The Good, the Bad, and the Iffy: is there such a thing as an ethical designer?

In small studios or solo practices, decisions usually rest with one or just a few defined leaders. The calls on what to take on can be nuanced, but it’s clear who gets to make them. In bigger firms, where decisions are spread across partners and teams, those calls have to accommodate competing priorities and multiple points of view. That’s the reality at Pentagram, where each partner essentially runs their own business within a communal whole. Partner Eddie Opara describes this structure as “a box of chocolates”: the values of the partners may vary (cherry liquor filled vs. caramel nougat), even as the firm itself has to present itself as a unified moral front (the big heart-shaped box). Mostly, things work out. But objections do occur. “It’s very rare, but sometimes a partner may voice their concern about a project another partner is taking on,” Eddie tells me. “We don’t have a formal framework that really allows us to say, ‘no, you can’t take that client,’ to someone else – but nine times out of ten, if an issue is raised by one of us, the person considering the engagement will say, I totally get what you’re saying. I empathise with you, and I’m not going to take the project.” Still, there are times when objections don’t change anyone’s mind, or no one thinks to speak up until it’s too late. “Things fall through the gaps,” Eddie says. One of those gaps came up in our conversation: a consumer product strongly linked to various cancers and reproductive abnormalities that Pentagram worked on while I was a designer there. “Oh God, I was mortified that we took that one on,” Eddie says. “I do not know what that partner was thinking.” He admits, “a company of our size should probably have more conversations about ethics.”

Pentagram isn’t the only big studio to have a few dubious projects in its past. The global branding agency Koto has a history of working with sustainable and socially conscious companies, which is why it raised eyebrows – for me at least; others are effusive – when they took on a massive rebranding project for Amazon, whose dubious record on labour rights, union busting, environmental harm, and workplace safety is well-documented. When I asked founder James Greenfield about why they took on such a controversial client, he politely declined to comment on Amazon specifically, but was frank about the studio’s general approach to client selection: Koto turns downs lots of projects, including “obvious no-gos” like fur or gambling, but largely, he believes ethics are subjective. “Ultimately, it comes down to a human connection – excitement about the product or company, the potential of the work, and our own curiosity.” He says cigarettes, for instance, would be easy for him to turn down because he grew up in a non-smoking household in a country where smoking rates were in decline. “Every project comes with its own compromises,” he says. “I don’t judge anyone for what they choose to work on – or not work on. There’s nothing I regret or wouldn’t stand by.”

Both Eddie and James emphasise that their teams are free to refuse any work they object to. At Pentagram, “if someone comes to me and says, I don’t want to work on that, then they don’t have to,” Eddie tells me. James says the same of Koto: “Anyone at Koto can say no to working on a project if they want to. As a people-first company, we have to live up to that promise.” In practice, permission isn’t the same as access. I have a hard time imagining that many junior designers are going to have the chutzpah to speak up after the client’s signed and the team’s been assigned, especially if they’re new to the job and unsure how that refusal will be received. Besides, even if one person says no, someone else has to say yes – and not everyone can opt out without stalling the project or facing repercussions. The official policy might protect employees on paper, but it rarely neutralises the power dynamics that keep most people quiet. Seniors carry the authority of decision making, but juniors often carry the work, and the moral discomfort that comes with it.

The freedom to actually say no is shaped by all sorts of factors. Cost of living is a big one: a designer in an expensive city who has to drive to work may weigh risk differently than someone in a cheap city with great public transit. Then there are the structural pressures: in the US, job security is tied to health insurance, which makes any risk to your employment a gamble. This is especially true for disabled designers or anyone with ongoing medical needs. A single gap in coverage can mean lost care and mounting medical debt. For immigrants, visas often depend on staying employed full-time; depending on how your boss takes your objection, being the squeaky wheel could threaten your right to stay in the country. It’s hard to talk about ethics when the price of saying no is your health or your home. Career stage changes the equation, too. No one’s portfolio is a full record of every project that paid the bills. Some of what’s left out is for creative reasons (like when the client picked the brand direction you hated), while some is work you’d rather not advertise in hindsight. Designers with longer careers can bury their compromises or simply leave them out, but when your portfolio’s still small, every job matters. Saying yes to something you’d never want to show might help keep the lights on, but it comes at a cost. Put it in your portfolio and risk being pigeonholed by it – do one crypto logo and suddenly you’re the crypto guy. Leave it out entirely and you’re left with a thinner portfolio that makes it harder to land the jobs you actually want. For juniors especially, it’s a no-win: you either pay rent or future-proof your reputation, but rarely both. Then again, privilege cuts both ways. Creech partner Griffin points out that the ability to not think about the downstream effects of your work is its own kind of privilege. “When your life, especially as a kid, has been impacted by alcohol, taking a stand feels more like non-negotiable.”

