Five minutes with Justin Peters

Justin Peters, chief design officer, at San Jose, CA-based Liquid Agency talks about his early design career in New York, returning to the new work normal post-Covid and his goals for Liquid Agency.

What are the key design trends at the moment and how are they influencing agencies and brands alike? 

Maybe not a trend, but a readjustment of how design teams work together seems to be taking hold. For the better part of two years, we’ve been learning how best to leverage remote collaboration platforms, and we’ve come a long way, as has the technology. It’s been an adjustment some creative groups have made with minimal disruption, but others have really struggled to maintain a creative culture and the quality of the work. The readjustment, as I see it, is that creative teams and creative leaders seem to be missing the face-to-face dynamic of being in a space, wrestling with problems, challenging and pushing each other’s work in real time. The in-person collaboration that quickly moves ideas from thoughts to things. Getting to unexpected places that are much harder to get to when there’s miles and days between each interaction. Arriving at Liquid Agency at a time when so many agencies are rethinking how their teams show up is a real opportunity to look at what’s working and what’s not working. Are there things that are keeping us from doing our very best work, each and every day? If yes, let’s pick them off one by one.

How has Covid-19 impacted brand design generally and Liquid Agency’s work more specifically?

One of the things we’ve been facing is managing on-site production protocols. We are certainly not unique in this, most agencies, and clients for that matter, have been navigating the fluid mandates, regulations, best-practices, and suggestions to keep their people safe and productive for quite a while now. Since Liquid Agency works all over the country with all kinds of clients, the protocols and attitudes can differ significantly from set to set. This has led Liquid Agency to build production policies that not only empower our staff to make personal decisions that keep them and their teams safe but help our production partners and clients understand what we believe to be critical in producing great work – when people feel safe and respected the process is more productive, and the output is so much stronger. Everybody wins.

In what ways have your previous experiences at Siegel+Gale and Carbone Smolan shaped your career and prepared you for this next step at Liquid Agency? 

I haven’t made many moves over the past 25-plus years, but when I have it’s been with purpose and opportunity in mind. For example, I joined Carbone Smolan Agency (CSA) straight out of school and didn’t even consider other offers for over ten years. It didn’t feel like I was ‘paying my dues.' Rather, I felt extremely fortunate to be there. After all there was no better studio, in my opinion, to hone one’s design skills, than CSA. My first move was to Siegel+Gale, a much larger, global brand agency that was looking to rebuild the creative side of the business. The need was pretty clear, S+G had to look outside the usual corporate branding community to bring in a fresher perspective on design and how to deliver it. The opportunity for me was just as clear – bring a nearly fifteen-year immersion in design thinking, craft and activation to a top brand strategy firm.

Opportunity number two was to bring my experience integrating creative and strategy across an international business back to my original home. After four years helping to broaden CSA’s client base, establish a profitable strategy practice, and launch some of the agency’s most high-profile brand programs in their over 40-year history, the agency was sold and Covid-19 hit. Timing was everything. Like so many others, I spent 2020 working remotely, but the interesting part is that I was consulting on how to better work remotely, specifically for large in-house marketing and communications groups. So, when Liquid Agency reached out, I was pretty well prepared to bring a relevant point of view on what the design capability of the future might look like.

What challenges are you expecting in your new role as chief design officer? What are your main goals? 

Landing at Liquid Agency is perfectly aligned with why I’ve made the very few moves and it comes with both purpose and opportunity. First, there’s a job to do, which specifically includes further integrating creative and strategy in ways that engage clients, our teams and the market in collaborative and meaningful ways; align our brand, employee and customer experience practices through creative design; and overall continue to elevate our creative profile. But I’m more excited about the amazing opportunities at Liquid Agency, and for me that means championing ‘design’ culture within Liquid Agency, with our client organisations and the broader communities where we do business. We work with some of the bravest clients and most innovative companies from coast to coast and around the world and I’m focused on helping them and moving Liquid Agency’s 20-year legacy of innovation, engagement, and Silicon Valley ThinkingTM forward.