Ad Astra: Pum Lefebure on Why Designers Dream Alone

Pum Lefebure kicks off our interview by interviewing me. What’s the objective of the interview, and how do we make sure it’s useful and different? And if I had to describe Design Army, the agency she founded with her husband Jake, in one word, what would it be?

Immediately it reveals Pum as a consummate designer with a sense of intention, purpose and curiosity. Someone who approaches life as she does design, that is to say, not content to see things and do things as they’ve always been seen and done. 

Whether it’s moving from Bangkok to the US and then applying for a college scholarship there without telling her parents, or consciously bucking the advice to compartmentalise her work life and family life by bringing her then baby daughter to work or on shoots, Pum is someone who would rather entrust her fate to craft rather than chance and who values an original vision.

As we’ll see, that’s also baked into her approach to creativity. She sees every project as a potential launchpad for something beautiful and new. When she hears people complaining about a boring or ‘uncool’ project, what she sees is a need to look harder to find the beauty in it.

“Guys, the best project is the one on your desk right now. Control your destiny. Work on passionately crafting something because no one is going to say no to something well-crafted and well-designed. Make a one colour, low budget project the best it can be. Let’s make that the goal. Let’s inspire everyone.”

For Pum, art and design is a language, and one she’s been practising since her childhood days when a blank piece of paper and box of colour pencils would keep her engrossed for hours as her friends and siblings chased each other around and played with Barbie dolls. An elementary school teacher noticed her talent and mentioned it to her scientist parents, who made sure their eldest daughter had access to all manner of creative activities, from painting to music and dance. She was, she says, something of a shy child. Art gave her a voice, a loud one, and she’s been building her creative vocabulary ever since.

Before the days of Design Army, that skill allowed her to be heard as a young, female creative in a room full of braggadocious male colleagues.

“I remember in my first job, I’d sit down in the conference room and you’d have the creative director and everyone would be flexing their muscles. English is my second language. I wouldn’t know what they’re talking about, so I just started drawing and sketching while I’m listening. I’m like, my mind is already here. I have an idea but I’m gonna shout quietly and show you my sketch of what i think this visual billboard should be, because a billboard doesn’t fucking talk. It’s there. You either see it or you don’t. That’s why our work is visual above all else. It has to capture you instantly and that’s hard to do.”

That experience shaped Pum’s approach to creative leadership, which is to make sure that those who are quiet, like she was, don’t get drowned out by louder, more confident voices. It’s also an approach that she believes engenders more singular, original visions and ideas.

She says when she describes that process to people outside of Design Army, they don’t believe her. She explicitly wants people to work alone before coming together - design by committee this is not. 

“There is no kumbaya at Design Army. We do not sit down and have brainstorming sessions,” she says. “You know why? As an artist, as a designer, when you dream, you dream alone. You sleep as a group, but my dream is not the same as your dream. We all have our own dream.” 

Designers are sent off alone, with the brief and sketchbook, going in 20 different directions. A week later, they bring together all of the dreams. “I go one by one, and the reason I do that is because [otherwise] I’m going to take over the whole conversation as the senior creative director. I want to hear everyone’s dream and start to see crossover. Then we group the dream, curate the dream and that becomes our story.”

Those sketchbooks are all important. As much as art is a language, it’s also a way of seeing and Pum requires her designers to sketch their ideas. This enables them to ensure that they’re not simply pulling references and compositions that have been done before, but there’s also something in the alchemical process of drawing by hand that unlocks subconscious fragments and connections, that don’t always immediately make sense but that bring a pure creativity to designs.

“I believe if you can’t sketch, you can’t see. As a writer, if you can’t write, you cannot see in your head. That’s the problem I have with some of the education that is happening right now. You just pull stuff from Pinterest, and I’m like... ‘That’s not your idea guys’,” says Pum. When she asks young designers about their process, her heart leaps when they tell her they sketch everything - but those who start from a place of research and piecing together things they’ve found, might struggle at Design Army.

It’s an approach that also helps with Design Army’s international team of artists - Pum says, “drawing creates a universal language” and Design Army is a “visual-first firm”. 

When Pum talks about art and design as a language, she also talks about the vocabulary of art history. It’s important that designers have a true depth of knowledge. Do you know Picasso’s Blue Period and the Renaissance? What about the taboo-busting Oliviero Toscani United Colors of Benetton campaigns from the 90s? (Incidentally, it was stumbling across those campaigns in COLORS magazine that inspired a young Pum to explore advertising as a career, not least the infamous photograph of a priest kissing a nun, which scandalised and intrigued her. She had attended Catholic school her whole life.)

This depth of knowledge always ends up enhancing campaigns, popping up like a wildflower through a crack in the road. With the recent Tutu Academy film for Hong Kong Ballet, for example, it features an acid green alien who was dreamt up and shot months before the 2024 Brat Summer. How did they land on such an of-the-moment colour? By looking to the past - as it turns out many of Degas’ ballerina pastels and paintings are slashed with bright lime green accents.

On the flipside, by being keyed into social media Pum and the Design Army team can be attuned to trends, and therefore what to avoid. “You have to have the pulse of what’s going on with trends to be able to make smart decisions, what not to do and what not to follow,” she says. “Trends are there for me not to follow. It’s there to avoid, because what we do for clients is a year out, two years out. Whatever is trending should give an insight of what people like now, and you’d use that information to predict.”

