Kate Russell (2026)

Kate Russell helps leaders and organisations turn conflict into connection. She’s passionate, kind and wonderfully quirky, with a knack for making difficult conversations feel a little less difficult. Her approach is simple: question with curiosity, listen with empathy and answer with kindly forthrightness.

Her existing identity was fairly generic, and anyone who knows Kate would tell you she’s anything but. She wanted something that felt like her, without losing the credibility needed to work with leaders and organisations.

We started with conversation. It’s at the centre of everything Kate does, and became the starting point for the identity. Her tagline, “Now, you’re talking,” gave us a way to bring that idea together.

One of the more interesting challenges was developing a set of characters Kate could use to communicate different emotions and behavioural styles. Rather than illustrating specific people, we drew on D.I.S.C. behavioural styles and built a modular library of bodies, faces, expressions and limbs. Kate can put them together herself, creating characters for situations we couldn’t possibly anticipate.

We wanted the whole identity to work this way. Something Kate could play with, adapt and make her own, rather than a rigid set of rules she’d have to work around.