Phil Gendall

Phil, a former director of Gendall Design and now both a Design Council adviser to businesses in the South West and a member of Dott Cornwall’s advisory board, was brought up in Gwinear, a small village between Camborne and Hayle. ‘Lying in the garden as a child, I could clearly hear the boom of explosions four miles away at the South Crofty mine. I hardly knew what it was then – but it was the sound of inventive Cornishmen working underground to make a living.’

Later, as a teenage summer job, he helped shovel out the year’s accumulation of metal swarf at the now-defunct Holmans Foundry, then the area’s main employer, during the annual holiday shutdown. He says: ‘That muck was the by-product of a great industrial age of innovation and production that doesn’t exist in Cornwall anymore. That left a lot of people here feeling that they were on the scrapheap too. We’re now in a technological age that simply can’t afford that kind of waste, either environmentally or socially.’

His father Richard is a retired teacher, a Cornish language academic and naturalist; his mother Lois was a GP and church warden with a passionate belief in community. And their values underpinned his later conviction in the social and cultural power of design – cemented by working with clients such as the Eden Project. ‘You cannot have a successful economy without a sustainable ecology, and unless communities support that idea neither will happen. That’s now understood as “triple bottom line thinking”’, he explains. ‘I use branding methodology to work with organisations – whether public sector or private – in order to develop places, businesses and communities that last.’

Phil, now 48, is umpteenth generation Cornish – although ironically, both he and his father were born half a world away. His grandfather was a clergyman radicalised by the horrors he saw as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches during WW1. He was shuffled off to the West Indies by church authorities incensed by his soapbox socialist preaching; Phil’s father was born on Grand Turk. The family later returned to St. Blazey, but in 1962 Phil’s parents emigrated to New Zealand - where he arrived a few months later. ‘I can at least claim to have been conceived in Redruth.’

They moved back to Cornwall when he was six and Phil went first to the tiny Gwinear village primary school (where he learnt to play banjo with classmate Charlie Reid – now better known as one half of the Proclaimers), and then on to Helston Comprehensive.

His interest in design first flowered there, under inspirational art teacher ‘Andy’ Andrews, who allowed sixth-formers skiving off games lessons to hide in his workshop. ‘We drew and drew and drew. I wanted to be either Roger Dean, who illustrated the Yes albums, or Ralph Steadman. ‘The only outlet we could imagine for this was album cover art. What else was there? A boy growing up in rural Cornwall then wasn’t exposed to much graphic design.’

That changed when he did a foundation course at Cornwall College and then began a graphic design degree course at Middlesex Poly. But that was a disaster. Phil says: ‘I hated suburban London and threw it in after a year. But I did learn how important place was, being happy where you are.’

He almost enlisted in the Royal Navy but Cornwall College tutor – and Phil’s second great mentor - Ray Tovey persuaded him to join a graphic design diploma course there. ‘It was a cracking course – I really loved the strong work ethic. And of the ten of us there that year, six are still working in design in Cornwall.’

He rounded out his formal education in 1982 with a post-graduate course in advanced typographical design at the London College of Printing before joining the London agency Banks and Miles – responsible for the corporate identity of BT, the Royal Mail and London Zoo – and, after a year, moving to legendary branding agency Wolff Olins.

In 1986 Phil and his then wife Tess decided to return to Cornwall. At that time, there were very few opportunities for ambitious young designers anywhere in the West Country; Phil was offered a teaching job while Tess founded what would later become Gendall Design.

Over the next 15 years Phil juggled lecturing and helping Tess develop the business, which steadily built a solid reputation for inspired commercial and educational design.

However, it was still a small business when they competed for The Eden Project’s design brief in 2000. Their pitch was a mix of bluff and aspiration. Phil says: ‘Probably they thought we were bigger than we were. But we were good, and we were passionate.’ They won. Other prestigious clients swiftly followed the Eden appointment: The EU Objective One Programme, National Maritime Museum Cornwall, University College Falmouth, Cornwall Pure Business.

They had caught a wave. Phil says: ‘It was the right time for Cornwall; there was the European investment and changes in the perception of the county, “Brand Cornwall” – and changes in understanding about what design and branding could do for business and the public sector. An influx of professional returners and incomers with fresh insight and expectations also helped us raise the game.’

Within two years, eight staff crammed the home they shared with their daughters Georgia and Harriet in Falmouth, they bought and refurbished the old Falmouth Docks Labour Building, and a couple of years later Phil, who was by then a Senior Lecturer at UCF as well as putting in long hours with Gendall design, left academia to join the team full time. But soon the company had doubled in size again and took new offices in the town’s Discovery Quay harbour development.

Away from the business, Phil co-founded the Cornwall Design Forum – which for the first time gave the industry here a voice, mutual support and the opportunity for collaborative marketing – and served as chair on the South West Design Forum. ‘Traditionally, the design profession hasn’t been very organised; we are all conditioned not to be joiners, which is both a strength and weakness. The region is now at the leading edge of national moves towards more cohesive grass-roots networking.’

That’s one reason why the Design Council was keen to bring its Dott programme here. Phil was invited onto the initial steering committee for the project as a representative of the forums, and when Dott Cornwall went live in 2009 he joined the advisory board.

He’s an enthusiastic advocate of the Dott process, mainly because – unlike the normal design process - it involves the end users right from the start, putting everybody on the same team investigating the issues, potential solutions and eventual outcomes collaboratively.

‘Dott isn’t just for Cornwall; it is a spotlight that stops and moves on. But if we are serious about this investment we must make sure we don’t just engage with those people who are easy to reach or give us the shiniest outcomes. Otherwise there is a real danger of a two-tier Cornish society continuing to develop; those that are well-educated and well-connected with the world – and the forgotten.

‘Here in Cornwall, like elsewhere, we’re all familiar with instances of well-intentioned public works that were not particularly helpful because the right questions were not asked of the right people to begin with. And big infrastructure investment happens once in a lifetime, so if you get it wrong you live with the failures for generations. Dott offers the opportunity to help get it right.’