Phil Cox

Phil Cox is a brand strategist and writer with a decade of experience at the intersection of design, communications, and culture. 

As a consultant to leading companies and organizations, he helps his clients with a range of strategic needs, from defining purpose to articulating offer to reaching new audiences, markets, and funding opportunities. He frequently collaborates with designers, architects, and technologists on interdisciplinary problems that span word and image, two dimensions and three.

Previously, Cox was an associate partner at Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design firm. There, he led brand strategy engagements while also playing a central role in business development and program management. Earlier in his career, he was a strategist at LaPlaca Cohen, a boutique consultancy serving nonprofit institutions across the arts and culture sector. He studied art history and journalism at the University of North Carolina.

In addition to his strategy practice, Cox writes about architecture and the public life of design. He is the author of two books and has contributed essays and articles to a range of publications.

Experience

Freelance Strategy Lead
2024–

AREA 17
Partnership Director (freelance)
2025–

Pentagram
Associate Partner
2019–2023

Gilda’s Club NYC
Associate Board
2021-2023

NEW INC
Mentor
2019

LaPlaca Cohen
Strategist
2016–2019


Capabilities

Brand audits, stakeholder interviews, mission, vision, and values development, positioning, naming, tone of voice, verbal identity, competitive analyses, UX strategy, short- and long-form copywriting, guidelines, campaigns.

Client list

Art and Architecture
SPACE10, MoMA, MCA Chicago, L’Alliance New York, Getty, Google Arts & Culture, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/La Brea Tar Pits, Materials for the Arts, Triennale Milano, Dia Art Foundation, Museum of the City of New York, Leroy Street Studio, New York Botanical Garden

Education
University of Chicago Center for Decision Research, University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, Harvard Social Innovation + Change Initiative, Chiba Institute of Technology

Foundations and Non-profits
Gates Foundation, Goalkeepers, Doris Duke Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, Pivotal Ventures, Advocates for Trans Equality

Environment
Conservation International, CTrees, Environmental Defense Fund, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Business and Technology
Meta, Google Brand Studio, Wilson Center, Superscript, Deloitte Insights, RAND Corporation, WGSN, Verizon Business Group, Deloitte Insights, Bedrock Ocean Exploration, Digital Architecture Lab

Contact

Email
Instagram
LinkedIn


Writing, Speaking, and Press

Books
“What a Building Does: The Hoosier Modernisms of Evans Woollen” (Indiana University Press, 2025)
“Speak Data: Artists, Scientists, Thinkers, and Dreamers on How We Live Our Lives in Numbers” (Chronicle, 2025)

Articles
“Wrighters’ Room,” Los Angeles Review of Architecture
“Evans Woollen: Tracing the Forgotten History of the ‘Dean of Indiana Architects,” MAS Context
“In Praise of the Pedestrian,” Untapped
“A Portrait of its People: St. Thomas Aquinas and the Church Architecture of Evans Woollen,” DOCOMOMO

Interviews and Reviews
Architect’s Newspaper
Architectural Record
US Modernist Radio
DesignMinded
The Creative Factor
PRINT Magazine

Speaking
Columbia GSAPP, TenBerke, Dattner Architects, Indiana Landmarks, Pentagram, Rizzoli Bookstore, Landmark Columbus Foundation


Work

Doris Duke Foundation
Brand strategy, program architecture, tone of voice, tagline, copywriting, UX strategy, ongoing consulting
The Doris Duke Foundation is a major philanthropic force in the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research, and child welfare. A comprehensive brand overhaul transforms the organization’s voice, asserting a bolder and more ambitious identity in alignment with its visionary grantmaking. “Dare differently” is the foundation’s new north star, a call to action for increased experimentation, collaboration, and systematic change.

What a Building Does: The Hoosier Modernisms of Evans Woollen
Writing, research
“What a Building Does: The Hoosier Modernisms of Evans Woollen” is the first biography of architect Evans Woollen (1927-2016). Surveying the full breadth of Woollen's six-decade career, the book tells the complete story of this essential Midwestern practitioner for the first time. Featuring nearly 150 new full-color photos, never-before-seen archival material, and dozens of interviews with former colleagues, clients, and friends, the book expands the narrative of modern architecture and its legacy in the American Midwest.