Even for folks in charge, economics are a major driving force. Eddie Opara says that even as someone in a leadership role, the deciding factor in project selection isn’t usually a vague ethical duty, it’s payroll. “Sometimes, you take something on because someone needs to be paid,” he tells me. “And sometimes you don’t take it, and you lose someone because of it.” Compromise isn’t a failure of conviction so much as the cost of leadership. Turn down a controversial client and you risk being the bad guy who has to let someone on your team go. Say yes, and you might end up the bad guy for making your team work on something they don’t believe in. When you’re weighing the livelihoods of people you see every day against an abstract future harm to strangers, the immediate, familiar faces often win out. There’s also the question of what compromises make possible. Eddie describes big corporate clients as a kind of “Robin Hood mechanism” – the money from bigger players can be the very thing that lets a studio take on riskier, more mission-driven work later.

Questions about client ethics are tricky enough when you know exactly who you’re working for. Things get even murkier when work is licensed, resold, or embedded with no direct link between creator and end user. For type designers, this is the norm. Once a font is released, it can surface almost anywhere, often without warning. Jesse Ragan, cofounder of XYZ Type, says custom projects feel relatively straightforward to assess ideologically: if he doesn’t believe in a client, he can simply turn down the work. Retail fonts are a different story. A typeface is made in isolation long before it’s used, and can be licensed anonymously or simply pulled from Adobe Fonts without the designer’s knowledge. Jesse has seen his work turn up in porn, conservative Christian campaigns, and even materials for a far-right Texas militia. “It’s always a shock to see,” he says, especially given his left-leaning politics. He describes designing a typeface as a slow, intimate process – “every little letterform, it’s like, ‘hello, friend’, when I see them” – which makes it all the more jarring when it gets into the wrong hands. Rutherford Craze, founder of foundry Mass Driver, shares this feeling. “Some type designers feel that once they release a typeface, where it ends up is no longer their concern. I strongly disagree,” he says. “It’s not feasible to make a living and keep a spotless conscience, but it’s our responsibility to find the most equitable balance we can, whether that’s through [dis]incentivising certain usage, or turning down work for clients we disagree with.”

For Jesse and Rutherford, the EULA – the end-user license agreement that governs who can use a typeface, and for what – is one of the few ways to set ethical limits. Rutherford divides his restrictions into two groups. The first covers violence and hate speech: hard to police, but worth stating. “The point is more that they’re a statement of the foundry’s values,” he tells me, “and an attempt to discourage any potential customer who would feel threatened by them.” The second – politics, religion, crypto – is about risk management. He’s approved most requests in these areas but wants the option to say no when it matters. Even so, surprises happen. “Often font licensing is purchased before any public info is known about a brand, which is where I’ve most often been caught out in the past, and it doesn’t feel good,” Rutherford wrote. “I can’t revoke a legitimate license, and I think that’s how it should be, but it does mean I have to learn from mistakes rather than being able to fix them – changing the EULA over time, or being a little more generous with licenses for things I support.” Jesse Ragan is more cautious about what EULAs can realistically achieve, but still sees them as worthwhile. “Use of the fonts in any violent, hateful, or discriminatory context” sounds clear on paper, he explains, but gets cloudy fast. “How do we define hate and discrimination?” he says. Jesse is wary of creating blanket rules that could backfire, especially around sensitive subjects like religion. Still, the EULA serves a purpose. “Letting your value system creep into every aspect of your work isn’t bad,” he says. “Virtue signaling gets a bad rap, but I think of it more like a declaration of intent. It tells the people you don’t want to work with to stay away.”