Having a broad and deep visual vocabulary also proved itself to be immeasurably useful in early 2023’s Adventures in A-EYE, for long time client Georgetown Opticians. One of the earliest big creative experiments in that wave of generative AI experimental campaigns, Adventures in A-EYE picked up a lot of coverage at the time for its unusual aesthetics and ambitious storytelling and will stand alongside Heinz’s Draw Ketchup as documentary evidence when people look back on the dawn of gen AI in advertising in years to come. 

The campaign revolves around high fashion Mars explorers, who have to wear glasses to protect their eyes from the harsh dry air and UV light. It took Pum months to train the AI to understand what she wanted (she describes her role as ‘almost like the mom of AI’) and to train herself how to write prompts. It took many long, frustrating sessions of Midjourney spewing out people with seven fingers and three eyeballs - and then her knowledge of art and photography came in to save the day.

“My prompt is a very long explanation. I have been in the business long enough that I can say: ‘this one should be in 35mm Kodak film, the light source is coming from the left of the camera, shooting in the morning mist with a little bit of smog’. I just describe what’s in my head, and sometimes it doesn’t even make sense and then it spits out an image,” explains Pum.

“[It goes] back to the knowledge of art history, the chest of drawers of knowledge from photography, lighting, art, colour palette, it helps us to be a stronger prompt writer. When the tool is in the hands of a team of people who have good taste and have a vocabulary to train the AI, then you’re going to get a better result,” she continues. “It’s designed with AI, but it’s very designed because there is a vision.”

Pum’s AI explorations were driven by her inquisitive nature. “As an entrepreneur and a designer, you have to be curious. After 20 years in business, you have to always stay curious,” she says. And that curiosity has always pushed her forwards in one way or another. It pushed her, for example, to leave Bangkok for the United States as a foreign exchange student.

“I just wanted my freedom, I wanted my life,” she says. “I wanted to create my own destiny and see where it was going to take me.”

She laughs that she couldn’t even order a McDonald’s when she first arrived, let alone do the required learning about the structure of the US government. As a determined, straight A student, she powered on, translating everything word-for-word with her Thai dictionary. The hard work paid off and she ended up with a scholarship to study design. 

It was during an internship at a branding agency in DC where she met her husband-to-be Jake. That turned into her first and only full time job before Design Army, and she ended up running a huge creative team. “I feel like I got an MBA from that job,” she says, explaining that she learned about the nuts and bolts of running a business - though she also learned what she didn’t want her own company to be: big and unwieldy. That’s why Design Army will always be a boutique.

It’s also why Design Army has been built to combine commerciality and creative satisfaction, or as Pum puts it, pay and purpose. There are the major global clients like PepsiCo and Netflix and JW Marriott and the smaller businesses and creative organisations like Morphe Cosmetics, Georgetown Opticians and the Hong Kong Ballet - and Design Army’s exacting standards apply equally to both. But Pum also says that there’s a value in the smaller budget clients that have more creative latitude but less of a platform. “You have to have purpose projects because people need to feel like they are growing and learning,” she says, explaining that these clients allow for innovation (which ultimately benefits the corporate clients) and help Design Army to retain its talent.

“As a company owner, our job is recruiting and keeping the best people. Our job is to inspire them to bring whatever they dream of, empower them to create their own voice. But at the same time you also want to make sure that, for the client that we serve, the client that trusts in us, whatever we dream also has to move their business objectives as well because otherwise design is just art,” explains Pum. “The difference is I approach design as art and that’s why the client likes it. The client expects it. If you want a straight branding agency, you can go to 20 places, that’s all they do - branding , logo, graphic, standard. But if you want a different point of view, more artistic, something cultural and emotional, that will make you fall in love, we are the right people.

Pum takes the responsibility of leadership seriously - acknowledging that designers are, by their nature, often very emotionally-driven and require a personalised approach. That means, as we’ve seen, creating space for the introverts and quieter voices, and it also means setting the tone and culture. “And as a leader you have to infect everyone with your passion, because people can feel it, the client can feel it when you show the work. The design team can feel it if you just want to get it done,” she says. “Leadership is very important.”

And, in her own way, Pum has shown leadership beyond the boundaries of Design Army, particularly as a female creative entrepreneur in the industry. She recalls joining the One Show’s board of directors a decade ago, where she was one of just three women. It was intimidating, she says, being surrounded by the big stars of the industry and feeling dramatically outnumbered - and at first she struggled to make her voice heard. But, with time, she’s stepped up and, this coming May, she will become the chair. Incidentally, the One Show’s gender split has become much more equal too, with 12 out of 27 board members being women.

She’s also blazed a trail for creative entrepreneurs who don’t want to choose between parenthood and business success - an inspiration for both men and women to be sure, but in an industry that still penalises motherhood she’s a real beacon. Pum and Jake became parents shortly after Design Army was founded and by including her young daughter in her work life, Pum’s managed to craft a path that works.

But then, if we’ve learned anything from Pum, it’s that she’s not content to just do things as they’ve always been done, when there’s the possibility to design something different, to set a new vision.

“I’m not interested in being like anyone else,” she says.