Working exclusively in the cultural and heritage sector, we distil complex messages into simple, inspired, intelligent communication that demands attention.
You can call it consulting, branding, design, marketing or advertising. We don’t care what it’s called as long as you’re delighted with the results.
We are an agency obsessed with design and culture; that’s how we fill our days and nights. We have a monthly cultural outing that we call Cog Nights.
We firmly believe in the power of culture to transform lives. We work pro-bono to lobby for greater public funding and recognition in education.
We’re expanding our team to work on ever more exciting projects, across digital, branding, campaign and editorial design.
If you have a love of the arts and want to work with some of the UK’s most exciting and important cultural and heritage companies, come and join us.
We have a specific role to fill: experienced designer.
And we’re always open to suggestions and interested to hear from brilliant people, especially website developers with a love of WordPress or Craft CMS. If you really want to work here, drop us a line.
Cog Design has a core, full-time team, based in our studio in Greenwich, plus a distributed network across Europe. We operate a flat and flexible creative structure; everyone is involved in the creative output of every project.
A designer by training, Michael founded Cog Design in 1991 and has managed the development of the company ever since.
He takes the lead on large-scale branding or complex communications projects and provides a creative overview of all of the studio’s output.
Beyond the studio, Michael is Executive Chair at the National Campaign for the Arts, a Fellow of the RSA, an occasional lecturer in branding and design and a regular contributor to design journals.
Culture for a changing city. A new website plus a full rebrand of East London’s most… more
A video-based campaign for a year-long, global celebration of the world wide web in its 30th… more
An ongoing project, redesigning the website for Europe’s number one performing arts institution. more
Anna is our head of design
Anna joined us in 2015. She leads our design team and oversees the day-to-day creative output of the studio.
She manages many of our larger and higher profile projects, working across branding, digital, campaigns and editorial design.
As well as client work, Anna oversees our monthly cultural calendar, commissioning a bespoke illustration and curating the content.
A new user-friendly website with a custom-designed ticketing process. more
The Horniman Museum and Gardens is a landmark for South London. Lots of the team had… more
For May’s Cog Night we took a short walk to Up The Creek for a stand-up… more
Jen’s background is in theatre marketing, having worked at some of the UK’s busiest venues, including Brighton Dome, Soho Theatre, and Underbelly Festival. She manages our large-scale digital projects, keeping all the moving parts of projects on track.
We take a day out, each year, to talk about past successes, lessons to be learned… more
Hailing from South Australia, Claire has extensive experience working across branding, print and digital design, with a strong interest in the arts and culture sector. Her dog, Scout, is an occasional studio visitor (and constant delight).
For our August Cog night we visited Underbelly at Southbank, to see Bowjangles (a string quartet)… more
For our May Cog night we ventured around the corner to Deptford Lounge to see the… more
Lucy graduated in museum studies and spent a few years working in the museum sector, gaining experience in digital collections and youth engagement. She supports our existing clients and liaises with our developers to pin down every detail and deliver digital projects.
It’s not every night you get to sip a cocktail made by a robot. But that… more
Ed is our Studio Manager. If you call or visit the studio then it’s Ed you’ll speak to first; he’s also does our bookkeeping and maintains our impeccable admin systems.
An English graduate from Cambridge, he provides and maintains the perfect studio environment for our creative team to thrive.
On a half-day First Aid course Ed learnt some useful skills, made some new friends and… more
Our October Cog night took us to Gary Clarke Company’s ‘Wasteland’ at The Place. Ed gives… more
Lydia joined us as our Technical Project Manager having just finished implementing a new ticketing and CRM system at Manchester International Festival. She’s our go-to for solving technical issues and finding new and creative ways of delivering our digital solutions.
Our September Cog night was a trip to Leicester Square’s legendary The Comedy Store. It was… more
In addition to our London base, we also have an international reach. We have a network of developers and designers across Europe. And, we have a pool of trusted Associates with specialist skills in the UK that we know we can trust, including developers, photographers, copywriters, illustrators and many more.
Razvan is an extremely experienced web developer, working across many development and CMS platforms. He manages ticketing integrations including our Spektrix plugin and API integrations, and integrations with EventBrite. He also takes the lead on much of our back end and server-based development work.
Emi’s talents extend across all areas of web development. He handles much of our complex database integration work and he has developed many of our tools for integrating CRM platforms, ticketing systems and collection management software.
Daniel travels the globe as an arts & culture digital developer. And he calls Tasmania his home. He’s a specialist in CRM integrations, with a focus on work with Tessitura and TNEW. He’s part of the very cool team at Dark Mofo and Mona.