Professional overthinking: how Thomas Pokorn designs brands with words — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Strategist and copywriter Thomas Pokorn calls what he does “professional overthinking” – taking a client’s subject apart and putting it back together so that anyone can understand it. Freelance for more than a decade and based in New York since 2023, Pokorn usually works on a project from start to finish and stays for the design reviews, where the words and the design sharpen each other. In this conversation, we speak about why copywriting receives less attention than design, what separates a strategy that gets used from one left in a deck, what writing in a second language has taught him and how he knows when a line is doing its job.

TBI Hey Thomas, it’s great to be speaking to you. How’s 2026 been so far?

TP Busy, in the best way. I just got back from a wine harvest in my native Styria, a nice way to greet the oncoming fall. It was lovely to spend time in nature and shift gears, though even my time off runs at full speed. I like using energy to generate energy.

As for the year, it brought my first US visa renewal, which is a campaign of its own (new passport included), and a steady run of dense, meaty brand and campaign work with some promising opportunities to build on. Now the leaves are starting to turn, and the streets are clear, so I’m riding my bikes as much as possible before it gets cold and you have to wear 50 layers. Soon it’ll be back to reading, exhibits and cooking elaborate meals, and I’m already wondering what next year has in store.

TBI You describe what you do as “professional overthinking” – why so?

TP Because overthinking is the job. Clients usually know their subject inside out, often better than anyone. Where I come in is working out how to explain it, reframe it and let people see it in a way that gets them excited. That means taking something complex apart, figuring out what makes it tick, and putting it back together so anyone can approach it, without losing the complexity that makes it work, or makes it interesting in the first place. That balance is the result of some hard work. Overthinking is how you get there, and the professional part is always knowing where you’re headed.

It helps that it comes naturally. I strike up conversations with everyone, which can make for a long wait if you're the one waiting on me. A friend once told me I ask so many questions it’s impossible to tell whether I want the conversation to end (I often don’t). Strategy and copywriting let me point all that curiosity at something with meaning.

The question I keep coming back to is, what am I helping this brand do in the world? Every company plays a role, with a positive impact or a negative one. Revenue matters, but the real work is defining a value and how it can change someone’s life. Brands can be pivotal actors in that, and so can the people building them. It’s an infinitesimally small part of the world to shape, but I get to shape it.

TBI You’ve worked with studios like PORTO ROCHA, Made Thought and Koto. What makes for a productive collaboration with a design team?

TP Being hands-on. I came up on the copy side and saw a lot of strategy decks that felt generic. The handoff was frustrating, and I could watch designers struggling to make yet another brand feel ‘bold, human, different.’ So I asked more and more questions to get to better ideas for the copy and what it was for, until someone said to me, “I see the work you do. You’re a strategist. Why don’t you do strategy?” I didn’t know the job had a name. I’d been doing it without permission.

That sentence changed the trajectory of my career. Someone articulated what I’d been feeling and couldn’t claim on my own, and it gave me permission to make it official. There’s something incredibly powerful about hearing from outside that what you’re doing is right. I try to pass that on to younger creatives now, because talent grows faster when somebody else notices it.

On projects, I’m usually in the work from start to finish – interviews, strategy, ideation, copy, then into the design directions, testing tone of voice against the visuals until the whole system works in words and pictures. I’d rather be around for design reviews to chat through ideas than wait for a handoff, because that’s where the healthy push and pull happens. Design finds ideas that sharpen the words, the words find tweaks that sharpen the design, and the work keeps levelling up.

The best collaborations feel like a rally, with strategy and design one-upping each other to get at the heart of the idea, firing on all cylinders. Being in a room with other creatives gets you there faster. You can quickly talk through whether something is good or genuinely intriguing, and working through the strategy together helps build the rationale behind each design choice. When strategy and creative drift apart, it’s a shame, because each one makes the other stronger.

Strategy is one part therapy, one part translation.

TBI You’ve said that the best ideas are usually already there, hiding in plain sight. How do you go about unearthing them?

TP By asking lots and lots of questions until I land on the ones that produce the most interesting answers. Sometimes you don’t know the real question until you’ve asked a few others first.

