Ofqual. Nobody said government had to be boring.

Ofqual regulates qualifications, exams and assessments in England. It’s not the most glamorous brief. Regulation, exams, government. The kind of subject matter that usually produces exactly the kind of creative output you’d expect: safe, corporate, forgettable.

That’s what I wanted to change.

The situation

How I worked

I wasn’t directing this from a distance. I was hands-on across the whole thing: designing, filming, editing, building templates, producing the podcast. The strategic thinking and the craft were the same job, not separate ones.

Along the way I grew the creative team and reshaped how the roles within it worked.

What I did

The first thing I changed wasn’t the brand. It was the question.

Ofqual’s communications had been built around content production. What do we need to publish this week? I shifted that to something more useful: who are we trying to reach, what do they actually need, and what’s the most effective way to get there?

That thinking shaped everything else.

I started with the visual identity. The logo wasn’t changing but I changed how we used it, placing it in a container that became its own creative device and gave us a new shape to work with across the whole identity. I simplified and brightened the colour system, making it more vibrant and modern without losing the institutional trust the brand needed.

Campaigns existed before I arrived, but they weren’t really campaigns. They were things Ofqual was doing, with a few posts added afterwards. I flipped that. Start with the information, find the creative idea inside it, build something worth engaging with, and then layer the expertise and craft on top. Reactive became intentional.

I pushed a video-first content strategy, designing explainers that could sit alongside the edutainment content teachers were already watching. I also kitted out the organisation with the equipment to actually make it happen, and did a lot of it myself.

I built and shaped Can I Just Qualify That?, Ofqual’s first podcast. I drove the format, the content direction, the technical production and made sure it sounded like something worth listening to, not another corporate talking-heads show.

I also reshaped the team around the new approach. I brought in an additional creative and restructured the social media role that reports into me to fit the direction we were heading.

What changed?

They had a brand. It just didn’t fit where they were going.

Publisher Collective is a games-focused advertising and technology company. The brand they had was corporate, flat and out of step with the industry and audience they worked within every day. They knew it needed to change. They just needed someone to show them what that looked like.

The situation

What I did

I was the sole creative on this. No team, no second opinion. Just me working directly with the head of marketing to redefine the whole thing.

I kept the logo, it had recognition worth preserving, but rebuilt everything around it. The single blue became a multi-colour gradient system: vibrant, techy, flexible. I named each colour palette to give the team shared internal language and make the brand easier to apply consistently. I used geometric forms from the existing logo as modular framing devices, giving the identity a thread that connected everything back to the original mark. I also established a new photography direction and a full set of brand guidelines for rollout.

I presented one direction. They went for it.

The initial brand work led to a long rollout across multiple tranches: presentations, social content, marketing assets, digital communications. I scoped and planned the website redesign before I left, though the build happened after.

What came out of it