Pali Palavathanan on Design as Activism

0:00From the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, this is the Design Thinkers podcast. Design Thinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Since the year 2000, the RDD has been bringing together visionaries from a range of disciplines to explore creativity and the design process. Join our host and RDD president, Nicola Hamilton, as she sits down for casual and candid conversations with Design Thinkers speakers, both past and present. This week on the Design Thinkers podcast, I'm joined by Pali Pallavathanen, co-founder and creative director of Templo. Based in London, Templo is a purpose-led design studio known for bringing creativity and activism together.

0:42They work with clients like the UN, Amnesty International, and GF Smith alongside grassroots organizations fighting for justice around the world. In this conversation, Pali shares how his own experiences as a refugee shaped his desire to build a different kind of studio. We talk about what it means to take on projects where the stakes are as high as arresting war criminals or tackling corruption. We also talk about how he balances activism with commercial work, the importance of instinct in choosing clients, and why he believes design is both a privilege and a responsibility. This episode is for anyone who's ever wondered how design can drive real change, whether you're looking to make your practice more purposeful, thinking about the ethics of the clients you take on, or simply curious about what it looks like to build a studio where values lead the way.

1:28I think I want to start sort of at the beginning of Templo, which probably means you're going to backtrack me even further back, but you co-founded Templo with the aim of doing design differently. Can you take us back to the beginning? What drove you to start a purpose-led studio?

1:43Pali Palavathanan:Oh, good question right off the bat. I didn't know I was doing that. There wasn't a real intention that it needed to be cause-led or purpose-led whatever you want to call it I didn't know what to call it I just had this instinctive sort of feeling that what I was doing previously wasn't enough to to make an impact and you're right I will take you back further because really there is I felt you know having spent almost a decade in the industry previously that there was this real disconnect with what I was doing and I had done a lot of like really nice design I came out with an amazing portfolio I'd worked with amazing agencies but you know there was an itch that needed to be scratched in that sense and um there was a clear reason I'd grown up as a refugee in Toronto um some will argue Scarborough is not part of Toronto but that's what I was told it's all the GTA to me yeah so that's where you know I experienced everything that society you know like really cares about at the moment so you know homelessness migration welfare status you know you name it I experienced it as a young child as an eight ten year old and that had a lasting impact on me obviously and I just felt this burning need to to do something um that meant something to me so there was no meaning behind it originally I couldn't name it anything package it into anything but I wanted to take all my sort of skill sets and apply it to something that you know was the reason why I was there in the first place and so I wanted to go back to Sri Lanka and I wanted to understand with fresh eyes what the problem was you know like Bob Gill the famous Bob Gill once said if you're designing something for a laundrette go to the laundrette.

3:41Pali Palavathanan:I went to a war-torn country where my family are from and I experienced oppression I experienced what war can do firsthand and I wanted to take something that was quite a local small problem and show it to the world and so I you know I did stuff off my own back basically so yeah no before you sort of jump into that project which I do want to talk about had you already started templo at this point when you go back to Sri Lanka or are you sort of in the sabbatical space where you're trying to sort of figure out what your next move is yeah I mean what do you define as starting because I bought the url by that time and I think actually no sorry this is pre-name you're right so this is pre-name but it was the start it was the the sort of um the starting point really I wouldn't have got to the name without going back there and actually on route so after Sri Lanka I went to Toronto for the first time as an adult so I went back so did you purposefully sort of follow that path yeah and actually well this is a sort of prelude to the Toronto took really because I wanted to stand on stage and really I want to say everything that we've done emanates from Toronto in some way or form which is quite interesting concept if you think about it you know like it went sort of 30 years in the making to get to well all goes well go be there in October you see so yeah so it predates that it predates the name by a couple of months but I wouldn't have got there without going back to Sri Lanka.

5:20So much of sort of building Templa was actually you maybe reconnecting with your roots or sort of re-engaging with those experiences of your youth. Yeah?

5:30Pali Palavathanan:Yeah. Okay. So you go to Sri Lanka and you experience a lot, I imagine. Yeah. So there's a photo I took of, I typically show it on stage anyway, during my keynotes but um a photo of me and my cousin on a beach with two army tanks rolling up so when that happens you know you you can sense the the oppression the fear and you know i'm i feel like a bit of a westerner as well so i'm like no one's got you know i've got my british passport you know i've got a different mindset but the you know i just felt like i deeply needed to do something to tell this story but you know design isn't enough you know I could have easily I did a sketch I did sketch on a night bus you know inspired by this sort of experience and I was on a night bus going through military checkpoints and you know it's bad when um the driver pulls into a temple to bless the the coach you know the bus the night buses but it was quite you know this night curfews and all sorts of things going on so um and are you doing this alone but most stories start like that you know like you need to do it kind of on your own to to sort of process everything but yeah sorry I forgot the question remind me what the question is so did I don't worry no we were talking about sort of what drove you to actually start start templo but we ended up in this fascinating space about I think maybe the like emotional process you went through in order to get to that place to understand what it was you wanted to do yeah sorry forgot that's okay Was there a specific moment where you sort of recognized that you did want to build your own thing, where you sort of understood that it was time to leave agency, the agency world and do something for yourself?

