Purpose Design

Paddy is a design innovator and storyteller who helps organizations discover and express their core purpose and long-term ambition. He is the founder of Frontier, a Design Office that collaborates with clients and creates strategic stories. He is also a member of WXO, a global network of experience leaders and practitioners who shape the future of human experience.

With nearly 20 years of experience in the design field and degrees in literature and architecture, Paddy has worked with diverse and influential clients, such as PepsiCo, Unilever, the Sacramento Kings, and the Holy City of Mecca. He is design strategist, an award-winning writer and filmmaker, and a frequent speaker at design conferences and universities. He is passionate about creating strategic stories that inspire, guide, and empower businesses, people, and the planet to thrive.

We design big stories. Big stories are brave, imaginative, and guiding. They help you stand out, discover new creative territory, and generate meaningful action. 

Frontier is a design office that believes in the expansive potential of storytelling to help people get somewhere new. We design the strategies, brand identities, and experiences that make big stories real. 

For a decade, people have come to us because we’re experts at drawing together diverse perspectives into something unified and resonant. Generating ideas, building consensus, setting direction: we accelerate this work by listening closely and bringing to bear new tools and methods of understanding and shaping what’s next. We draw from diverse realms—like contemporary art, purpose design, playful speculation, and radical technologies—to help organizations and their people understand the edges and make progress that matters. 

This pluralistic approach to purposeful branding leads to genuinely inspiring amd strategic stories that we turn into momentum-building brand identities, exhibitions, websites, campaigns, books, and videos. 

In addition to design services for partners, our commitment to big stories runs through studio-initiated projects. These include Frontier Magazine, an online publication about new and newly relevant ideas in the arts, technology, and the built environment; Projectory, an experiential learning platform that trains organizations on building future resilience; and Live Magazine, a traveling editorial project.