Not every ethical line is drawn around who a client is or what they sell. In some subsets of design, the fault lines appear in how something is built and what it persuades people to do. In the case of UX design, the job of a designer is to direct attention, manage friction, and reduce the chance that someone clicks on the thing they aren’t supposed to. Sometimes those nudges are helpful, like a home screen that surfaces a reservation or a column layout that makes pricing tiers more legible. But as anyone who’s tried to cancel a software subscription knows, they can also be used for more nefarious ends. Obscuring renewal terms is a common tactic, as is “Privacy Zuckering” (I’m sure you can guess the origin of this term), which steers users to overshare by burying or delaying privacy opt-outs. These misdirections are known as “dark patterns” – a term coined by Dr. Harry Brignull in 2010, when UX still prioritised accessibility and care for the user. Megumi Tanaka, a UX designer and educator, tells me: “We were kind of inventing the field from scratch then, so people just assumed that you had to think about the person on the other end.” In that context, dark patterns were outliers that broke with a shared understanding of what UX was supposed to be (the clue’s in the name, user experience).

As mobile infrastructure improved and design patterns hardened, the case for clarity weakened. “It used to be easier to convince executives that empathy was simply what it meant to design for mobile,” Megumi says. Unfortunately, once people knew how to build accessible, user-friendly apps, they also knew they didn’t have to. Usability and manipulation aren’t opposites – an interface can work flawlessly and still deceive you. That shift made space for design logic that treats friction as a strategic tool. Empathy started to sound gullible (see also: the death of Google’s “don’t be evil” policy). “Everyone just kind of abandoned the empathy thing,” Megumi remembers. “It’s taxing to be the person who’s always like, ‘Hey guys, we gotta do what’s good for the user.’” Now, they say, “You’re not just being bad by accident, you’re being bad on purpose. It’s kind of like being a con artist.” Dark patterns weren’t notable anymore, they’re just regular degular digital design.

Despite usually trying to advocate for the little guy, Megumi has past career moments that weigh on them ethically. At one of their first jobs, a beauty startup, they were tasked with rapidly growing the user base. Their solution? Scrape contacts from a user’s phone, create accounts for those contacts without consent, then send them a text prompting them to “confirm” their new profile. It worked. The company got hundreds of thousands of users “basically overnight”. “Everyone clapped for me,” they say. “It even led to a Series C.” Yet, no one, Megumi included, saw it as a violation at the time – it was just smart growth. In retrospect, Megumi sees it clearly as a dark pattern. “I wouldn’t have wanted someone to do that to me,” they say.

Megumi still tries to be careful about the work they take on, but those decisions rarely feel clean. They’ll vet companies on Crunchbase to avoid places with shady funding, but also think the investors matter less than the CEO: “You have to evaluate the spine of the founder – how willing are they to stand up to bad ideas?” Crypto is a no – “feels more like selling out than AI” – and gambling is off the table entirely (too exploitative). They wouldn’t take a lead role at a company like Wix, citing its base in Israel. But other lines are blurrier. “Honestly, I’m in my get-your-bag era,” they joked. “It’s pretty hard to feel bad about stuff in tech, because even the best thing is still a little bad.”

There’s obviously no such thing as a perfect project tied up in a neat ethical bow. In real life, the only people with a “perfect” ethical record would be the ones who never design anything at all. 2010s sitcom The Good Place built an entire punchline around this: no one “gets into heaven” anymore, not because people have gotten more evil, but because every modern choice is tangled in complex ideological knots. Design is no different. You can probably guess what I’m going to say next, so you might as well say it with me: there! is! no! ethical! consumption! under! capitalism! This phrase, which originated in leftist theory, points to the fact that every product is made within an economic system built on exploitation, since profit requires paying workers less than the value they create. On top of that, all our goods and services are entangled with overlapping harms like environmental damage, corporate consolidation, and political inequality. Some products carry more harm than others, but none are untouched. Even buying a tomato can connect you to low-wage farm work, pesticide runoff, and monopolised agriculture. In design, it’s a reminder that the fonts we license are often owned by venture-backed companies that treat design as an asset class, the merch we design is sewn by people earning far below a living wage, and the packaging we design – yes, even the compostable kind! – ends up in a landfill.

