Cog is a digital design agency working exclusively in culture and heritage.
We help arts organisations inspire their audiences through engaging, intelligent branding and websites that ease interactions, demand attention and prompt action.
Our approach is audience-focused and pragmatic. Every solution is unique because every client brings individual challenges and opportunities.
We avoid jargon, minimise complexity and partner with exceptional clients to build long-term, productive (and enjoyable) working relationships.
We are helping the sector on their journey towards a full reopening and a future where digital content sits alongside live performance.
It’s an exciting time and we are expanding our team to build capacity, invest in innovation, and bring new talent to the mix.
We are advertising for several new roles and we are always interested to chat with brilliant people – who knows where those conversations may take us.
Founded in 1991 (the year of the first website) we bring three decades of experience of working in the arts.
But we are never complacent. Every solution is uniquely crafted because we take the time to understand the audiences, challenges and opportunities of every client and project.
We firmly believe in the power of culture to transform lives.
We donate our time and expertise to lobby for public arts funding and recognition in education. We provide designs for campaigns and we’re the in-house designer for the National Campaign for the Arts.
And we put our money where our mouth is, through support for Arts Emergency, the Black Ticket Project and Blueprint for All (formerly the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust).
Hosted fortnightly, we invite guests to share ideas, instigate change and make connections with our team, clients and friends.
Previous guests have included: ex-Culture Secretary Chris Smith; artist, Bob & Roberta Smith; Janice McGuiness of People United; Pamela McCormick of UD Music; teams from Spektrix, Ticketsolve, Tessitura, Tickets for Good, MHM, Audience Agency, and Culture Hosts; plus many of the UK’s most exciting cultural venues and organisations.
Sustainability is an ongoing journey; we’ve made a good start.
Our long established and firmly held environmental policy includes not accepting projects that require us to fly to meetings.
We’ve taken big steps towards a carbon-neutral studio. It, alongside all of our hosting, is powered by 100% renewable and non-nuclear energy.
We are not fans of carbon-offsetting; we use less, recycle more and never use landfill.
Once a month we fund a team outing to a show, exhibition or event; we think it’s important to experience the type culture we promote.
We take it turns to write a review for our journal. We publish that, alongside other reviews, snippets and recommendations in our ever popular Cultural Calendar.
And we commission an illustration from an emerging talent to capture the event.
We are a team (not just a collective of freelancers). Some work fully or partly remotely (in the UK and around the globe) but most enjoy the collaborative culture of our studio.
We have a well stocked kitchen, bike racks and a shower, an indoor garden (with fish in a pond) and lots of space.
We love pinning ideas to the walls and discussing them over a mug of tea.
Cog Design has a core, full-time team, based in our studio in Greenwich, plus a distributed network across Europe. We each have specialisms and responsibilities within a flat flexible creative structure..
A designer by training Michael founded Cog and has moulded the company around a belief in the power of culture to shape people’s lives.
He’s a regular commentator on design, empathy and sustainability, in the press and as a speaker/lecturer.
He has recently finished a five year tenure as Executive Chair with the National Campaign for the Arts. he is a Fellow at the RSA and a mentor at University of Greenwich.
England’s Creative Coast is a new initiative to create an inspirational destination across the South East… more
For our February Cog Night, we pressed play on James Rowland’s greatest ‘hut’, Team Viking streamed… more
More people are asking about our approach to sustainable websites. It’s great that people are asking…. 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.
For January’s Cog Night we played Swamp Motel’s online game The Mermaid’s Tongue. Anna gives her… more
Working with Theatre Centre on a campaign to entice young people to this new show about… more
Bringing a much loved TV gameshow to life. A new website and smarter ticketing system for… 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.
Our May Cog Night was our first in-person experience in nine months. Ed gives his take… more
Using some Spektrix magic we’ve created a more personalised experience for Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s digital audiences…. more
Our April Cog Night was an intimate evening with Mae Martin, via Zoom. A chance to… more
Emma is a specialist in user experience and user interaction design. She manages the design of many creative projects, working closely with our project managers and developers throughout the process. She has a particular passion for visual arts.
Nottingham Playhouse is one of the UK’s leading producing theatres. With a new Artistic Director in… more
The Heritage Fund uses National Lottery money to help people explore, enjoy and protect the heritage… more
We attended a live-stream of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer for our second ever virtual Cog Night…. more
Like many of the best technologists, Alex’s background is in music.
He has an MA in Composition.
At Cog, he’s delivered sites for Horniman Museum and Gardens and specialist implementations for English National Ballet and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, with whom he created the first Spektrix-based paywall (for streamed content).
As a trustee at Drake Music (leaders in music, disability and technology) he trained in neurodiversity and accessibility; he leads our work in these areas.
Last week Alex attended Culture Geek 2020. Here are his five takeaways from the digital conference. more
This immersive sound installation was our first live outing since March. Alex gives his take on… more
Alex recently gave a breakfast briefing on Creative Coding and Generative Art. Here he talks a… more
Kristina spent several periods with us as an intern during her studies at London College of Communication. When she graduated, with a first class degree, we were delighted to welcome her into the full-time team.
For our November Cog Night we enjoyed The Albany’s livestream of R.A.P. Party. Kristina shares her… more
Emily’s path to our digital delivery and support team was via a degree in fashion and years in social media and detailed data analytics.
She gained a love of the arts through a role at English National Opera where she quickly progressed to managing the digital team.
At Cog she provides ongoing support and project delivery for numerous clients who love her ability to describe complex tasks in everyday language.
After gaining his degree in acting, Nick found a love of ticketing via a training role at ATG which led to a client training position in the formative years at Spektrix. More recently Nick was Arts Council’s Tech Champion for ticketing and CRMs in their innovative Digital Culture Network. He brings that wealth of experience to our team where he leads in project management and client relationships.
In addition to our London base, we also have an international reach. We have a network of developers and designers across the globe. 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 experienced web developer, working across many CMS platforms. He manages many of our website builds and ticketing integrations including our TNEW, Spektrix. 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.
We knew Helene as an excellent digital designer and project manager with our clients, The Marlowe. When she move with her young family to Norway, we were pleased to welcome her to our team. She is the product manager for our CogPlayer platform.
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.