“Don’t Be Precious, Stay Curious” – Jonny Goodall on the Ever-Evolving Discipline of Design
A VCCP veteran with over 11 years under his belt, Jonny Goodall is chief design officer for the agency’s creative digital experience division, Bernadette — and in 2024 he was elected to the esteemed BIMA 100 list for industry leaders in the creative digital space.
He spends most of the day navigating the high and lows of the ever changing digital landscape.
Managing and nurturing a talented team of over 30 designers, creatives and technologists across London and Prague, the last year has seen Jonny focus on evolving the offering, and growing capabilities into new frontiers like AI and bots, systems and automation, immersive and gaming, while pushing our web and app skills to new levels to make smart experiences people love.
LBB> Tell us about your current role and design specialism(s)?
Jonny> I’m chief design officer of Bernadette – the digital experience agency from VCCP.
Bernadette is around 100 people across London, and Prague. And I have the privilege of leading a talented team of people and disciplines that represent interactive creativity, digital innovation or experience design and engineering.
And we work across the whole digital ecosystem for clients – from websites, and apps for consumers to tools and systems for internal teams.
My role doesn’t stop at the ideation and output, you can’t design a digital experience without developing and deploying it, so support driving the end to end solution.
What technology and platforms, as much as how does the brand show up, and does it give us what the business needs, and what customers want.
LBB> What drew you to design in the first place and how has your design career evolved?
Jonny> I’ve always been drawn to making things with technology rather than “design” in the formal sense.
Growing up in the ’90s, I was obsessed with Japanese cartoons, console games, and the early days of opportunity that dial-up internet gave us.
I didn’t realise at the time that my fascination with how toys were assembled or how I could control characters on my Nintendo Game Boy were actually rooted in design.
As the internet matured, I started coding, experimenting with digital art tools, and exploring ways to create interactive experiences and games.
I attended an art and design college to do multimedia and there I won a D&AD New Blood pencil for a one time only award in streaming – at the time it was being lined up as a creative opportunity, not just a way to deliver content.
But while studying I decided I’d learn more by diving into real projects – designing websites, gig posters, and album artwork for bands. That hands-on work built my portfolio, and got me on the career ladder with a couple of real design and development jobs.
But the D&AD award got me noticed by Dare in London, one of the most progressive digital agencies of the 2000s.
There, I lived through the rise and fall of Adobe Flash and discovered how thrilling it is to blend design and technology for big brands on their digital platforms or in marketing.
I jumped into a couple of fulltime and contract roles after that and eventually that led me to join VCCP – the wonderful Jim Capp saw I had something and I was quickly entrusted to grow the digital design team and bring digital thinking and execution to some amazing brands and campaigns and now I’ve been here over a 10 years and we’ve grown the digital offering into something really special.
And that now goes by the name Bernadette, which reflects the VCCP Challenger spirit and the girl of the logo standing up to your bear. And also my belief in putting people first in every digital experience so that brands truly resonate with their audience.
From tinkering with 8-bit sprites to shaping strategic digital solutions, I’ve always found joy in solving problems, telling stories and where I can make a story something users can participate in like playing a game - thanks to interaction design and technology.
LBB> What aspects of design do you get really nerdy about personally?
Jonny> Interaction design in its widest and deepest sense is my thing. How people interact with digital products and services. I love human-centred design (HCD) and human-machine interaction (HMI) and behavioural science.
Fundamentally what I do is all about people and understanding them – that’s first, then make something they would want to engage with. And to do that I love mixing technology and engineering with design and creativity.
Design is about solutions, and technology enables it and makes it real – so many solutions, that digital design, that interface, that experience is nothing without the hardware, the operating system and the code to bring the solution to life.
LBB> There are so many new design tools out – what tools do you like to use and why?
Jonny> Not new as such, but part of the new skool compared to the old faithfuls like Adobe - Figma is essential for anyone in interface and experience design, not just the designers, but anyone in the team.
Figma brings people together over your designs and prototypes and really is built for the digital product and experience world. Scalable, systemised, flexible, fast.
Unreal is the other one we’re super excited about. We make a lot of digital twins and key hero assets and build automation engines around them, mixing Unreal into our workflows brings us some of the virtual production opportunities you hear about in Hollywood.
And means from concepts to model creation we can rig and have objects in interactive experiences and games pretty fast and even prompt enabled for gen-AI outputs.
Which brings me onto my love for Midjourney and Kling - gen AI is just making the world more exciting and helping stimulate and realise more thinking.
LBB> Design Thinking – thoughts?
Jonny> “Design Thinking”, or design thinking – as an established framework it embodies principles I fully endorse and can’t live without… It’s as helpful as the double diamond from the Design Council.
For digital experiences and products or any product design physical or digital: empathising with users, defining the problem, ideating the solution, prototyping it, testing with people and iterating – have to happen to get it right.
I apply these steps without feeling the need to label them as part of a specific framework and it helps focus us to find and solve certain problems.
The one big thing it does do, is help people remember to design for their users. Not just the business. But we still have to do both of course.
I think if anything IDEO’s Design Thinking framework made problem solving a product in its own right, and empowered us all to solve problems and by proxy design.