That said (with respect to @ethicaldesign69), I think people often twist “no ethical consumption under capitalism” into a free pass for moral relativism; the idea that if the whole system’s broken, then nothing is off-limits. In design, that logic turns into an easy way to dodge hard decisions: every client choice is framed as purely personal, untouchable by outside judgment. The problem is, that framing erases the actual consequences of the work – what it does, who it serves, what it enables – and replaces them with vague appeals to “context”. It flattens every decision into a matter of taste, as if designing for a local bookstore and designing for an oil company were equally compromised just because both exist under capitalism. This is convenient for avoiding uncomfortable truths, but it also erases the fact that collective refusals can matter. Enough designers turning down fossil fuels, arms manufacturers, or tobacco doesn’t topple those industries, but it can slow their harm and deny them the professional legitimacy that design work confers.

Whether we want to hear it or not, some things simply do cause harm. This is where I part ways with James Greenfield of Koto’s cigarette example – his point was that it’s easier to turn down cigarettes if you don’t smoke or come from a non-smoking culture. My point is that it doesn’t really matter. Cigarettes cause cancer whether you grew up around them or not, whether your country treats smoking as normal or bans it outright, or whether you yourself smoke a pack a day or just the occasional drunk cigarette. The same goes for certain clients in design: a company’s record on labour, the environment, or human rights doesn’t change just because your personal context makes it easier, or harder, to walk away. Being honest with ourselves also means admitting why work gets taken on. Most of the time, it’s not a mystery – it’s money and prestige! That’s not inherently shameful (money pays staff, prestige helps a studio get work in the future, etc.) but it’s worth owning instead of hiding behind the idea that every client decision is unknowable. Choosing to work with a company like Amazon is not an abstract expression of cultural background. It’s a professional choice, made with full awareness of what that client stands for. There’s a difference between participating reluctantly in a flawed system and actively using your skills to prop up the companies driving the harm.

Even if you’re willing to swallow your beliefs for a paycheck, it might backfire. Design is a job that rewards empathy and immersion; it asks you to make your client’s goals your own. That’s hard to do if you despise everything they stand for. As Griffin Creech puts it, “I think it’s rare that someone does good work about something they loathe spending time on.” Fully inhabiting a perspective that’s radically different from your own is difficult, if not impossible. There’s only so much compartmentalising you can do before the work starts to be affected.

Rather than limit work, setting boundaries can open new doors; saying no can signal what you’re saying yes to. Creech’s alcohol policy has drawn clients in the wellness space, many of whom have their own reasons for steering clear of booze (even if they’re different ones), and led to more projectsin that field. “That’s not why we did it,” Griffin says, “but it’s nice they’ve noticed and called it out. Because it matters to us.” Pentagram partner Eddie Opara, meanwhile, has begun using the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals – a set of 17 global objectives that include things like climate action, gender equality, and responsible consumption – as a kind of moral compass for client dilemmas. “It helps with some form of grounding,” he says. Like Creech, he emphasised that values-driven work often resonates with clients: “Clients are coming in and saying, I see what you’re doing. I feel a kinship here.” Sometimes the choice to say no can be just as visible as the work you do take on. Andy Khatouli, a creative director with past stints at JKR, Wolff Ollins, and Ragged Edge, recently posted on Linkedin about turning down a $250k pitch because the brand was on the current BDS Boycott list of businesses connected to the ongoing genocide in Gaza: “Fun brief. Really confident we would have got it – but the creative industry needs to make a better stand. Do your research. Say no. Keep brands accountable. Boycott if you need. Challenge your leaders. Life is more precious than money.”

It’s naive to think we can be morally “pure” all the time in this industry. As one designer joked to me, “only the unemployed are ethical”. But that doesn’t mean you have to shrug and let the current take you. Try to notice what work makes you feel proud, and what makes you cringe. You won’t always get to say no, but at least you’ll know when you’re making a trade-off instead of pretending it doesn’t matter to you. Maybe it’s as simple as deciding you’re ok with doing a social campaign for a company you dislike, but would never take on their rebrand. Maybe it’s no to beef and plastic but yes to bacon and glitter. Deciding your ideal boundaries can help you to work toward them, and feel less bad when you don’t get there. At the very least, it’ll keep you honest. Design has power, even if it’s smaller than we sometimes like to believe. So it’s worth asking: who gets to benefit from that power? Do you want to spend your career propping up companies you’d drag in a DM? Do you want to work somewhere that quietly signs off on harm because it’s profitable? Just because we can’t be perfect, doesn’t mean that our choices don’t matter, individually and collectively. The big question isn’t if design can change the world – it’s whether we’re paying attention to the world we’re helping to build through design.