Creative alumna on building a career as a freelance editorial writer
31 July 2026
After developing a strong practical foundation during her BA(Hons) Textile Design studies, which was deepened through her time on Falmouth's MA Communication Design course, Poppy Thaxter now brings the experiences and skillsets forged at Falmouth to her work as a freelance writer.
Covering topics such as branding, typefaces and visual culture for titles including The Brand Identity, It's Nice That and Design Week, we caught up with Poppy to discover how the combination of a practical undergraduate and communications-based postgraduate have supported her to thrive in her career since.
What inspired you to pivot your career from textiles to communication design?
Falmouth’s BA(Hons) Textile Design course is such an expansive degree. There, I specialised in print and built a solid understanding of colour, composition, pattern design, market research and conceptual thinking. I loved the course for the space it gave us to explore, and my tutor, Dr Simon Clark, was great at pushing us away from commercial tropes and towards the unexpected.
What I loved most was research; from trend-forecasting rabbit holes to looking at books on painting, graphic design or interior design. Underpinning that was an interest in seeing the bigger picture: how design fits into culture and society. My dissertation – digging into cultural theory and the history of commercial printed textiles – was honestly the best time. But it took me a while to realise that I wanted more of that, rather than to pursue a practical textile design career.
I then began looking for ways to feed the creative research part of my brain. Enter Dr Robyn Cook (now Associate Professor of Design Ecologies) and Falmouth's MA Communication Design: a course that approached design from a critical perspective, asking not just how design communicates, but how it can provoke, engage, entertain and question.
How did your time as an MA Communication Design student support your work as a freelance writer and design journalist?
In two ways: a mindset shift and a skillset. The MA changed how I understand design’s place in the world, within capitalism, with culture and systems of bias and representation. It gave me a curiosity I haven’t been able to shake since.
The practical skills – research, enquiry, analysis – inform everything I do as a writer. But if I had to name the most essential, it's synthesis: the ability to explore a subject and find insights others miss, and to communicate them engagingly. It resulted in brand campaigns for marathon protests, fake musicals on design pedagogy and a book on the romanticisation of true crime.
The MA tackled heavy topics and theoretical territory; but having an incredible tutor like Robyn meant it never came at the expense of fun and humour.
What did you value most about your time at Falmouth?
During my BA(Hons) Textile Design degree: the access to resources. The libraries, the wealth of digital resources and everything offered by the Fashion & Textiles Institute (shout-out to Senior Technician and best human Freya Moses!)
During the MA Communication Design: the cohort. It was a multidisciplinary group of people unafraid to push outside their comfort zone, get weird and have fun with it. The year was hard work – compounded by COVID – but I couldn’t have asked for a lovelier group of people to be around.
Since graduating, you’ve spent three years as a writer at The Brand Identity, later contributing to titles for It’s Nice That and more. Can you tell us about the work you create in your day-to-day?
In the years following graduation, I cut my teeth writing articles on branding and visual culture for LogoArchive’s Logo Histories and The Brand Identity.
After three years as a staff writer at The Brand Identity, I went freelance and have since built a practice spanning editorial writing, research and verbal strategy, penning pieces for studios as well as TYPE01, Frontify, It’s Nice That, Imperfect Index, Designfully and Design Week.
Call me clichéd, but what I’ve loved most throughout it all is the people. I’ve interviewed hundreds of designers, studios and projects, but what stays with me are the relationships and stories I get access to along the way: the doubts, the detours, the things that never make it into the final case study. I’ve had the opportunity to provide press coverage for events such as the Birmingham Design Festival and to guest-judge INTL’s Live Project Competition.
It’s fun being a cheerleader for folks, seeing them go from strength to strength.
Can you tell us about the work you've done for TYPE01, the UK's top online magazine focused on typography and design?
As a freelancer, I work with founder and editor-in-chief Amber Weaver on the TYPE01 blog – interviewing type foundries and writing features on new typefaces. Since 2022, I’ve been a regular contributor to their magazine. Issue 11, guest-edited by an award-winning London-based design studio, is coming out later this year. Stay tuned!
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