7:15You sort of talked about knowing that you had this itch, that there was something more you wanted to do. Is there a moment?

7:21Pali Palavathanan:Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, this, you know, if anyone, if anyone knows me, you know, like they know I just don't stop working. And I'm just quite a intense person when it comes to my work process. And that's how it needs to be, you know, there's no sort of off button, if you like, but, you know, it's bad when you're working on quite a big project, quite, you know, like quite a big global brand, and you're kind of falling asleep at the wheel something wasn't working for me and at the time just the way the world was as well um no one cared about it either and then weirdly what you know like what's happened in the last decade in parallel to really templo starting up is we the world's been through a lot right trump won brexit here the pandemic yeah you're thinking about this what sort of 2011 2012 yeah sort of 2012 2012 sort of thing and so 2013 comes along and then all of these things start to happen in parallel and then so I we kind of predate the Trump thing by quite a bit so by four years and then Trump happened and then all of a sudden you see a sort of global reaction to something and wanting to express something and stand for something which is fine but it's just quite interesting that what I kind of did was maybe a little bit ahead of the game in terms of like conscious more cause-led type you know work and and trying to bleed that into branding which you know typically you know all about making money right capitalism and which is absolutely fine um but how to plug those in in an authentic way is quite it takes time and takes sort of certain skill sets and lived experience to do that in the right way.

9:10So I'm sort of curious, obviously your background, your background, your upbringing, like influence this need to do something elsewhere, right? It's, you know, the country your ancestors come from is war-torn, has been for a long time. And so sort of that, of course, makes a really big influence. But you sort of set out to push design into new territory, right? Like political change was the thing you really wanted templo to do from the beginning and i assume that that trip really drove that home for you solidified that cemented it as your aspiration and since then you know the studio's work has had huge success in those spaces helped arrest war criminals been part of like really controversial conflict inquiries especially now surrounding gaza your work has been banned in some countries including sri lanka for the work that you're doing there but how do you actually approach design when the stakes are that high sort of for your clients but also for you yeah well

10:08Pali Palavathanan:there's a level of like protection you know that needed to you know and consideration so for example the Sri Lanka work at the beginning the Gaza inquiry work which in 2014 you couldn't talk about Gaza so right now it's a very trendy subject to like sort of fly your flag with and put your flag in the window, etc. But back then, it was a super, super risky subject when you're associating a country and, well, the sort of political regime first. In both countries, actually, there's a lot of parallels between what was happening in Sri Lanka and what's happening in Gaza. A lot of parallels. And there's a lot of, like, sort of, you know, there's a strong relationship between the suffering of both parties, you know.

10:55Pali Palavathanan:But at first we didn't put a name to it. And there's something, you know, there's something actually really beautiful about, I think as designers, we're so, you know, we need to put a name to everything, you know, and it's about IP, it's about ownership. And there's something actually really beautiful about not putting a name to something and putting a name to something only when it mattered. So the Sri Lanka work, I wanted to do it, sort of faceless in a way I don't know why I just felt like I needed to do it was like an instinctive thing I just wanted to do it I just got a lot from it got a lot of good energy and like the design processes I think some of the best things start from that place um from a place that might feel sort of selfish in that moment or sort of driven by self I think some of the best things come from that spot yeah weirdly weirdly it's kind of selfish to I want to work on this specifically no one's asked me to do it so it's like briefless but then yeah like but I had to do it for Sri Lanka because I had to put our name to the Sri Lanka work because other people were getting blamed for it so a year and a half later I had to press release it to the design press um so I had to I had to go live with it and then the guards inquiry again it was this is the stop the torture campaign yeah the first one yeah and then the guards inquiry I didn't put our name to it again.

12:22Pali Palavathanan:But then I had to do it because Design Museum wanted to feature in their Pope to Note exhibition, which featured all the design work from Obama poster to the Trump protests. So it kind of forced me to put name to that as well, which I'm really, I'm happy I did both, you know, didn't put my name to it and then put the name to it. It's such a fascinating thing to sort of think about. You're doing this work, which is sort of driven by instinct, I think, or desire to help that you're sort of, yeah, like, how do you sort of balance that idea, that capitalist instinct that the studio needs credit and financial compensation for this kind of work, but that also at the same time, how do you get that from this kind of work?