The best ideas usually live in the client’s head already. They can’t quite get to them alone, or they’re not ready to say them out loud and claim the position. I can relate. It’s an ongoing process for all of us.

I always say strategy is one part therapy, one part translation. First you play therapist, listening to all the client’s wants, needs, hopes and worries. Then you translate that into a diagnosis they can actually work with, so they walk away with an answer. Then you translate it again, out to their audience, as something people will understand and engage with.

To build confidence, I’m clear about roles early. They’re the experts in their business; I’m the expert in brand. They teach me their category, and I bring what others in and beyond it are doing. Clients are often so focused on their own space that they lose touch with what drives the people they serve, and the sharpest insights tend to live outside the core business.

A trampoline park we worked with was pivoting from adult fitness to kids, hoping to pull them away from video games. So we asked kids what actually draws them to games. The answer was free exploration and room to imagine, and we built the brand on it. The idea had been in plain sight all along – to compete with the screen, offer what the screen already offers.

Take away the jargon, and a brand is simply a compelling reason to choose you, come back and stay. Clients who see that tend to treat it as one of their most valuable assets, because it can change the core of how their business works.

TBI Strategy and copywriting tend to get less attention than design in identity work. Why do you think that is?

TP I promise I’m not salty about it. I see it as part of my job to make the case for strategy and copy through the work itself. As for why it happens, there are a few reasons. The first is that design is the visible output, and attention favours the glance. Design gets judged in a second of scrolling, while copy and strategy need someone to stop and read. It’s easy to look at something, think ‘that’s cool’ and enjoy it in passing (no knock on design, I love looking at it too). The showcases are built the same way. Award entries, portfolio sites and case-study carousels are made for images, so the words get reduced to a headline on a mockup. Of all the design conferences I’ve been to, I’ve seen exactly one writer on stage. And when a design account reposts a project, the detailed credits get scrubbed. The thinking roles are usually the first to go.

Then there’s history. In advertising’s golden era, the art director and copywriter worked as a pair; Bill Bernbach famously teamed them up at DDB. Identity design grew up differently, out of graphic design, so most studios are built around designers, and writing is something you bring in when a project calls for it. Designers have design studios to join. Writers mostly don’t have an equivalent, which makes us easier to overlook. An agency owner once proudly told me he didn’t need strategists. And yeah, it shows in the work.

Language plays a part too. Cool things look cool in Tokyo and Vienna, while copy is tied to one language and often gets localised or rewritten along the way. A visual identity can find fans anywhere; a great line mostly lands with the people who speak it.

And strategy and copy are harder to point at. Our contributions only come alive once someone else has made them visible, baked into design, so it’s tricky to say “that idea was ours.” Good strategy also looks obvious in hindsight, which is the point and also the problem. Nobody assumes they could draw a typeface, but everyone writes emails, so writing can look easy from the outside. With AI producing words on demand, it’s tempting to treat it as the cheap part, which makes the thinking behind good copy even easier to undervalue. So there’s less exposure, less insight into the work and less credit. Which is part of why I said yes to this interview.

TBI What’s the difference between a strategy that sits in a presentation and one that actually gets used?

TP Too often, strategy ends up as a box you tick before getting to the ‘actual’ creative work. I think that’s nonsense. As a strategist, my job is to find the thing that makes a brand interesting and hand the team something that excites them. I want strategies good enough to tee up the brand idea, so everyone (the client included) sees the subject in a new way and gets inspired by it.

The way to do that is to build it as a narrative, one that seeds the best ideas so they can be revisited throughout the creative process. Great ideas deserve better than sitting in a deck, so I like to show how they might come to life – a few lines, a sense of how the brand could sound. A good strategy offers a path forward, with new possibilities, new futures and ways to get there. That’s immensely more useful to a client than a page of statements and summaries.

I think of it like mise en place. Everything’s prepped and within reach, so when the design team starts cooking, they can move fast and keep tasting as they go. The test is simple. Does the team keep reaching back for it? If people are drawing on it, building on it and checking their ideas against it months later, it’s working. If it lives on slide 14 forever, it was a formality.

TBI German is your first language, English your first love. How does moving between the two influence the way you think about words?

