Studio Blackburns Mark Jones On Why Great Designers Know When To Leave Things Alone

Creative Boom: Insight Career Studio Blackburn's Mark Jones on why great designers know when to leave things alone The creative director on owning one colour, learning from Jaguar's rebrand, and why his team once got paid in Christmas turkey instead of a fee. Written By: Tom May 11 May 2026 There's a moment in Mark Jones's Studio Session talk when he describes how his studio came to rebrand Ellis Butchers, a two-shop operation in Blackheath. Mark's boss lived nearby, got chatting in the shop, and one thing led to another. They really wanted the project. The client couldn't quite stretch to a full fee.

And so, come Christmas, the entire team took home turkeys, gammon and more. "We got paid in bags of meat, effectively," Mark says. It's a good story. But what follows is just as revealing: the Ellis Butchers work gets exactly the same rigour, the same strategic thinking and the same craft as anything his studio does for its biggest clients. Mark is creative director at Studio Blackburn, a Shoreditch-based brand agency whose client list spans the Olympics, Sky and M&S, but whose philosophy is stubbornly practical.

He was speaking at a Studio Session, a live talk hosted inside The Studio, Creative Boom's private membership community for working creatives. His talk, titled The Quiet Power of Good Design, took the audience through three very different branding projects: from the world's most famous folding bike to an energy company that asked its designers to scare them. If there's a thread running through all of it, it's this: great design rarely announces itself. It fits in just enough. It owns one thing brilliantly. It knows what to preserve. And it has the confidence to resist change for change's sake, even when that's the easier sell.

"We have this sort of mantra," Mark says, "that we want to work with people who really care about design." Fit in just enough, stand out just enough The phrase Mark keeps returning to is "sector vernacular": the visual language of a given industry, the shared codes that tell consumers they're in familiar territory. The job of good branding, he argues, isn't to ignore those codes but to understand them, work within them just enough to feel credible, and then find the one thing that makes you distinctly yourself. He uses the Jaguar rebrand as his cautionary tale: a brand that completely stood out and alienated its audience.

"We're not talking about that," he says. "We want to fit in just the right amount." So Energy, a sustainable energy provider, is a good example of what that looks like in practice. When Studio Blackburn returned to refresh the brand in 2025, the brief was simple: stand out, act like a challenger, and stop blending in with the big six energy suppliers. The studio's response was to strip everything back: no mascot, a single bold colour, and a campaign built on the idea that the company handled the energy so customers could get on with their lives.

The result featured a drag queen blow-drying a wig, a man ironing his toasties, a woman on a work call who's smart on top and activewear on the bottom. "We do energy, you do you," says the campaign line. It's simple to the point of being slightly cheeky, but in a good way. Don't touch the logo One of the most practically useful things in Mark's talk is also one of the least glamorous: when working on a brand refresh, your first question should be what you're keeping, not what you're changing. Studio Blackburn's approach isn't to rebuild from scratch. It's to identify what's already working and build around it.

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The article discusses a significant aspect of brand strategy that can influence design decisions, but the concept of knowing when to preserve elements is not entirely new in the industry.