13:04It's interesting to think about. And it's interesting to think about that sort of finally putting your name to things often happens when you're sort of pushed into it because you don't want anyone else to sort of take the fall for it or something else happens how do you think about the like how the studio is going to keep itself afloat sort of finance for their operations versus the sort of work that you're doing I imagine sort of self-funded so now we're

13:33Pali Palavathanan:I mean firstly the agency can never be what it was right at the beginning just um even though So, you know, we're still working on the Sri Lanka work to this day. So we've just finished putting the finishing touches to the latest sort of expose stuff that we're working with, International Truth and Justice Project, which is a sort of project that sprung out of the Stop Torture work. So that is a continuous theme that runs through in parallel to all our sort of big commercial work. and I don't want to ever let go of it. But obviously I could never plug myself back into the UN for months and months and operate the studio from there.

14:17Pali Palavathanan:You know, that can't happen anymore. We've got a design team now and there's a balance that's been happening. But obviously everyone that wants to work at Templar wants to sort of feed into that as well to some extent, right? So they're there for the same reasons as well. It just can't be me at the beginning as well. It shouldn't be just me and my sort of, you know, that was quite, you're right. You would use the word selfish and there is a selfishness, a single mindedness attached to that at the beginning. But if you're running an agency, it needs to be less about me and about other sort of counterparts.

14:53Pali Palavathanan:Obviously we've got Anushka Rodder who runs the company as well. So it's about bringing her sort of voice and, you know, it should be not just about me. I don't want it to be. The team is purposefully small, but I think you have more than just you and Anushka at this point, right? Yeah, yeah, there's 10 of us. There's 10 of us. And, you know, there's a nice blend of Anushka deals with the sort of client relationships. And she's, you know, like how the business is run, which is great because I'm not great at that, as you can tell, probably. But then, yeah, we've got really like great skill sets within the design team as well.

15:29Pali Palavathanan:So ones that are really good at 3D coding, creative coding, animation. Others are like great at typography and, you know, like strategists, et cetera. So I don't want to be, I want people to show me, you know, as a creative director, I want people to show me the way to do it. I don't want to have to just know what I know. Does that make sense? You know, I just don't want to know what I know. I want them to show me the way to do it. Yeah, yeah. I think you want them to push you creatively because I think that that's one of the beautiful things of the work we do, right? The people below us tend to sort of push us more than the people above us after a certain number of years in the industry.

16:11You've said that you sort of staying small helps you stay ethically nimble. Can you tell me what you mean by ethically nimble?

16:18Pali Palavathanan:Wow, where'd you pull that one out? You've said it a handful of times and it's this like fascinating term because I think a lot about what it means to build a studio that is sort of values-based or purpose-led, but it comes from sort of your and Anushka's values, right? So as that team grows, that sort of pool of ethics would start to get more complicated, I imagine? Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's a really good question. What we've tried to do is just grow organically. So there's 10 of us, but I didn't want to grow super fast and just take anything on to scale up and then by doing that you can make certain choices right there's a really great Chinese proverb and I'm going to butcher it so apologies but it's something to do with you know what when you want to let fresh air in you open the window but some flies will come in as well so obviously you know some flies might come in under the guise of being you know we it might look good from the outside and then we kind of realized that actually this doesn't marry up either the people doesn't marry up or the intentions don't marry up with where we think where you know where we get the kick out right and then we have to make a decision and it's not happened too many times but it's happened a couple of times where just super you know like there was one when I started templo I had I wrote down a certain brand I won't name it here but I wrote a certain brand and I thought oh man I would love to work with them and we'd start working with them and I told them never work with me again yeah it's the whole meet your heroes thing uh which is really surprising yeah yeah so some flies are you know they they present themselves really well but if we're keeping that to analogy but actually they need to be squatted and then does the team or you like do you ever feel constrained by the sort of seriousness of the subject matter well no I I think it's, I think, you know, as creatives, I feel like we have like a, we are at the forefront of, we should be anyway, at the forefront of being able to, you know, like have a sense of responsibility and a civic duty.

18:26Pali Palavathanan:That's what I think anyway, we should be the ones questioning things, we should be the ones pointing out the problems and offering solutions. And I think it's only right as creators, we should feel the responsibility and the weight of the project. A lot of people ask me this, how do you protect yourself from some of the projects that you work on? And I'm like, why should I? Why should I? I should fall in, all in. Like, you know, like just typically a typical brief, you get the brief, you research it to death, you try and become a mini expert, within a few weeks or a month or something. And then this should be no different.

