From public installations in northern England to the identity systems of civic organisations operating across two continents, a new generation of designers is reframing what graphic design can do - and where it belongs.

The relationship between design and civic life has a long history in the United Kingdom. From the Festival of Britain in 1951, which produced some of the most enduring examples of mid-century visual identity, from the typefaces of Abram Games to the environmental graphics of the Royal Festival Hall - to the Design Council's ongoing documentation of design's contribution to British cultural and economic life, the discipline has consistently been understood here not merely as a commercial service but as a form of cultural production. Its products are the visible fabric of public life: the signage that orients a visitor in an unfamiliar city, the identity system of a civic institution, the designed environment of a cultural venue. Two practitioners working at very different scales illustrate where that tradition stands today.

Morag Myerscough, the London-based artist and designer made a Royal Designer for Industry in 2017, has built a practice around the transformation of public space through colour, typography and structural installation. From schools and hospitals to town centres and cultural hubs, her work is characterised by a direct engagement with community and place - design as an act of civic participation rather than commercial communication. In December 2024, she completed an 11.5-metre-tall neon sculpture for Doncaster Minster, a commission informed by the culture of embroidery and tapestry in religious buildings. Earlier, her Joy Pavilion at Sheffield Children's Hospital - a colourful structure intended to offer patients and staff a space of respite within a medical environment - demonstrated the capacity of design to carry genuine emotional and social consequences within institutional settings. Her contribution to Burntwood School in south London, with architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, was recognised by the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2015. What connects these commissions is a consistent argument: that the designed environment of the spaces communities inhabit is not incidental to the experience of those spaces, but constitutive of it.

That argument is being made in a different register, and from a different cultural formation, by Umer Shehbaz - a graphic designer and brand identity specialist based in Manchester, who trained and worked in Karachi, Pakistan from 2013 before establishing his United Kingdom practice in 2022. Where Myerscough works at the scale of public installation, Shehbaz works at the scale of the traded venue and the civic institution - but the underlying conviction is the same: that design shapes the experience of the spaces people move through, and that this shaping is a form of cultural work with consequences that outlast any individual commission.

His formation in Pakistan encompassed a sustained appointment as lead visual identity designer for Rotaract International District 3271 - the youth programme of Rotary International, present in over 200 countries - across four consecutive district administrations from 2017 to 2021. The annual District Directory, a formally published document distributed to all member clubs within the district, and the complete event identity for the annual district conference, were among his responsibilities. The role carried institutional consequence: the materials were the public face of an internationally chartered civic organisation. In 2019 the district awarded him Best Rotaract Designer, the programme's only design-specific honour. His Pakistan career also included event branding for the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan - the country's principal federal financial regulator - with commissions encompassing programmes delivered in collaboration with The World Bank and UKaid.

In Manchester, his most significant recent commission was the complete visual identity and environmental design system for Amazonia Lounge and Bar, a premium Afro-fusion restaurant and lounge that opened on Bury New Road, Cheetham Hill, in early 2025. The work encompasses the venue's logo and identity system, interior wall graphics, neon installation, window treatments, staff uniforms, printed menus and membership collateral - a complete environmental design scheme in continuous public use within a trading venue experienced daily by Manchester residents and visitors. The commission required holding together two opposing visual imperatives - the cultural expressiveness of Afro-fusion identity and the restraint of premium hospitality positioning - within a single coherent system. His portfolio also encompasses a brand identity for Dagpakketverhuur, a commercial client in the Netherlands, whose trading channels now carry the identity in daily use - evidence of a practice that crosses borders as readily as it crosses sectors.

What Myerscough's public installations and Shehbaz's venue identities share is an understanding that designed environments are not neutral. The visual world of the spaces a community inhabits is the product of decisions made by designers - decisions about colour, form, typography, material and cultural reference that shape how those spaces feel, who they welcome, and what they communicate about the values of the people and institutions that created them. The Bauhaus understood this when it argued that no distinction should be drawn between fine art and applied art. The best contemporary design practice understands it too.

In a country with a long and serious relationship to design as a form of public and cultural life, the work being done - in public installations across the north of England, in the hospitality venues and civic organisations of Manchester, and in commissions that cross national borders - represents that tradition continuing in new forms, from new directions, and with new cultural intelligences brought to bear on what design can do and who it can speak to. That is work worth paying attention to.