Hollywood Monster join as a Supporter for BDF 2026

Why is Hollywood Monster supporting the Birmingham Design Festival?

Because we have watched design become one of the most important things this city does. When we started out, design was often treated as the finishing touch, the bit added at the end once the real decisions had been made. That has changed completely. It now shapes how places feel, how businesses are understood, how Birmingham presents itself to the rest of the world, and we have seen that shift happen from the inside over more than thirty years. The city has changed alongside it. There is huge depth of creative talent here now that genuinely competes with anywhere, and a body of work coming out of Birmingham that deserves to be taken seriously. Both of those things need backing. The talent needs somewhere to grow and be seen, and the work needs people prepared to champion it rather than take it for granted. Supporting BDF sits right at the heart of our Community Champion pledge, part of #MonsterImpact, it’s part of our commitment to putting something back into the city that built us. The festival does both jobs at once, growing the talent and championing the work, while keeping its doors open to everyone. That is exactly the kind of thing we want to stand behind.

Hollywood Monster isn’t a traditional design studio. Where do you fit in a room full of designers?

That’s an interesting question, I would challenge the idea that we are not a design business, because we have seriously talented designers in house, and they are involved long before anything gets produced. Where we are different is that we live at both ends of the process. We have the creative thinking, and we have the means to turn it into something real, across large format print, hard signage, LED and digital screens. A design has to leave the scamp or screen at some point and exist in the world, often at a scale most people never have to deal with. Five metres wide, hundreds of sites, the side of a whole building, a screen that has to work in daylight. Getting an idea to hold up at that size, and look exactly as it was meant to, is its own craft. So the people in so many of the rooms and events at the festival will be feeling the same passion that we do every day. A lot of them are our clients and our partners, people that we work alongside as designers and studios every day, we understand the challenges they are up against, and our job is to take their thinking and make sure it survives contact with the real world exactly as they intended.

You talk about design as more than decoration. What do you mean by that?

I mean it is doing real work, all the time, mostly without anyone noticing. The way a space makes you feel, whether you trust a brand on a shelf, how easily you find your way through somewhere unfamiliar. That is all design, and it is shaping decisions and emotions constantly. People see the finished thing and assume it was the easy part, when actually it is the result of a huge amount of skill. There is the creative side, the eye for colour, composition, type and balance, knowing why one version of something works and another falls flat. Then there is the technical knowledge underneath it, understanding materials and how they behave, how a colour will hold up outdoors, how something needs to be built so it lasts and installs properly and still looks right years later. Getting all of that to come together takes real craft and real experience, and most people never see the work that goes into making it look effortless. That is exactly why it gets undervalued. Because it is quiet, it is the first thing cut in schools and the last thing thought about in budgets. I think that is a mistake, and events like this one are part of putting it right.

Why does this matter so much in Birmingham specifically?

Birmingham has one of the youngest populations in Europe, and that is a genuine advantage if you do something with it. There is a deep base of creative skill in this city, across design, making, print and digital, a lot of it coming out of the universities and colleges, and it holds its own against anywhere in the country. I do not think it always gets the credit for that. The thing about a skills base, though, is that it does not look after itself. Talent needs places to learn, people to learn from, and a way into the industry that is not closed off to anyone who cannot afford it. If we do not nurture that, it drifts somewhere else, and the city loses something it cannot easily get back. We have built our business from here over decades, and a lot of the skilled people who make our work happen come from this region. We have team members who have been with us for well over ten years, people who joined us early in their careers and have grown into real experts in what they do. That tells you what happens when you back talent and give it room to develop. So we have a direct stake in keeping that pipeline healthy. Backing a festival that brings the next generation through, champions the talent already here, and keeps the door open to everyone feels like the right thing to do for the city as much as for us.

What do you hope comes out of the festival this year?

A few things. Personally, I always want to come away having learned something. Our industry is moving fast, with new mediums and technologies changing what is possible, and a festival like this is one of the best places to get a real read on where it is all heading. AI is the obvious one. It is already changing how design gets made, and the interesting question is not whether to use it but how you hold onto craft and originality while you do. I want to hear how people are actually thinking about that. Then there is everything else driving the agenda, from sustainability and the pressure to make work more responsibly, through to the harder questions about who design is really for and how the industry stays open. The honest answer is that nobody has all of this worked out yet, which is exactly why getting everyone in the same room matters. Beyond that, I hope people leave taking design a little more seriously, and that a few young designers walk out believing there is a future for them in this city. If we can play some small part in making that happen, we are glad to.

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