Jean Jullien and Malika Favre. The Brand Impact Awards profile of 2023 lists clients including Apple, Nike, Penguin Random House, The New Yorker and the Academy Awards, and says the agency focuses on advertising and branding as well as publishing and editorial.

For a design guide, Handsome Frank shows how a small agency can build its identity on a single human story, with a family name and a few lines of plain copy doing the work that a slogan would do elsewhere. Compare The Jacky Winter Group and Central Illustration Agency, two other illustration agencies in this collection. For this guide we use red, yellow, blue and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Handsome Frank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.