Brian Collins

Brian Collins is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of COLLINS, an independent strategy and brand-experience design company he started in 2008 with Leland Maschmeyer. Before founding the firm he spent roughly a decade as chairman and chief creative officer of the brand and innovation division at Ogilvy. COLLINS has built identity and brand systems for companies including Spotify, Microsoft, Hershey, IBM, Coca-Cola, and Mailchimp, work that has been covered widely in the design and business press.

Fast Company named Collins an American Master of Design, and he received the Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts and has long argued that design should be optimistic and ambitious, treating brand identity as a tool to imagine better futures rather than merely decorate existing ones. He speaks on the craft and business of brand design, on building an independent design company, and on the relationship between creativity, strategy, and long-term brand value.

His talks draw designers, creative directors, and brand teams who want a practitioner's view of how distinctive identity systems get made and why design ambition matters to a business.