The Designers Trusted With the State’s Image: Inside Manchester’s Public-Sector Design Work
Most people think of graphic design as something businesses use to look good. A nice logo. A tidy website. Something to make a company stand out from the shop next door.
But design has grown into something much bigger than that. According to the Design Council’s Design Economy 2026 report, design added £136.7 billion to the UK economy in 2023, and by 2025 the sector employed over 2.27 million people, a 15% jump since 2020, at a time when total UK employment barely grew at all. Somewhere inside that huge, mostly invisible industry sits a smaller, quieter corner of work that almost never gets talked about: design made for government bodies, regulators and public institutions. Places where the client isn’t trying to look interesting, they’re trying to be accurate, trusted and understood by millions of people who never asked to be an audience.
In Manchester, a handful of designers have quietly built careers doing exactly this kind of work. It rarely gets celebrated, because it isn’t glamorous. There’s no award ceremony for “clearest possible instructions on a government form.” But it’s some of the hardest design there is, because you can’t just make something look nice. It has to be right.
Rob Richardson
Rob Richardson has been a freelance graphic designer in Manchester for over twenty years. His client list runs from early-stage start-ups to institutions most designers never get near, including the NHS, the Ministry of Justice, and Manchester Museum, alongside longstanding work in the cultural and eLearning sectors for names like Mind Tools and BCLP.
Designing for organisations like these is a different discipline entirely. A restaurant client might change their mind about a colour because they simply prefer another one. A government body won’t. Every choice has to survive scrutiny from people whose job is to check it against a standard, not against their own taste. There’s no room for a designer’s ego in that kind of brief, only clarity, consistency and getting it right the first time.
Portfolio: robrichardson.co.uk
Micah Purnell
Micah Purnell has spent over twenty years working across branding, editorial design and public art in Manchester, and his client list includes Nike, the NHS, The Guardian and Wembley Stadium, alongside the Department for International Trade. His work has also been shown in public exhibitions alongside Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon and international street artist JR, and has been featured in The Guardian, Getty Images and the BBC.
One of his more memorable projects was created for public display during the Euros at Wembley Park, an installation built around the idea of togetherness, meant to bring strangers into a shared moment rather than sell them anything. He’s also pitched public art projects for spaces like Printworks Manchester, including a hot air balloon-themed installation designed to lift people’s mood using nothing but colour and a few well-chosen words, viewable through an app that brings the artwork to life. It’s a good example of what a lot of institutional and public design actually is: not persuasion, just an attempt to make a shared space feel a little more human.
Portfolio: micahpurnell.com
Umer Shehbaz
Before Manchester, Umer Shehbaz spent several years designing for the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, one of the country’s principal federal regulatory bodies. Between 2016 and 2021, he worked on a series of projects for the organisation, event branding, large-format backdrops, media walls and stage design for events attended by senior government officials and commissioners.
That kind of client teaches a designer something that’s hard to learn anywhere else. There’s no room to experiment for the sake of it. Everything has to hold up in front of an audience that includes the people who wrote the rules the design has to follow. Shehbaz has carried that same discipline into his UK work since relocating to Manchester, most visibly in a 92-page driving instruction manual built to meet the illustration standards set by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, work that had to be checked repeatedly for accuracy rather than aesthetics before it could be signed off.
“Design at this level is not about how things look in isolation,” Shehbaz says. “It’s about how every element someone encounters tells the same story and creates the same impression. When that system works, people feel it without being able to name it. They just know it’s been thought about.”
Portfolio: umershehbaz.com · Behance: behance.net/umer82059f71
The common thread
None of these three would describe themselves as “public-sector designers.” Most of their work is for ordinary commercial clients. But each of them has, at some point, taken on a brief where the usual rules of design didn’t apply, where the job wasn’t to be creative, it was to be trusted. That’s a different kind of skill, and it’s one that rarely gets its own spotlight. Maybe it should.
