Eye Magazine

2025 brings us another St Bride Foundation design conference, but this time with a twist for the design industry stalwart. ‘Doing the Work’ took place on 18 October 2025 and was curated by designer Greg Bunbury, to celebrate diverse creative voices while foregrounding inclusive futures. During a year in which the UK has seen rising anti-migrant sentiment and unthinkably large far-right rallies, the conference served as a renewed call to stand in solidarity with people of colour, writes Anoushka Khandwala.

The speakers were Ricardo Eversley, Harkiran Kalsi, Carolyne Hill, Jodi Hunt and Kingsley Nebechi. I joined the stage at the end of the day to moderate the panel of speakers, and work with the audience to co-create a manifesto that served as a record of our conversation, for use by designers, organisations and institutions that are committed to ‘doing the work’.

Bunbury’s introduction emphasised the importance of tackling problems, not people, and giving space, grace and respect to each other. Ricardo Eversley, designer and senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University then spoke about teaching to transgress. Teaching is a process of continual learning, according to Eversley, and it is essential to accept that, as a tutor, there are limits to your knowledge. Dispelling the single genius narrative that pervades design education is key to challenging the traditional power structures of the classroom. This ethos is echoed in his online bookstore, Simba and Sloane, which is dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices.

Illustrator and lettering artist Harkiran Kalsi used her love for running as a metaphor for her ‘creative journey’. Doing the work, she says, means running your own race, and asking ‘why’ you are doing what you’re doing. Kalsi’s ‘why’ is her mum, who pushed her to create, despite the fact that being an artist in India is not the norm. Kalsi talked about bell hooks’s notion that love is an action, rather than just a feeling. If love is a doing word, then creative practice is surely a method of enacting love.

Carolyne Hill joked about how useful it is to have initials that form the word ‘C. Hill’ – the name of her eponymous creative studio, Chill Creates. Hill offered a refreshing perspective on design practice with added signature wit. She recalled everything from designing signage for racecourses (a big lesson in how not to ‘F things up’) to ripping up cardboard boxes for posters to protest the threat that ‘Brixton is for sale’ under gentrification (see above). Hill’s work pairs clever concepts with a social ethic, and her talk showed that design can and should be used to communicate your values.

Jodi Hunt reminded us to ask Gil Scott-Heron’s question ‘Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?’ when recalling a supposedly dream job that turned sour. Hunt went from strength to strength after leaving, from working on a book cover about the 1930s underground jazz scene, to an exhibition celebrating Black queer archival material at Somerset House. Hunt’s collages sizzle with energy, uniting fragments of difference to create dynamic visual languages.

Illustrator Kingsley Nebechi began by describing his idyllic childhood in Italy followed by a sudden move to bleak London. How would he recall those sunsoaked colours? Through image-making, of course. His client list includes Island Records, Nike and the United Nations, but it was a project for Bounty kitchen roll that Nebechi was most excited by, because it meant his mum finally understood what he does for a living. Making the creative industries visible as viable career pathways is vital to diversify the field. Luckily, Nebechi’s illustrations have graced basketballs, watches and cleaning supplies, making them literally a household name.

The panel discussion offered the opportunity to tease out questions that emerged from the presentations. We discussed the politics of representing marginalised groups in the media: by making communities visible, does that necessarily make them safe? What is the responsibility of brands in terms of investing in the communities they are using to advertise their products? If the current trends around diversity are driven by brands wanting to find new consumers for their products, what do anti-racist politics look like outside of capitalism? How do we gather more data on the design industry in the UK, so that we can accurately assess how equitable our field actually is? Should we hold organisations like the Design Council to account for collecting this data?

These questions informed the last section of the day, when panellists and audience members came together to co-write the ‘Doing the Work’ manifesto, which will be printed at the St Bride Foundation letterpress printing workshops later this year, to archive the event and to ensure its longevity. The themes of the manifesto are: looking for potential rather than just experience in hiring practices; nurturing an attitude of abundance to combat the ‘scarcity mindset’ induced by late capitalism; and investing in scholarships for students to help remove barriers to entry into the creative industries.

Official conference illustrator Lana Lê drew rapid sketches of all the speakers, and we all agreed that Lê (aka ‘woolypear’) should become an industry staple. After some drinks, snacks and gossip, we dispersed into Fleet Street, and the event took its place amongst the many printing histories that have been held there. Thank you to Greg Bunbury, Becky Chilcott and the St Bride Foundation for giving us the space to do this work.

Anoushka Khandwala, designer, writer, educator, London

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