Thirty years of Liquid Light
Liquid Light is 30 years old! Actually it’s 31 years old, but what’s another year when you’ve been around for three decades?!
What’s it like from the inside of a 30 year old agency? Well it’s worth pointing out that I’ve only been here for the last 12 of those, and many people at Liquid Light weren’t even born when Liquid Light started. Finn and Rob (Liquid Light’s founders) have stepped away. So in some ways it raises a slightly existential question. If the people, the technology and even the clients change, “What is Liquid Light”?
For this post I want to explore the ethos that has carried through Liquid Light's existence. And if that’s still difficult to pin down, it’s still interesting to look at the history, and failing that some old pictures of early websites are always fun. Enjoy!
Above: Liquid Light home page through the years. Earlier versions no longer work without Flash (RIP!).
A brief timeline
- 1995: Back room beginnings
Founded by Finn Taylor, Robert Day and Roberto Battista. Early work is on CD-ROMs and floppy disks. - 1996: A transformative win
Liquid Light is commissioned to work on the European launch of Microsoft's MSN. What started as a small collective becomes, almost overnight, a proper digital agency. - Early 2000s: Surviving the crash
The dot-com bubble bursts. Many new media agencies disappear overnight. Liquid Light downsizes but survives, proof that building on solid foundations matters more than hype. - 2010s: Heads down, doing good work
During this time Liquid Light won many awards, including a Webby, building its reputation for delivering complex digital projects for ambitious organisations - 2012: Working with the World Health Organization
Amongst growing work for non-profits, Liquid Light begins its relationship with the WHO, working on various programmes and later on the main website. - 2017: BYTES Conference
Liquid Light launches BYTES, a grassroots design, UX and digital conference in Brighton. All profits go to charity. - 2018–21: A new chapter
The original founders step away. The agency passes to Mike, Owen and Matt, who had long been part of the fabric of Liquid Light. Against a backdrop of Brexit and a global pandemic, the ethos holds. - 2021 onwards: New clients and updated focus
A strong year for new business, with the Design Council, a UK government advisor founded in 1944, amongst the highlights. It also marks the point at which Liquid Light makes a deliberate decision to focus primarily on NGOs and purpose-driven organisations, this is a sector the agency had been working in for many years. The experience gained across a broad range of commercial clients over three decades continues to inform and enrich that work, bringing perspectives that benefit every project. The agency is more focused for the decision, and the team are genuinely motivated by the work they do.
What’s changed, and what hasn’t
Above: A spread from ".net" magazine
Liquid Light began on the cusp of the internet’s mass adoption, so it’s fair to say that we've been around for every meaningful shift in how the web works. There’s an obvious parallel with AI today, and all of the unknowns that have come with it.
But something has stayed constant throughout, and it’s this that has carried us through uncertain times and will continue to do so.
As Finn reflected back in 2011in a magazine interview: "It is always about the content… content is king, this is what visitors come for. The design is all about conveying the brand and enhancing the content. If our developers do their job right, no one should notice the technology, ideally, it should be invisible."
That instinct to put the audience first – or “user centered design” to give its proper name, is as relevant now as it was in 1995.
User-centered design has been an ethos threaded through Liquid Light’s history. But with AI now part of many people’s toolset, I’d like to propose another principle for the next 30 years: Making sure that humans are never removed from the process. Yes, AI can certainly make us quicker and better. But it can’t make decisions, it doesn’t have opinions and it will always be the human that will make our work go from “good enough” to great.
Above: A few early Liquid Light designs. Back from before the Iphone was even a thing. Cera 2000-2015
One more thing
In the same interview that Finn gave, founder Rob Day had this to say about the Liquid Light website:
"To be honest we're really quite embarrassed about our own website. It's dated and we know it. While we know only too well the importance of a beautiful agency site, the sad reality is that we always seem to be way too busy focusing on our clients and their websites."
Considering our last major redesign was in 2019, it’s good to know that some things never change! Though we are working on it.
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Matt Keogh
Creative Director and Co-owner