But also in turn didn’t really help us designers. Many people treat Design Thinking as a standalone concept and it’s a thing before design, as if there’s an evil twin called Design Doing or Design without Thinking. Or just Design Production after we found out what to do.
At its core, design is about solving problems – which naturally involves thinking. It’s not just art or subjective aesthetics. The very notion of splitting “design” and “thinking” has undervalued the real work that goes into creating meaningful solutions, experiences, communications etc.
LBB> What are the most persistent misconceptions about your particular design specialism that you see across the advertising and marketing landscape?
Jonny> I get into a spiral of despair about the default perception that design is visual aesthetics and pantone swatches. That’s compounded by the misconception that if you work in digital you are also IT and can fix the meeting room computer.
Also we see a lot of misconceptions that the digital experience is a second thought after the advertising. When it should be part of the wider advertising though.
Given that, invariably we are encouraging someone to tap, click, scan or search for what you just advertised. And that will take them to a download of an app, or a web page to start a purchase journey, or discover more about what they just saw.
So that place it takes them to, needs to be just as good as the advertising – it needs to match and complement and build on it – so that online shop, landing page, app needs to meet the expectations of the person who felt compelled to commit to going further with your brand after seeing the marketing. And too often that is forgotten about and the result is drop off.
LBB> Accessible design is an increasingly prominent topic – from your experience what are the most challenging facets of accessible design? And what does best practice in accessible design in your particular design specialism look like?
Jonny> Brands and clients identify it as part of their responsibility. Integration and inclusion of accessibility in brand. Brand worlds need to be as responsive and adaptive. Any of us, now, for my own needs and comfort can change, without any special hacks or plugins, whether an app shows us light or dark. I can increase the text size of everything on my phone. And even switch out the fonts to basic fonts… So when a brand can have colour and typography manipulated by the people engaging with it for their own accessibility needs, what will make your brand still stand out? Without worrying about accessibility needs, you will not only lose users, you’ll lose your brand.
LBB> What do you think about the ethics of design?
Jonny> Design is supposed to be about solving problems. In experience design unethical “Dark UX” design patterns creep into too many online experiences.
The easiest to see some of those is to turn off your ad blockers – we have made advertising and digital media so annoying that ad blockers exist. And you can see why, too many sites make money from a bombardment of advertising flashing up everywhere as you scroll down a page – you’ll either tap one as you scroll, by accident or you got an advert confused for actual content and you go down a rabbit hole.
Design makes things look exciting and attractive enough for us to want it. And we then make it easy to buy. One click order, makes you spend without much a second thought. Ease for the user over ethics and care for society some might argue.
The balance of the ethics of design goes hand in hand with the ethics of the clients you work with and what challenges are we solving. Design thinking and other frameworks like it help keep us honest to what people need and want. But we are also representing a business, and good design helps both people and the business ideally.
LBB> What are some of your favourite examples of creative design solutions that inspire you?
Jonny> The product design of Teenage Engineering makes me very happy. Waze, the navigation app, still just makes driving that bit more enjoyable and intelligent, ahead of the other mapping apps out there.
LBB> Which design projects throughout your career have been the most satisfying to work on and why?
Jonny> The ones where the client is excited about the risk and reward. Recently ‘My Cadbury Era’ was a perfect example of that.
A project that happened at the right time, right in the gen-AI explosion. And we knew AI was a perfect enabler for a campaign that was aiming to make personalised user generated content, but at the same time it was a risk.
Gen AI needs to be handled with care due to how it is trained and the hallucinations and bias it can generate when not guided.
It takes brave and trusted clients to let us crack on and together go on a journey to make an experience that not many global brands have been able to do so robustly yet.
The result was great usage, and accolades for its innovative use of AI, and inclusive design so the hard work paid off.
LBB> What’s going on at the moment in design that’s getting you particularly excited?
Jonny> Conversational interface design. With the power of AI (generative and AI with reasoning) we can create whole new ways to interact with brands and their data, content and information which are full of personality and natural behaviour cues and help drive positive longer term engagement.
Imagine the internet is just data and you can just talk, chat, text – just ask and interact with a brand like you would any person online… with full contextually relevant, rich media interfaces. Webpages… What webpages? I have all the content I need without all that old fashioned browsing?
LBB> Who are your design heroes and why?
Jonny> Dieter Rams – a genius. Most well known for his work at Braun years ago. His 10 principles of design apply to any kind of design. And inspire me to balance form and function, and keep it simple.
Susan Kare – the designer from back in the ‘80s who designed the iconic icons for the Apple Operating system. Bringing personality and fun to what in the early days of computer interfaces was a little bit void of personality. And probably without her, maybe emojis wouldn’t be what we know them to be today.
Simon Manchipp – a lot closer to home and now. The ECD and founders at Someone – the brand agency. Whenever I have the privilege of being in a pitch or presentation, or drinking session with him. He’s been there, and done it, and been back again – he is so tuned into culture and people’s perceptions. His attitude to work is infectious and I learn a lot from him… More than I learned from ChatGPT, who would have been my fourth hero.
