In this personal essay, our founder Brian Collins reflects on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, living in NYC throughout the early ’80s, and how symbols, like the rainbow flag, are used to imagine and install a more benevolent future.

“On a good day, this is the quintessential nature of design: signaling and rehearsing new tomorrows. To craft symbols, stories, and artifacts that ultimately shape hearts and minds for the better.”

Read on.

Print Magazine reviews the talk Brian gave at this year’s 99U Conference at Lincoln Center.

Writer Ellen Shapiro highlights how we help our clients create a new, expanded vision for their future and then design their way into it.

Design is not what we make. Design is what we make possible for others.

That’s been our mission from the start.

It appears to be working.

We’re honored that AdAge selected us as their first Design Firm of the Year.

Thank you to our teams in San Francisco and New York for pushing us into the future.

And thank you to our clients and partners who give us opportunities to do amazing things - and who make us better, every day.

We’re just getting started.

COLLINS was recently named to Ad Age’s 2019 A-List, highlighting companies that are shaping the future of creativity.

Thank you to our partners who trust us to imagine and create better tomorrows.

“We see design as a problem-seeking process. Seeking, asking increasingly bigger questions, allows you to reframe a problem.”

In a recent interview with Forbes, Founder Brian Collins speaks to design being an agent of change and how it can create a better and brighter future. Click here to read the full interview.

“Great designers don’t invent the future. Instead, they sense where the world is going, what it needs, and install that future for the rest of us.”

In Adobe’s Blog, CCO & Founder Brian Collins and Chobani CCO Leland Maschmeyer highlight the key elements to a successful rebrand and encourage today’s designers to use stories, symbols, and systems as a starting for point for creating a future that inspires them.

“The best designers are always rehearsing the future in some way; first they must seek and uncover some unseen truth or opportunity, then actualize it in some tangible way.”

CCO Brian Collins shares how he encourages students to channel their unique creative strengths into new concepts and possibilities that can benefit the world around them in the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Design blog.

For the second year in a row, we were invited to speak at the RiseUp Summit, the international tech/startup/design conference based in Cairo, Egypt.

COLLINS Senior Designer Leo Porto spoke to a global crowd, leading an inspiring conversation on cultural identity and his experience creating Bonde, the first-ever conference dedicated to Brazilian design, happily co-sponsored by us

COLLINS has been selected for the “Top 50 Companies Creatives Want to Work Next”. We’re honored to join Nike, W+K, Google, HBO, Disney, Dropbox, Spotify, Instagram, and Pixar, among others. Thank you workingnotworking.com and the creative people who voted for us.

If you’re looking to join us in our west coast or east coast office please let us know.

The COLLINS High School Design Internship Program went into full gear this year, led by Yocasta Lachapelle. Isis Joseph and Kaye Torres are currently New York City high school students. Nicole Cousins and Cyra Cupid were high school interns with us last year and returned again after their first year at The Rhode Island School of Design. This week we begin interviewing candidates for 2019.

“Design is not about what we do. Design is about what we encourage and enable others to do… it’s about building tools, environments and communications that help other people make meaningful things possible.”

San Francisco Managing Partner Karin Soukup and CCO Brian Collins discuss the importance of secret superpowers at COLLINS and more in Tobias van Schneider’s ‘How to Get a Job at X’ series.

Design is a powerful tool to create civic change, but voting is another way we can help create the future we want to live in.

Exercise your vote today.

COLLINS once again helped design the science and technology conference, PopTech2018.

The opening film and subsequent talk by Brian Collins from 2017 sparked a conversation this year around imagination and creative tension. And the film lives on as one of the most downloaded videos of the conference.

View the film here.

Monocle highlights our work for the East Cut neighborhood in San Francisco, uniting the Rincon Hill, Folsom, and Transbay areas that were once overlooked due to the 1869 Second Street Cut development project.

The new name and identity for the East Cut reflects the vibrant community’s past and future.

Fast Company notes, “while other software giants are simplifying their branding, Mailchimp is keeping it quirky.”

Our creative identity prepares this joyful brand for a pioneering future while retaining its playful, unconventional disposition.

And of course we kept Freddie. He just got a haircut.

Brian and three of our team members recently spoke with The Dieline about joining, working, and growing at COLLINS. Pro-tip: reading is fundamental.

Brian will be taking the stage this week with Chobani Chief Creative Officer Leland Maschmeyer in Atlanta as their first stop in Adobe’s Creative Leaders Program series. They’ll be discussing how design helps companies create new futures and sharing a framework for making that actionable.

This week our work with vitaminwater on their brand book took home a win at the Design Week Awards in London.