5 minutes with Gray Buchanan
Ahead of Autumn Conversations: Design & Discovery in Pōneke on 1 May, we sat down with one of our featured speakers, Gray Buchanan, of Genre. Register for your ticket here.
This season we’re discussing what happens when you have the freedom to play, make and discover without client or commercial boundaries. Our speakers will share the stories behind their side projects, hobbies or community involvement that have led them to transformative discoveries.
Join us at the 2025 Design Assembly Autumn Conversations events taking place across Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.
Kia ora Gray. Can you share a bit about your background and your day job?
My background has always been in art and design. I studied graphic design with a very talented group at Northumbria University in the UK. Some of them have now started their own practices too, so it was a really inspiring start to my design journey.
I then worked in different agencies across the UK until we emigrated to Aotearoa in 2019. After a period of co-leading Typeface I started my own practice, Genre, in 2023.
Genre keeps me busy, generally designing brand identities, among a range of other projects. I love experimenting with collage alongside client work. I’ve just started a small monthly ‘netwalking’ group for other Kāpiti creatives, where we get out for a walk and a chat along the Waikanae River.
What role does curiosity play in your creative process, and how do you cultivate it when there are no external constraints?
I see curiosity as closely entwined with creativity, and it certainly inspires me to experiment and explore. I’ve always been curiously-minded and keen to investigate new things. It is partly what inspired me to call the studio Genre, because there are always so many different forms of art, design, music, literature and culture to explore.
Even outside the constraints of a brief, I find that curiosity is always there. I feel like there is always more to learn and discover. Moving to Aotearoa has been really inspiring for me, especially the scenery and te ao Māori.
I’ve been using personal projects, like collage, to explore some of these things. That’s the beauty of them, you get to choose what you work on. You don’t need to wait for the perfect brief, or try to convince the client in a certain direction. You can try things without the fear of missing the brief. It helps me to make connections and figure out what’s interesting to me.
Reading poetry and experimenting with collage has inspired me a lot lately. They both overlap with my work – graphic design is essentially those two things: words and pictures.
Have you discovered any personal values or design principles through play and exploration that now guide your professional work?
Reading poetry has shown me the power of words, whether written or spoken. It’s certainly consolidated some personal values, like my love of nature and creation. The poet Gerard Manly-Hopkins wrote ‘nature is never spent’ and I think that is so true – nature always inspires.
Collage has helped me understand colour more and how to use it. It has also honed my sense of visual composition. You get to play with layouts and figure out how to create balance, tension or movement – that’s definitely fed into my design work too.
I think it’s also helped me loosen up creatively. I don’t feel as restrained in design as I used to in agency life. It’s liberating to be able to play with a logo design or editorial layout first, before really refining it.
Outside of commercial briefs and projects, what do you believe the purpose or role of design is and could be in the future?
That’s a great question – and a big one! In light of AI, the political landscape, and the climate crisis, making any sort of future predictions feels incredibly difficult – especially as things are changing so rapidly.
It makes me think of Elizabeth Goodspeed’s recent article on It’s Nice That. She is much more articulate on this than I could be! The article references an era in the late 2000s, when there was a belief in the industry that design could solve all the world’s problems. I think our industry can be guilty of swinging to extremes, but I still hope design can be a force for good.
For me, to really distil it down, design is communication. And as designers our greatest skill will always be the ability to weave words and pictures together to communicate a message – no matter how it is created, or what platform it’s consumed on.
Outside of a creative brief, design can be used to better explore and understand new ideas. It can facilitate cathartic self-expression and it can push positive outcomes. I’ve long been grateful that our industry seems to have a strong moral compass and an empathetic social outlook.
Hopefully, as the landscape evolves, we’ll see a greater appreciation of the craft – and more conceptually sound design initiatives for social good, whether that’s on a small community scale or larger global platform.
Ahead of the Autumn Conversations Pōneke event coming up on 1 May, can you give us a teaser into the project/topic you’ll be presenting?
I’m looking forward to sharing more about my personal projects and collage in particular. I think it’s a relatively undiscovered discipline and there are heaps of talented collage artists producing awesome work. I’ve taken part in Februllage (an open collage submission) the past two years which has been great fun.
I’ll be trying to join some of the dots between personal and professional creative work too. If anyone is inspired to get into collage, then I’ll be sharing some resources and references that have inspired me as well.
Lastly, what’s the best way for folks to see more of your work and connect with you?
The Genre website showcases latest branding projects: www.genre.co.nz
The Genre Instagram has more regular mahi and inspiration: www.instagram.com/genre.co.nz
LinkedIn is increasingly becoming the best online platform to discuss design, I love connecting with others on there: www.linkedin.com/graybuchanan
I post my collage work at on https://www.instagram.com/studio_gray_
SubGenre is a monthly email of inspiration from the studio, you can sign-up here: https://subgenre.kit.com/signup
Register here for your ticket to attend the Autumn Conversations Design & Discovery event on 1 May
