For more than five decades, Pentagram has operated on a model that the rest of the design industry finds either enviably pure or quietly infuriating: equal partners, no CEO, no holding company, no shareholders demanding quarterly growth. Each partner runs their own team, takes their own clients, and keeps their own profits. It is, in the truest sense, a collective, and the most commercially successful one the design world has produced.
But a collective is only as vital as its membership. And over the past several years, the Pentagram new partners have been quietly reshaping what the studio means, designers who came of age not in the era of print annuals and identity manuals but in the era of responsive systems, motion-first branding, and interfaces that exist across dozens of platforms simultaneously.
The question the design world is asking, quietly but persistently, is whether these new voices will change what Pentagram means. The more interesting question is whether they already have.
The Partnership Model, Refreshed
Understanding what's happening at Pentagram requires understanding what's unusual about its structure. Most large consultancies (Landor, Wolff Olins, Interbrand) are owned by holding companies. Their creative directors are employees. Their client relationships are institutional. Pentagram's partners, by contrast, are the institution. When a partner leaves, their clients often leave with them. When a new partner joins, they bring not just talent but an entire practice philosophy.
This means that partner appointments are, in effect, strategic decisions about what Pentagram wants to be. Every new name on the letterhead is a statement of direction.
And the recent appointments tell a clear story. Partners like Yuri Suzuki, Jody Hudson-Powell, and Sascha Lobe arrived with practices rooted in interaction design, generative systems, and digital product thinking. They didn't abandon the craft traditions Pentagram is known for: they simply refused to treat them as the ceiling.
Digital-Native Sensibilities in an Analogue Temple
The phrase "digital-native" has been drained of meaning through overuse, but in the context of Pentagram it carries specific weight. For decades, the studio's most celebrated work was built for physical media: book covers, architectural signage, poster campaigns, identity systems conceived primarily as printed stationery suites. The visual DNA of Pentagram, the thing that made it Pentagram, was rooted in tactile, material craft.