19:09Pali Palavathanan:You should empathize with it. You should sort of blur the lines between yourself and the project for the best outcome because there's people that have suffered. And then design is a freedom of thinking. It's a freedom of speech. And it's a privilege to do it, especially when you realize like you know how certain parts of the world are you know like I get to sit on my laptop and express myself visually and that's a privilege yeah no absolutely I mean it's design as a industry is quite is quite new for exactly that reason right a lot had to come before it in order for us to do what we do yeah I think a lot of our listeners like know inherently the power of design I think we sort of know that I while you were talking about sort of our responsibility to ask those questions and interrogate the brief a little bit and be the people who are sort of thinking about it.

20:09There's a little, a small piece of me that sort of resents society for that fact that it makes it to us before anyone asks those questions. You know, I think about that. I think about that when it comes to value-based work, but I think about it when it comes to accessible design. I think about it when it comes to inclusive design, like those sort of things. And it makes me think a little bit about sort of the limitations of design. So I imagine you're experiencing this quite often in the kind of work you're doing where there's so much power in being able to visualize these things and being able to communicate those things.

20:43But there probably are moments where design isn't the answer, where something strategic or quieter or behind the scenes is the answer. Have you found design's limits in some of these spaces? This podcast is made possible with the support of the Association of Registered Graphic Designers. Through RGD, Canadian designers exchange ideas, educate and inspire, set professional standards, and build a strong, supportive community dedicated to advocating for the value of design. The RGD is Canada's largest professional association for graphic designers. The association's membership of more than 4 ,000 people includes firm owners, freelancers, managers, in-house designers, educators, and students.

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22:14Pali Palavathanan:great question sometimes yeah you're right sometimes um the stuff we get involved with doesn't require design but it is design it should well it should fall into the maybe the remit if you like the skill sets transferable yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so um i don't know i can't think of a maybe a specific one but maybe you know every thursday a there is a a group of survivors of torture and i feel sometimes the need to go there and and just be there and try and help or run workshop creative workshops or something like that so that's not design i'm not designing anything particularly but it feels like design still you know um we we recently managed to sanction four war criminals i'm staying very much on topic of Sri Lanka here, by the way, but I managed to, we managed to sanction four war criminals and it took six years and design played a small part of that.

23:19Pali Palavathanan:But, you know, there's other people doing way more work behind the scenes to, you know, lobby MPs, have weekly sort of Zoom calls with MPs in House of Commons, you know, like So it's, you know, it plugs into a bigger ecosystem, but at least designers, you know, adhere to, especially if you've got a seat at the table, you know, you're one of the main partners of whatever you're doing. It doesn't need to be Sri Lanka, it could be something else, right? But all our most successful work happens when we're in the boardroom or we're at just the main table where we're not being pushed at the, you know, we don't come in at the end.

23:59Pali Palavathanan:we're constantly being we're constantly there to with all the big major decisions being made that's the best work that comes out of it when we're treated like a just you know like a supplier it's very much a distant sort of process and you're sort of disconnected from it and design plays a very sort of surface level process you know part in the process i mean my my area of specialization is publications, is magazines, and so very different. But I sometimes when I'm tackling a new project or a magazine redesign, I tell clients from the very beginning how messy the process is. You want it to be really linear.

24:39You want it to be the shiny presentation that is followed by a more refined presentation, which is followed by a final. And that's just not, it's not how the best work gets made. There is this moment where you're hashing it out. You're trying to figure out what to prioritize and deprioritize. And I can't imagine the additional layers of sort of emotional response to the work that you're presenting. What about like, follow up from some of these projects, like thinking about the size of your team at this point, I imagine there are checks and balances in place to sort of protect people. We talked a little bit about not attaching your name to things right away.

25:15Are there other things, other experiences you've sort of had to protect the team from?

25:19Pali Palavathanan:Yeah, so what we've done a couple of times are vicarious trauma workshops so where the collective team not just us but investigators translators human rights lawyers all come together and we sit in a room and we do workshops with experts within that field to because we're we're going through a lot of sensitive topics and we're dealing with firsthand evidence and you know it's not pretty and it's not you're talking about like the messy process well it's very messy and you're trying to make sense of all of that in terms of powerful storytelling and pursuing the truth and all of that kind of stuff it requires a lot of digging and investigating.