TP My mom was a bank clerk and my dad was an English teacher. Sadly, only one of them brought their work home. So I grew up with English books, films and music, and the language arrived as something to enjoy rather than something to study, which is the best way to fall for a language.

German is a wonderful language, but it’s a tricky one for brand voice. It has a word for everything, which leaves very little room for subtext, and the verb often waits until the end of the sentence, which is great for suspense and terrible for headlines. Brand copy tends to land in one of two places – abstract poetry the client finds impenetrable, or puns that arrive with their own wink-wink elbow nudge. English gives me more range in rhythm and register. It’s like a huge box of crayons, with more colours to get the shading exactly right. At some point I stopped translating my ideas and started developing them in English from the start, and that unlocked concepts I couldn’t reach the other way.

For a while I thought I had to sound a certain way to belong in strategy and copy, fluent in the trend-speak of ‘consumers crave connection.’ That wasn’t me, and it flattened the one thing I could offer, which is a different perspective. Speaking a second language means you take nothing for granted, so you notice the gap between what’s said and what’s meant. There’s a lot going on in that gap.

TBI “Design without strategy is just a cool thing.” How do you make sure the strategy actually finds its way into the visual work?

TP By staying in the room. I like to say I design, with words, and that only works if the words show up early and keep showing up. Branding is a team sport.

It also comes down to specificity. Too many brand platforms have a vision, mission and tone of voice that say nothing at all. “We believe in making the world a better place,” when it’s a dog food brand. A designer can’t build anything on that. Give them language with an actual idea in it, and they’ll run with it in directions you didn’t expect.

And the brand book should read like a book. Most guidelines open with what you can’t do with the logo. I’d rather open with the purpose and the vision, written so it clicks for a new employee on day one, so the people making things later feel what the brand is trying to do before they learn the rules.

TBI What draws you to freelance life over working within a studio full-time?

TP Variety, mostly. It keeps me energised and on my toes. One month it’s a dating app, the next it’s running shoes or robots, and every new category means learning a whole world from scratch. I’m also a big believer in procrastiworking. When I’m stuck on one project, I switch to another, and the first one often solves itself while I’m busy. When I need real distance, I can take it, whether that’s housework back home or a long ride, and the work is always better for it.

It started by accident and stuck by choice. When I finished my master’s, no agency in town had a copywriter on staff, so I figured I’d work for all of them and gave it six months. That was over a decade ago. When I moved to New York in 2023, I tried for a full-time role, mostly so I wouldn’t have to figure out American healthcare and taxes alone. Nobody was hiring; everyone was still reeling from the post-COVID slump. I assumed it was because I smell and am awful (kidding) and went back to what I know.

Freelancing also puts you in a lot of rooms. I move between studios I’ve long admired and clients I work with directly, so I get to see how great teams work and bring the best of each to the next project. It teaches you fast that nothing is given and nothing is granted. I treat it like a one-person studio. You say yes to things you don’t quite know how to do yet, and that’s often where the unexpected ideas come from. Turns out I thrive in uncertainty, and the more challenging the project, the more awake I feel.

TBI What kind of projects are you hoping to take on more of?

TP We’re talking dreams, so the ones where the stars align – a forward-thinking client who’s up for something exciting, trusts you to do it, and pushes you further. You end up with work you couldn’t have predicted at the start, and it opens doors to the next thing you’re curious about.

Beyond that, I’m drawn to brands that know what role they want to play in the world, or want help figuring it out. Food is a big one for me. I love it, and I’m happy to keep eating my way through the research.

One in particular. Warning people 10,000 years from now to stay away from our nuclear waste. Repositories have to leave warnings for people who may share none of our languages or symbols, and nuclear semiotics has been chewing on that problem for decades. A report for one waste site includes the line ‘This place is not a place of honour.’ What gets me is that the wording was meant to be felt more than read. It describes what the site itself should evoke. Writing a grave warning like that, for a landscape instead of a page, would be an interesting challenge.

This is branding, after all, not a Nobel Prize. I just want to keep making work that’s thoughtful, a little surprising and genuinely useful to the people it’s for. If that sounds like your project, my inbox is open.