80% of working low-income adults want to attend school but cannot afford to.

That’s the result of a gnarly mix of systemic, incentive-driven problems that have stumped our best policymakers and most imaginative employers.

While the rest scratched their heads, Rachel Romer stepped in and rolled up her sleeves. She founded Guild: a B Corp. tuition finance company that helps employers pay for employees’ tuition.

Our friends at Forbes cover Guild’s story - and the story of our work together - here.

London, we heard you like tea.

At least, more than coffee for a Friday afternoon. So next week, Coffeehaus becomes Teahaus. We just did it in Ipanema, why not bring it to Shoreditch?

With our friends at Google Creative Lab, we’ll be putting on tea, Pimms and good conversation all afternoon.

Leland Maschmeyer and Brian Collins are in town joining the good people at D&AD for the D&AD Festival, where they’ll speak about transformation and design, and Brian will chair judging. We figured we’d stick around to hang with a few more Londoners before we left.

Friday, May 24, 3-5pm.

Afterwards, we wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up at a pub.

You can RSVP, here. Spaces are limited.

“The instant you hear someone say ‘What is this ugly shit?’ that’s a signal that something promising is about to happen. It could even herald the emergence of a new world.

That’s been going on all over TikTok and YouTube lately. The kids there are beyond inspiring. They’re fashion designers, painters, skateboarders, coders, cooks, dancers, side hustlers, collaborators, demos, EPs—all messing around trying to figure it out. That’s where the energy is—at emerging edges of the arts and tech. AI is just fuel on that fire…”

Read on, here.

The AIGA National Conference is in New York this week.

Sunday, we are holding a massive book sale at the COLLINS office with our friend and designer Rick Griffith from Matter.

12 - 5p. Sunday, October 15.

457 Grand St.
Brooklyn, NY.

Open to all.

We hope to see you there.

Brian Collins can be found on a lot of lists. Some include:

• Top Tate’s Bakeshop Customers of 2022
• Trivia Watch’s 60 Under 60 [2020, discipline - Star Trek]
• New York City’s Loudest Uber Passengers, 2010 - present

It was nice to see the good people at Frontify put him on theirs, too.

And it was a bonus that Brian also ended up on Frontify’s Paradigms conference billing alongside COLLINS Chief Strategy Officer Taamy Amaize, last week.

Stay tuned for a recap of the action.

Artwork by Kristina Bartosova and Dev Valladares.

When Freeform invited us to help them evolve their purpose and transform their brand, they made it clear they were committed to wholesale change.

Game on.

We worked with the crew at Freeform to build a new brand platform and visual identity that walked us both right to the edge of what we knew and what we didn’t.

And we worked with the good, inventive people at Monotype to transform the original 1957 cut of Helvetica into something completely unexpected and dynamic.

Michael Di Leo and Emily Sneddon took the stage at the Monotype-hosted Brand Talks conference to share how we did it with our friends at Disney.

Plenty of us were in the crowd. And they both (unsurprisingly) crushed.

You can see the work, here. Which, by the way, Fast Company just included among the Best Work of the Year in their Innovation by Design Annual Issue.

And again, bravo to our friends at Freeform.
Love at first watch, indeed

We began our relationship with the remarkable people at Figma three years ago.

Working closely with their leaders, we set out to tell the world about a truth that history often hides: Nothing great is made alone.

Today Fast Company named our efforts together the Best Brand Work of the Year.

Good clients = good work.

Bravo, all.

Story here.

At COLLINS, we believe the spaces we work from profoundly inform how we create within them.

In the words of Anne-Marie Willis, the acclaimed architect, researcher and writer, “We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.”

Our friends at Thiel Architecture + Design helped us imagine and build our offices just off of Union Square years ago. Then they helped us do it again and we created our new Brooklyn clubhouse built for a new, remote-first world.

We could not love it more.

We’re also thrilled The American Institute of Architects like it, too. They honored it with their award of excellence for interior architecture of the year.

Frankly, we think they just liked all the books.

If the COLLINS library doesn’t make it clear—we love reading.

But sometimes, it’s time to put down the books.

When we do, we usually find ourselves in a downtown karaoke room queueing up unabashed pop hits, guilty pleasures, heart-snatching ballads and more til late.

For COLLINS Sounds Vol. 14: a playlist handpicked by our homegrown musical talent.

Creative Review sat down with design leaders from around the industry, including our friends James Greenfield and Emma Follett, to get their takes on Twitter’s rebrand.

They were kind enough to reach out to COLLINS co-founder Brian Collins, too.

It’s all here.