26:10I think also probably the the sort of cross-culture part of it too right to be able to actually dive in and understand the culture in which you're

26:16Pali Palavathanan:working as well yeah I mean it helps if you're part of the culture as well but or if you've even just pushing Sri Lanka to one side but if you're experiencing something else as well you know it's good to have that lived experience and that's something that we like to do as well where we're bringing in first-hand sort of knowledge of certain areas that it's about I think about how incredible it is that you are giving your team and your staff those opportunities right to sort of learn and process and sort of understand the spaces that they're hanging out in and how, you know, the work you do, of course, is incredibly sensitive, but design as a process in and of itself is like inherently vulnerable and how little we sort of do in other spaces to protect our teams who are doing these things where they like lose themselves in a project in order to dive all the way in.

27:08Okay. Let's like switch gears a little bit and talk maybe a bit about the other stuff, the slightly lighter stuff. So, you know, there are a lot of studios who want to do good, but they also need to pay the bills. We touched on this a little bit already, but how do you approach that tension between ethics and economics? Like, do you have bread and butter work that you do in order to support the maybe riskier activism led projects? So it's not really calculated like that.

27:37Pali Palavathanan:There used to be, when I was in another agency, there used to be something that used to bang you know like circulate where they would show this pie chart and it was 80 commercial to what you've seen it right yeah and uh i just hate that bloody model just why can't i just normalize some of that good stuff into the rest of the business model i just couldn't understand that like commercial can be good as well so there's no real sort of and also it's really hard to distinguish what's ethical and then what's just wanting to story tell something big you know that's not ethical that's just doing the right thing and that's pursuit of truth so that's a different subject subject in itself and that's coming again from a very sort of biased point of view right i'm tamil i feel persecuted i want to tell that story so So that's a very sort of bias.

28:34Pali Palavathanan:And I'll use that word selfish again, sort of viewpoint. So yeah, like we, like, but commercially wise, we have bigger projects, obviously, but they all mean something to us and they're all doing something and they've all got a angle that fits into our, it's really weird how these projects come to us because they're very clearly needing a skillset that requires something that we offer or like lived experience so they you know the the companies find us and gf smith's a great example of that where um they came to us because they needed something and we didn't know they needed it and we couldn't understand why they needed it at first and so we couldn't work out why they were coming over to us and because they looked very different and presented themselves very differently back then so we couldn't understand why a heritage brand a sort of british heritage brand was reaching out to us because we're just sort of in shortage, money on our business, working on the stuff that we love working on.

29:35Pali Palavathanan:And then it turned out to be a conversation that was very different. And so, you know, then we can bring that in and balance that still with all the other work that doesn't change. Yeah. I mean, that one was one where when you launch that rebrand, so for all of our listeners, GF Smith being the very, very, very much beloved by designers, British paper company that, you know, we all hope there's enough budget to print on GF Smith paper, but it was a really different kind of project for Templo, right? There was so much joy and fun in that project. And I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking that must've been a nice reprieve for the team.

30:11Like that must've been a nice sort of change of pace to turn and work on that.

30:15Pali Palavathanan:Yeah. I was going to bring that up actually, you're, you know, that sort of switch of gear and actually it was a joy. The whole process was a joy from start to finish, starting off with the very first conversation that we Anushka and I had with Ben Watkinson the global brand director you know what was supposed to be a 30-minute conversation ended up being a three-hour conversation and then from then on just working with the board and the people there you know it was it was a very joyous project and also you know they had certain needs and what's weird is like we both traded something off so they needed they needed to reach out and speak to a certain sort of demographic obviously but also they wanted to bring up some of the that the community stuff that they've been doing for decades and decades and how how did they crystallize that and formalize that into the charitable trust needed work so they needed something from us and actually having stayed away from the design community for so long we needed to plug back into the design community in many ways and so they well by doing this project it immediately put us back and back in that space you know so sort of front and center if you like so we we sort of we sort of it was a mutual exchange yeah was that community piece the thing that you you didn't understand why they came to you until that became clear or was it something else yes yes so that was the bit so um because that was all you know what they had this really beautiful veneer that was always on top you know And it was beautiful, immaculate, but you couldn't touch it.

31:48Pali Palavathanan:It sat on a shelf. Yeah, very stoic. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it was this show pony. And so I didn't know about any of that community work that they had been doing in the local area in Hull, which is in North England. And it's probably one of the most deprived areas in the UK. And also just what they've been doing collectively in the creative industry as well, supporting projects and stuff like that. So I had no idea. I was really compelled to sort of marry up the stuff that, you know, pull in some of the interesting things and experiences and knowledge that we've been sort of holding, if you like, and bring it into a completely different space and collide those things together.