Frequently asked questions about

Everything you need to know about forpeople is in our name: we are for people. Our purpose is to advocate for people in every creative decision we and our clients make. It’s as true now as it was 20 years ago, and no less important.

We’ve spent 2 decades nurturing a 100-plus strong team of cross-disciplinary design talent that connect creative practices in ways others can’t, to discover the solutions others won’t.

Because a more human future doesn’t call only for better fonts or sharper language: it’s built of holistic experiences realised beautifully across all senses, places, and contexts.

Every day we strive to make the future more human. This means focusing on what should be done, not just what could be — and advocating for people at every step in every project.

To us a more human future means a future that’s more equitable, meaningful, beautiful, and sustainable.

The only network we belong to is the one we’ve built, developing clients with sheer enthusiasm and a relentless dedication to quality.

It’s been that way from day one, way back in 2004, when four people became forpeople.

Sure, we’ve grown a bit—but we’re still an independent agency, powered by passionately independent thinkers, with the freedom to do things differently.

And that’s all we’ll ever need to keep doing great work.

Michael Tropper and David Summerfield are the two of forpeople’s original four co-founders who are still active within the business as Executive Directors of our Operational and Trustee boards.

forpeople is a proudly certified B Corp™.

This means we’re part of a global community committed to continually reaching high standards of social and environmental impact. A community that uses their work as a force for good.

B Corp helps us hold ourselves to higher standards in what we do day to day: to be as democratic, representative, and sustainable as possible.

In how we run our studios.
In how we care for our team.
In how we guide brands and companies to shape the future human experience.

For now, for ever, for people.
A proudly certified B Corp™.

B Corp™ Impact Report for 2024.

Many of our clients consider us less like a typical agency, and more of a secret ingredient within their team.

We can embed within their organisations, and bring external perspectives to help them transform creatively.

We’re used to working with clients across the globe — either helping them see their home markets with a fresh perspective, or helping them navigate the European market with precision.

We have decades of expertise working in China, Japan, Korea, USA, across Europe and India.

Bespoke to the client and challenge.

Whether colleague or client, we work together on a very personal level—with trust and respect, and without placing barriers between disciplines.

Whilst our individual backgrounds span physical and digital, 2D and 3D, film, environment and beyond, we don’t allow our specialisms to separate us.

It’s why, with each new project, we unite the most passionate with the most capable, because we don’t believe there’s any other way to work, and still work well.

We bridge different industries, bringing learnings and inspiration from each to solve challenges in new ways— over 6000 projects we’ve worked on everything to the world’s fastest electric car to the future of cheese.

We do have some areas where we’ve developed deep specialisms designing the future of:

Performance; Nutrition; Automotive; Technology; Hospitality; and Wealth.

Our bodies and their health are the single biggest effectors of our quality of life.

In our Performance mission, we partner with sports and health brands to improve and extend human health and performance through better gear, services, and experiences.

We partner with industry leaders such as Arc’teryx, Nike, and Kettler to bring new visions of the body to being.

The food system takes up 44% of Earth’s liveable land and accounts for about a quarter of our GHG emissions. It’s a system ripe for a rethink.

We work with the next generation of food system innovators (such as Mosa Meat, Hoxton Farms, and Formo) as well as global nutrition icons (including Danone, The Coca-Cola Company, and Cargill) to shape a more delicious, equitable, and irresistible future of food.

Cars attribute up to 15% of the world’s GHG emissions, so a shift to more efficient and sustainable automotive products is a must for a cleaner future.

forpeople have 21 years of heritage in the automotive sector, and are leaders in design of next-generation EV experiences — partnering with global design, and innovation teams from NIO, Audi, Kia to deliver products, services, and brands which make the transition to cleaner mobility feel natural.

Technology permeates every part of our lived environments and lifestyles, through products, services and spaces — yet our relationships with these technologies is often ill-defined or unbalanced.

We partner with companies such as Dell, Logitech, Panasonic, and Plaud at the intersection of hardware, software, AI, and humanity to craft a more human future of technology experience.

Hosting is a fundamental part of human connection, and an integral part of forpeople’s DNA.

We work with the world’s leading hospitality companies (such as IHG Hotels & Resorts and Cunard) to understand the role of hospitality in a changing future, and with companies in other sectors (such as Estee Lauder Companies and Nike) to create new hospitality offerings.

We’re profoundly interested in a new generation of financial systems, services, and products with the potential to make democratise prosperity.

Our work on blockchain projects (such as with Polkadot and Thesis) has focussed on building a more equitable systems of value, while our engagement with international banks has led to us creating more personal wealth management experiences.

When you’re designing for thousands of different perspectives, there’s no use having just one of your own. It’s why we don’t have a house style, and prefer an ever-evolving set of tools to a fixed, repetitive process.

Instead, we share as many varied and individual viewpoints as we can with one another, inviting every unique outlook to inform a richer, more complete view of our work as a whole.

We’re staunch believers in the power of ambitious human creativity, and big ideas.

We use a range of AI tools and methodologies to augment our creative and research processes — always with client consent, critical judgement, and never to replace human craft.

Technically, everything we do use is verified against stringent criteria by our IT team, with details to be found in our AI Policy.

Where many organisations see consumers, demographics and target groups, we simply see people. People with emotions. Attitudes. Aspirations. Connections. And because we’re people too, how our work makes them feel matters more to us than anything else.

Our approach to brand is rooted in two ideas:

Firstly, that ‘brand’ is about people and the culture they build within an organisation — so we look internally first, creating manifestos, behaviours, and shared values which unite people behind a shared idea.

Secondly, we know that brands need to communicate seamlessly across all senses — which is why we build brands with tactility, crafting tone-of-voice, materiality, and overall experience, not just logos and fonts.

For us, design is about realising holistic experiences composed of interfaces, spaces, products, and communications.

Our experience as strategists enables us to zoom in and out between big-picture and details to design finely crafted and soulful details and interactions to create solutions which live in the heads and hearts of people.

Beyond that, we’re experts in building design systems — bespoke DNA which can be scaled by internal design teams across physical, digital, and spatial.

forpeople is a place where people come to work, but don’t always feel they are at work.

A week might take in both the future of cheese, as well as the world’s fastest electric car. Researching, CAD-ing, prototyping or cooking in service of a more human future

We value empathy, ambition, ingenuity, and virtuosity.

We invest a lot of time and effort in finding people that really belong in our family—so naturally, it’s only right that everyone should feel at home from the moment they join.

Forpeople is always on the lookout for the brightest, most curious talent in both London and Amsterdam.

You can find details of full-time or contract vacancies via our Homerrun page.

Absolutely, in both studios. A huge proportion of our team started here as interns (some of our 2010 interns are still with us!).

Head over to Homerrun to apply.

Yes please!

We value talent, curiosity, and drive above all else.

Visit our Homerrun page for more details.