Most designers, if they’re honest, think of typography as something that happens when you make interesting decisions. The photography is artistically directed, the concept is refined, the layout takes shape…and then the typeface is “slammed”, as Louis Sloper said; like the decoration on an already plated plate.
Louise thinks this is putting the cart before the horse. “Typography is a key part of my approach to art direction,” she says. “Words have power, and to me typography is their body language.”
It’s a belief she’s earned over more than 25 years in the industry, working as an art and design director at various advertising agencies in London before founding her own purpose-driven studio, Here We Go, and most recently as executive creative director at SWC Partnership. She is also the President of TypoCircle, a non-profit creative organization currently celebrating 50 years of championing the craft of printing.
In a recent chat with our own private network, The Studio, Louise delved into the Bacardi Untameable campaign, a global brand reset she was involved in at BETC London that transformed the rum brand from a sugary party drink into something with real heritage and soul.
That’s all. But the story of Bacardi runs through a series of practical lessons about typography, process, and creative courage that any designer could learn tomorrow morning.
Build the grid later
Perhaps the most provocative takeaway is Louise’s gleeful rejection of the grid system as a starting point. “All the lecturers were killing me because I’m actually not a big fan of the grid system,” she admits, clearly enjoying the heresy. “I have in mind a grid system that limits your typography game.”
Her alternative? Design instinctively first, then reverse engineer the structure. As she says, “Start by breaking free and see if that frees you.” “Then, if you do need to iterate on it or hand it over to another designer to understand, build the grid around your intuition.”
This is an approach that focuses on speed rather than thoughtfulness. Louise describes her own process as continuous, rapid iteration. “Often, within half an hour, I’ll have 40 or 50 layouts, just because I keep tweaking. I just copy, tweak, copy, tweak, and then I’m done with it.” She even recommends setting a timer: ten minutes and seeing what happens before the alarm goes off. “Thinking too much sometimes gets us into trouble.”
Kill your babies (all 2,000)
This instinct for sales has certainly served the Bacardi project well. Louise estimates her team produced around 2,000 visual iterations for the campaign: enough to fill a five-minute GIF, with each frame flashing in an instant. The explorations were wild and varied: layered screen prints in black, red and gold; photocopy distortions; text so over-cropped you could barely read it; half-tone experiments with the Bacardi family portrait; there was even a version where the bat was completely removed from the logo’s circle. “If we’re really talking about untameability, we really don’t want the bats to be restrained,” she explains.
One approach went particularly far: a custom typeface screen-printed in gold ink that captured the raw, protest poster energy the team was aiming for. Customers love it. Louise still has a print on her wall.
But then reality intervened. The campaign needed to run globally, across dozens of markets and languages, including German, where compound words can reach ridiculous lengths. “The production company went crazy,” Louise recalled. “They said, how do we set this up?” Lesson? Fall in love with the process, not the outcome. “Sometimes you have to do things that are going to fail. It’s important not to be afraid of failure and just try a bunch of different things.”
cover beautiful pictures
The solution the team found is, in its own way, braver than a gold ink font. After commissioning the Wade brothers to shoot extraordinary in-camera photography in Panama and Mexico (hundreds of extras, flamethrowers, absolutely no CGI), they made the printing decision to obscure much of it.
The launch poster begins with huge capital letters spelling out “UNTAMEABLE”, a slightly imperfect shape that deliberately dominates the frame. Expensive and beautiful photography becomes the backdrop. “We have to fight for this,” Louise said. “We had to really work to convince clients to cover up all these amazing images with typefaces.”
It works because the genre is not a decoration; it was information. The campaign is resetting Bacardi’s entire global image around one word, and that word needs to hit you before anything else.
“When you have a solid foundation of art direction, everything else comes easy from that point on,” Lewis points out. “It’s always worth taking the time to lay the foundation first.”
comfort zone issues
When asked where designers most often go wrong with typography, Louise pointed to a familiar default. “Black and white, Swiss font, Helvetica, we just default to that.” There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, she stresses, but when you react automatically to every brief, you’ve stopped thinking. “That’s where we went wrong. We weren’t actually brave enough to try new things.”
The reverse is equally common. As she says, “We put all the love into the photography or the idea, and really the typography is an afterthought.” Her tip: flip the hierarchy completely. “You can think about typography before you create an image because it’s just as important to the story.”
Build your references
A common thread runs through everything Louise discusses: the importance of having lots of in-depth, broad visual references. When her agency was doing a campaign for Campari, she immediately thought of Italian futurist Fortunato Depero, who had created bold typographic works for the brand decades earlier. Rowse Honey’s campaign sees her return to Andersen’s fairytale covers, complete with shading and lettering. Bacardi’s creation draws from Cuban protest posters, Art Deco signage and the brand’s own dusty archives.
“You don’t know where the inspiration comes from,” she said. “It’s important to have a back catalog and be as curious as possible.” These tips sound simple, but they require real discipline. An ongoing, daily habit of looking at work from outside your own discipline, era, and comfort zone, and filing it away for briefs you haven’t yet received.
Return to summary
While Louise is passionate about typographic experimentation, she equally emphasizes what keeps it grounded: the brief. She shares the cautionary tale of a young designer who spent an entire week creating beautiful posters that had nothing to do with the requirements. “It was absolutely heartbreaking for us, but we had to say: ‘What does this have to do with the briefing? You have to start over.'”
Meanwhile, Louise recognized where the young man was coming from. “We were definitely tempted,” she admits. “It’s just a matter of checking in regularly with what you’re being asked to do. And asking other people. Just communicating.”
In a way, this is an apt summary of Louise’s entire approach. Be bold, have fun, be willing to make 2,000 versions and throw away 1,999…but never lose sight of the practical use of your work.
