For most of my career, I thought I was designing. Looking back, I think I spent more time paying attention than anything else.

As a child, I was always drawing. Sketching outdoors near where I lived. Filling notebooks with landscapes, buildings, objects, and whatever else happened to catch my attention.

What I enjoyed wasn’t simply making pictures. It was trying to understand why things felt the way they did.

Why one arrangement looked balanced and another didn’t.
Why certain colours sat comfortably together.
Why some places felt calm and others felt chaotic.

Even when I wasn’t drawing, I was paying attention.

At the time, I assumed I’d become an artist. Design wasn’t on my radar.

In fact, I discovered it almost by accident.

I had hoped to study at Glasgow School of Art. Instead, I was encouraged to complete a foundation course first. That course introduced me to design, and somewhere during that year, my thinking shifted.

Art had largely been about expressing what I wanted to say. Design introduced a different challenge. How do you help somebody else say what they mean? That question stayed with me.

I’ve always been naturally curious. I’ve also always been shy. As a teenager, and well into adulthood, I often found it easier to observe than participate.

Looking back, I think design appealed to me because it allowed me to do something I found difficult in conversation. It allowed me to translate. Not just my own thoughts. Other people’s too.

When I speak, I still have a tendency to over-explain. I want people to understand not only the conclusion, but everything that led me there. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Design felt different. I trusted it. I trusted the process. I trusted that if I thought carefully enough, looked closely enough, and arranged things well enough, understanding would eventually follow.

I remember presenting concepts early in my career and watching clients look increasingly worried as I attempted to explain them. Then I’d show the work, and the room would relax.

“Oh, I get it now.”
“I see what you mean.”

That happened often enough that I began paying attention to what was really going on. The work wasn’t creating understanding. The understanding was already there. The work was revealing it. Years later, I found myself noticing something similar in creative projects. Most projects began with a request: A logo, website, campaign. The deliverable was clear. Everything else was often a little vague.

Clients would say things like: “I’ll know it when I see it.” Or: “Can you give me some ideas now?” I never enjoyed those moments. Not because I couldn’t come up with ideas. The problem was that it always felt like we were starting in the wrong place.

The strongest projects rarely began with creativity. They began with understanding. Particularly in the charity and faith-based projects I worked on, there was often something deeper holding everything together: A belief, a purpose or shared story. Not always visible. Not always articulated. But present. You could feel it. And when difficult decisions arose, you could return to it.

Other projects weren’t like that. The work looked good. Sometimes very good. But privately, you knew something was missing. There was nothing underneath it. No centre of gravity. No reason why this solution belonged to this organisation and nowhere else.

For years, I noticed this without really giving it a name. I simply assumed it was part of the job. Then one day I came across the philosophical word thisness. I remember reading about it, liking the sound of it, the meaning even more so. The unique quality that makes something what it is, and not something else.

What surprises me now is how little I did with it. I didn’t immediately build a methodology, create a framework or even connect it to my own work. The word simply sat there in the background. Occasionally resurfacing. Refusing to disappear completely.

Years later, when I started thinking about refreshing my own brand, it appeared again. At first, I thought it might simply make an interesting business name. But the more I reflected on my own working practice, the more something began to bother me. I realised I wasn’t actually helping clients create defining ideas. Most of the time, I was helping them recognise something that was already there.

The defining idea of an organisation is rarely created. It is usually discovered. That sentence arrived slowly. Not through a single project. Or a single insight. It emerged through hundreds of conversations, observations, successes, mistakes, false starts, and half-formed thoughts collected over many years. The penny certainly didn’t drop overnight. In truth, it took far longer than it probably should have.

There was even a point where I considered keeping the whole thing to myself. The idea of putting something like thisness into the world felt uncomfortable. It meant attaching my name to something. It meant moving from practice into public thinking. That felt far more exposing than producing design work for a client. Part of me wondered whether it was worth the risk. Whether anyone would find it useful or if it was simply something that worked for me. But the thought kept returning.

Partly because I believed other designers might find it helpful. Partly because I realised much of what I’d learned over the years existed only in my own head. And partly because creative work seems increasingly under pressure to move faster, produce more, and question less.

Yet every meaningful project I’ve worked on has pointed in the opposite direction. Looking back, I sometimes think thisness existed long before I gave it a name. It was there in the sketchbooks. It was there in the client conversations. It was there in those moments when a room shifted from confusion to recognition. The word came later. The observation was already there.

And perhaps that’s fitting. Because thisness was never really about creating something new.

It was about noticing what should not be lost before everything else begins.