Meet Charlotte Cripps: the design director who doesn’t just think outside the box – she’s busy redesigning it, branding it, and probably teaching it how to use AI.
From transforming legacy publications into glossy coffee-table stunners to leading bold design teams, and most recently, shaping the branding for The Subthread – Charlotte’s career reads like a masterclass in visual storytelling. She’s not just fluent in editorial and brand development, she’s also conversational in AI, wielding new tech as both muse and toolkit.
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Today, she’s fresh off a run as design director, her portfolio bursting with award-shortlisted covers and a knack for making even the most strategic design look effortless. If there’s a new frontier in creative tech, Charlotte’s probably already mapped it – and added a killer logo for good measure.
We sat down with Charlotte to talk about pushing boundaries, the joy of collaboration, and the right way to think about AI in design.
The fundamentals of good design
“When I first started designing magazines, images arrived on little acetone squares. I’d use a slide loupe to check small acetate transparencies on a lightbox,” says Charlotte Cripps, sipping from a Kate Bush-themed coffee mug at her breakfast bar. It’s a memory that captures just how much publishing has shifted over her 25 years in the industry – and how she’s shifted with it.
Spending time in Cripps’ gorgeous 1980s home, it’s clear good design runs through every part of her life. She greets me in a floor-length electric-blue dress with a cape-like sweep, a striking contrast to her long red hair. “You have to be color obsessed to do this job,” she says.
She has been designing since the ’90s, but in her mind the fundamentals haven’t changed. “You still need good judgment. You still need creativity. You still need to know when to pull back. You also need a certain amount of obsessive technical detail and the willingness to go deep into what you’re designing.”
Her early career was hands-on and analogue: days spent in libraries scanning books, buying magazines, ripping out tear sheets, and building mood boards by hand. Today, she can build one in under an hour, with dozens of iterations just a few clicks away.
The role of AI
Charlotte is clear-eyed about the role AI now plays. “If you don’t embrace AI, you’ll get left behind,” she says. But for her, AI is just a tool – not a replacement. “I’ll design something in Midjourney, but that’s only the beginning. You take it into Photoshop, layer it up, play with it. If you treat AI as more than a tool, the originality of people’s work dies.”
Adobe Creative Suite remains her foundation. “I couldn’t survive without Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign,” she says. Plugins “elevate” what comes out of Adobe, while Midjourney and Flora AI push her experimentation further. “Flora looks intimidating at first, but the interface is beautiful and it’s surprisingly simple. Some of my best AI has been done on there.”
When she isn’t racing deadlines, Charlotte devotes time to her own R&D: discovering new tools, decoding SREF codes shared by AI technologists and designers on X, and diving into quick-hit tutorials on YouTube. Her favorite channel is PANTER: “They’re cutting-edge, the videos are under five minutes, no fluff, straight to the point.”
She also stresses the importance of online communities - from Pinterest boards to Substack newsletters to Reddit forums where she finds tutorials or tests work with strangers before taking it to clients. “There’s no place better than the community,” she says.
"If you treat AI as more than a tool, the originality of people’s work dies.”
Her career began straight out of university with a travel magazine for Lufthansa, before she cut her teeth at the TV trade title Televisual. Back then, artwork traveled by moped courier on CD-ROMs to printers in Cornwall, who would then download the files, print them and bike back color proofs for Charlotte to approve in London. “You’d have mountains of CD-ROMs piled around you,” she laughs.
After working on branding projects and freelancing for the likes of Contagious and The Viral factory, her big return to publishing came with Broadcast, where she turned a traditional broadsheet into a glossy coffee-table magazine. More recently, as director of design at Digital Frontier, she fused technology and editorial design, making space to dive into AI. “It was the one place where design was as important as the words.”
Creating The Subthread's visual identity
Since going freelance Charlotte has put her skills to good use. Among other clients she has created the branding for The Subthread. Charlotte crafted a visual identity that’s ambitious. Tasked with creating a look that bridges generations and sits at the crossroads of creativity, technology, and innovation, she delivered a Brutalist yet friendly system inspired by the core aesthetics of 70s to 90s design.
The result? Confident, approachable typography, flexible layouts built for editorial clarity and creative edge, and a scalable toolkit ready to grow from digital moments to live events alongside the brand itself. Her wordmark, for which she created both block and outline variants, threads ideas together with motion and imagery, ensuring The Subthread logo feels unmistakably original wherever it appears. It was built entirely in Illustrator. For the block mark Charlotte drew a rectangular frame around the text, and then used the blend command with a single step to add a subtle sense of perspective.
Charlotte Cripps on designing The Subthread brand
From the brief’s arrival I knew it would be a gift to design a mark with Brutalist bones, a friendly attitude with a cultural heartbeat. It was clear this logo would matter.
The block wordmark delivers instant cut-through and doubles as a storytelling window for photography and video, which could work perfectly for partner takeovers or events.
The outline mark is lighter and easy to adjust and animate so I could shift the mood without losing recognition.
In one iteration I mimicked a CRT boot up with scanlines, soft bloom and tiny phosphor grit to echo late night screens and street tech, so the mark feels like lived culture rather than studio polish. That balance of structure, play and cultural texture is exactly why making it was such a joy.
Charlotte's inspirations run deep. As a student, she fell for the radical typography of Neville Brody (The Face, Arena) and the grid-breaking layouts of David Carson (famously known for his work on cultural magazine Ray Gun). “They started my love affair with publishing and editorial design,” she says.
More recently, she’s drawn to Japanese artist Shojiro Nakaoka, who creates visuals using sound vibrations and plotters – a process that echoes Charlotte’s own explorations in generative design and the intersection of technology and creativity. “Some of it is moving, some illustrative. Everyone should check him out.”
From acetone slides to AI animations, CD-ROMs to digital communities, Charlotte has embraced every wave of change. What anchors her is not the technology but the philosophy: judgment, creativity, and curiosity.
“The skills will never change,” she says. “The technology will. And if you’re curious enough to test what’s new, you’ll find yourself at the forefront of what’s next.”
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