RAF
Benevolent
Fund

The Fund supports serving and retired RAF personnel and their families. Its retail arm does real work: every t-shirt, pin and keepsake sold puts money back into welfare services, so the merchandise has to earn its place commercially as well as respect eighty-odd years of heritage.

I work across the whole chain rather than one slice of it. I design the products, produce the ad creative that sells them, and get into the Shopify build when the store needs it. That means the thing that gets designed is the thing that can actually be printed, listed and advertised.

A range of apparel and accessory designs drawing on the RAF’s own visual language (the roundel, the Red Arrows, the Spitfire silhouette) without slipping into pastiche.

The lead design takes the Red Arrows’ smoke trails and lets them resolve into the Union flag: one idea, readable at ten metres on a t-shirt and at 40 pixels in a product thumbnail. Everything is drawn in vector, so a design can go from a garment to a window sticker to a social post without being redrawn.

Creative for Meta campaigns across the retail range and seasonal appeals. Product photography, layout, and the copy hierarchy that has to survive being seen for a second and a half on a phone.

Working to a charity’s brand guidelines is its own discipline: the marks and the tone are fixed, and the job is to find room to be interesting inside them rather than around them.

Practical store work alongside the creative: product setup and merchandising, template and theme adjustments, and making sure a new range can actually be launched without a developer in the loop.

This is the part most design suppliers can’t take on, and it is usually where campaigns stall: the creative is ready and the store isn’t.