Patrick Bennett on Why Design Is Always in Service of the Idea

​The 2025 London International Awards wrapped in Las Vegas, where juries debated every piece of work live and in person.

Among those deep in discussions was Patrick Bennett, global chief creative officer of Jack Morton, who served as a juror in this year’s Design competition. With a career spanning graphic, print, packaging, digital, advertising and experiential, Patrick brings a rare breadth of perspective on how design shapes communication.

This year’s Design Grand LIA went to FCB Chicago for ‘Caption With Intention’, recognised for its thoughtful approach to accessibility and clarity in visual communication.

Patrick spoke with LBB’s Addison Capper about trends he saw in the work and his wider thoughts on the evolution of design in an ever-expanding advertising industry.

LBB> The Design category definition mentions visual identity, production values, execution of craft, and communication through visual content. How do you personally define “design” in the context of advertising today?

Patrick> I need to preface this by saying I’ve had a whole bunch of different focuses in my career. I started in graphic design, then I moved into print and packaging design, then into digital advertising, then 360 traditional advertising, and then into experiential.

So I’ve had a really wide breadth. And through all of that, I’ve used design as a foundation for everything I’ve done. The way I approach it is by thinking of design as – to use the cliché – how it works. And to double down on that, how it communicates.

Design is in service of concepts. It’s about how you design something to bring that concept to life and communicate it. There’s always a design language behind a thing, because there’s a concept of what that thing should be and how you should engage with it. That impacts everything – from how much it weighs, to what it feels like, to the materials it’s made from, to its shape.

I think that’s broadly how we need to think about design: how does it work, and how does it communicate the concept behind it?

LBB> How do you feel design in advertising is broadening? For example, how does it impact practices beyond more traditional visual identities into things like experiences?

Patrick> Very early in my career, I was lucky enough to design the yearbooks for the New York Yankees when they were winning the World Series. I designed one cover that didn’t show any players, didn’t show any hardware, didn’t show anything. It just had the Tiffany NY logo and a spot varnish pinstripe – you couldn’t even see the pinstripes.

My thinking behind that was that it was such a powerful brand, especially at that moment, that cluttering it up with nonsense would only take away from it.

Fast forward to now, and you think about the things we design – whether enormous experiences with 30,000 people, staging with neon and LEDs, or other large-scale work – it’s the same principle. It’s about understanding what we want to communicate, who we’re communicating to, and the best way to do that. You can apply that to every aspect of marketing and come to the same conclusion.

It’s important, as designers move through the industry, to recognise that their task is bigger than aesthetics. The aesthetics are part of it, and they do communicate, but the role is broader and bigger than that.

LBB> As you work for Jack Morton, can you speak a bit more pointedly about great design with regards to experiential. What is that relationship like?

Patrick> If you’re designing a 2D print piece, you have certain tools you can communicate with. If you’re designing a 30-second spot, you have even more tools. When you’re designing for experiential, you have a tremendous number of tools at your disposal – from spatial design to temporal design. It’s about the movement people will take through a space, and that’s absolutely fascinating.

I’ve been in the experiential space for about five years, and I’m still learning every day. One of the most important things designers need to do is learn the rules, so that when you break them, you’re breaking it on purpose – for a reason.

I’m still learning the rules of experiential design so I can understand how to break them for effect. That’s what I love about it – it keeps changing and I keep learning new things. That’s what designers should be doing.

LBB> How is the importance of design evolving in a world where people are bombarded with visual content all day?

Patrick> Right now is a unique time period. There are a few things in the body of work here that aren’t labelled as AI but you can probably figure out they are. As more people get bombarded with AI – next year it’s predicted 60% of the content people see will be AI, and the year after it could be 80% – people are going to struggle with how they relate to brands. How do they trust brands? How do they trust what people say when they don’t see it with their own eyes?

That’s making experiential, and truly conceptual experiential work, even more essential. I think we’re going to continue to see that growth. I’m happy about it – it’s my industry – but I also think it’s the real antidote.

Experiential allows brands to show up in people’s worlds, to let people directly connect with the brand in a meaningful way, with a value exchange, through a beautiful experience. And that’s what people are looking for.

LBB> Design and visual identity can be so subjective – how do you deal with that when judging it?

Patrick> I would argue not, actually. Again, it goes back to the rules. There are a tremendous number of rules in the design world.

I was looking at a piece while judging that was beautiful – an amazing concept, incredibly well executed. At first glance, it’s just beautiful. But they went a step further in some of the materials they shared, showing how it leaned into particular rules. One was font weights, where they created a new weight of their brand font for a specific purpose. It needed to be different to fulfil a role, and that was very much about following the rules.

Then there was another section where they did something different – where they broke the rules. And there are so many examples like this. Having been in design for quite some time, and starting a long time ago, I’ve been grounded in that. One of my very first jobs, even as I was just getting into graphic design, was as a pre-pro person. My job was to fix files before they went to press. I got a beating on making sure the rules were followed – making sure the black was the right weight so it would print correctly.

