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.
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, campaign messaging.
Freelance Strategy Lead
2024–
AREA 17
Partnership Director (freelance)
2025–
Pentagram
Associate Partner
2019–2024
LaPlaca Cohen
Strategist
2016–2019
Client list
Art and Architecture
SPACE10, MoMA, MCA Chicago, L’Alliance New York, Getty, Google Arts & Culture, Materials for the Arts, Triennale Milano, Dia Art Foundation, Sarasota Orchestra
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, TIGER 21
Foundations and Non-profits
Gates Foundation, Goalkeepers, Doris Duke Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, Pivotal Ventures, Advocates for Trans Equality, RAND Corporation, Wilson Center
Environment
Conservation International, CTrees, Environmental Defense Fund, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/La Brea Tar Pits
Business and Technology
Resy, Meta, Google, Superscript, WGSN, Verizon, Deloitte
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
“How Non-Profit Brands Can Fight Back” The Subtext
“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
Speaking
Columbia GSAPP, TenBerke, Dattner Architects, Indiana Landmarks
Press
Architect’s Newspaper
Architectural Record
US Modernist Radio
DesignMinded
The Creative Factor
PRINT Magazine
Contact