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.
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)
2025–2026
Pentagram
Associate Partner
2019–2024
LaPlaca Cohen
Strategist
2016–2019
CLIENTS
Art and Architecture:
SPACE10, MoMA, MCA Chicago, 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, Pivotal Ventures, Advocates for Trans Equality, 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, Deloitte
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.
WRITING/SPEAKING/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:
“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
© 2026