That’s what you see in design: there are rules. It’s not completely arbitrary, like picking a colour you like or a font you like. Things work together for a reason.

LBB> What else have you seen in the work you’ve judged?

Patrick> What I love about packaging design in particular is that you don’t immediately think of it as subversive or as having creative hacks. Usually, you think of ads that use Google Maps to do something clever, or ads that hijack people’s Alexas. But we actually saw a few packaging designs that were hacks and conceptual leaps, and I thought that was very cool.

When you’re thinking about communicating a concept or an idea, it doesn’t have to only come through traditional channels. Every single step of the way can communicate that – even packaging design, even something subversive or system-hacking. You could lead with a package design in advertising.

LBB> Nostalgia is such a big trend at the moment - did that pop up at all?

Patrick> In terms of nostalgia, I didn’t see a lot of it in packaging design, but I did see more of it in poster design. Some leaned heavily into what you’d expect from 1960s or even 1950s poster design. A couple of those scored high for me because they captured a lot of quality and value in design that you want to see in a piece of work.

At the same time, there were also designs some might dismiss as ‘brain rot’ that resonated with me, because they felt very of the now. They captured the zeitgeist, and I wanted to lean into that as well.

So you see a big gap: on one side, considered, slow 1960s-style design with immaculate typography; on the other, bold, chaotic work that leans into today’s aesthetic. I love a world where both of those can be rewarded.

LBB> As you said, AI is also completely changing the way visuals can be made – what are your thoughts on the line between ‘craft’ and automation and our definition of ‘good’ design with regards to that?

Patrick> It’s a world that’s moving really fast, and I don’t know if we’ve reached a point yet where we can clearly create new rules around it. Every week there are new capabilities, and AI can be used in completely new and different ways.

Everybody in this industry has a story: you’re working on a project, you think you’re advancing the tools in an innovative way for your client, and then – bang – Google or someone releases something that completely blows it up.

So I don’t want to say, as some folks have, that we’re just moving toward a purely curatorial, editing-type relationship with AI. I don’t want to make predictions about what the interface will be. But I do think hands-on craft is incredibly important. Leveraging AI for efficiency and scale is powerful, but like any other tool, it can be misused and overused.

So I think anyone who gives you a definitive answer on this at this stage is being presumptive.

LBB> How should accessibility be factored into design in advertising? Is it still treated as an afterthought, or is it becoming integral to craft?

Patrick> How you create for differently abled people is critical, especially in the experiential space.

A few years ago, I led a piece for American Express where we built a big, beautiful Platinum Playhouse on the beach in Miami for Miami Art Week. There were probably a dozen other activations on the beach of different scales. Ours was one of the largest– and the only one with ramps and accessibility for wheelchair users. That wasn’t by accident. I’m passionate about it, and that client was also passionate about it.

Whenever you create things that are accessible to the most people possible, you’ll find others – who you didn’t even design the on-ramps for – also benefit. I always bring up curb cuts. They were designed for wheelchair access, but moms with strollers love them, and so do plenty of others.

When you think about any work you’re designing – whether it’s an interface, an ad, a TV spot, or a $100 million experience – making it available to as many people as possible only improves the quality of the output.

A simple example: colour blindness. If you choose colours with the right level of contrast, the work doesn’t just become more accessible for people with visual impairments – it actually looks better for everyone.

LBB> In your view, what does diverse design look like? Is it about who creates the work, who it represents, or how widely it can be understood?

Patrick> It’s a lot of those things. I’m from the Caribbean. My family’s Trinidadian, but I was born in St. Croix. I grew up in the Caribbean and didn’t move to the States until I went to college. That gives me a very different perspective than many of the folks I work with and many of the clients I directly interact with.

What that means is I look at every opportunity, every audience, from a very sociological standpoint. I don’t make assumptions. And that’s what diversity is all about – not making assumptions.

When you have a homogeneous group, people just assume: “Oh, he likes to eat that,” or “Oh, he watched that movie.” How many times have you been in a brainstorm where someone says, “It’s like that movie”? Nine times out of ten, I’ll say, “I’ve never seen that. I didn’t grow up with that.” Yes, it removes the shorthand, but it adds a different perspective. It makes you look at things in a way you wouldn’t otherwise take for granted.

That’s what diversity is about: never taking anything for granted. And that makes better work.

LBB> What’s the guiding principle you always come back to when you’re designing?

Patrick> It’s about communication. You never forget that design is a communication exercise. If you’re just sitting there pushing pixels around without anything you’re trying to communicate, you’ve already failed.

With all the tools we have in front of us – whether it’s AI, Figma, Canva, or any of the others – if you just sit down and start tinkering with the tools before actually spending time in your brain thinking about what it is, you’ve missed the point.

Sometimes that means starting with a pencil, old-school. It might feel like the dark ages, but you have to start with an idea. Then you think about how you’re going to communicate that idea, and you use design for its true purpose: to communicate.

​Read more from Addison Capper here.

​Read more insights from LIA here.​