Advocates for Trans Equality
Naming, mission, brand positioning, copywriting, anthem video script, guidelines Born out of a merger between two long-time LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, A4TE is a new organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of trans people in America. The new name, “Advocates for Trans Equality,” defines the organization’s clarified mission in no uncertain terms. The name is paired with a new mission statement, brand pillars, and tone principles to help unify all the organization’s communications with clarity, energy, and spirit.


University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning
Brand strategyThe School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo is the only accredited architecture program in the SUNY system. A new brand strategy and accompanying visual identity repositions the school within a contemporary maker culture, attuned to regional identity and shaped by a pragmatist spirit of experimentation, materiality, and community engagement.

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/La Brea Tar Pits
Strategic planning, opportunity assessment, brand architecture, naming, brand strategy, verbal identity, guidelinesThe Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is the largest natural history museum in the western United States. A major public institution in Los Angeles, the museum has a uniquely civic ethos rooted in natural and cultural history. Developed with leadership and community members, a comprehensive new strategic plan sets a course of impact for the museum’s next decade.

This plan then led to a completely new public-facing visual and verbal identity. The revised brand clarifies the organization’s structure (the museum also oversees the La Brea Tar Pits) and works to assert a more confident public image in a crowded cultural market.

Materials for the Arts
Mission, copywriting Based in Queens, New York, Materials for the Arts (MFTA) is one of the country’s largest creative reuse centers. A new mission statement, clarifying the non-profit's work and conservation-minded approach, served as a conceptual anchor for the brand’s evolved personality. Messaging developed with MFTA’s fundraising staff further accentuated this ethos while also adding a healthy dose of wit and vibrancy. The identity made its debut on a massive digital billboard in Times Square and on kiosks around the city.

Mindworks: The Science of Thinking
Naming, exhibition strategy, experience design, copywritingMindworks: The Science of Thinking is the world’s first discovery center and working lab dedicated to behavioral science. Presented by the Center for Decision Research (CDR) at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the space is a one-of-a-kind experience where people can learn more about how their minds work, and at the same time, contribute to groundbreaking science as participants. A series of interactive, lo-fi exhibits translate the principles of behavioral science into dynamic hands-on experiences to capture decision making in process. 


Gates Foundation
Creative strategy, project management The Gates Foundation is the third-wealthiest charitable foundation in the world. Over the course of four years I completed multiple projects with various Foundation teams, spanning branding, digital products, internal communications, and external campaigns.

Speak Data
Writing, researchThough it may be the most powerful force in society today, data lacks a unified definition. Present in every moment, transaction, event, and interaction, the one thing most people can agree on is that it shows no trend toward obsolescence. Rather, the data ecosystem we have created now sustains us as much as we sustain it. 

Published by Chronicle, “Speak Data: Artists, Scientists, Thinkers, and Dreamers on How We Live Our Lives in Numbers” explores a range of perspectives on data from experts across disciplines. Throughout 17 interviews with figures like James Clear, Seth Godin, Refik Anadol, Eric Topol, and Paola Antonelli, the book seeks to expand data’s lexicon for accessing the full complexity of human ideas, stories, and behaviors.

Triennale Milano
Creative strategy, copywritingArriving at a time of heightened societal instability, “Inequalities,” the 24th Triennale Milano International Exhibition, explores the global challenges arising from the powerful yet often unseen differences across various dimensions of human existence and the growing disparities that characterize them. The exhibition’s branding uses the shifting patterns of data visualizations to embody these themes of imbalance. Based on block-like pixels, the dynamic generative system is endlessly flexible and can express different statistics while providing a cohesive visual language for the wide-ranging content. 


Meta
Creative strategy, copywriting, guidelinesA marketing and communications plan developed for the tech giant embeds a more humanistic, narrative approach to data visualization and consumer storytelling.

SPACE10
Research, copywriting “The Digital in Architecture: Then, Now and in the Future” is a special report produced by SPACE10, IKEA’s research and design lab, that looks at the ways in which innovations in digital tools for design and fabrication in architecture have contributed to the built environment today. An encyclopedic history of digitally enabled buildings, movements, and tools is presented in a five-panel gatefold timeline, inspired by the expansive “evolutionary tree” maps of Charles Jencks.












Phil Cox© 2026