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📝 Writing | ✨Narrative + Content strategy |👨🏻‍🍳 User centred design | 📈 Scaling up content teams

Hello, I’m James Pallister, a writer, content designer and strategist based in London, UK. A long time ago I was a journalist and I used to write books.

Now my work spans narrative + content strategy / storytelling or building digital products, problem-solving, user-centred content and copywriting (what I call writing to persuade). I take the best of user centred design practices and apply it to client problems that usually combine technology, people, culture and ‘content’.

Here’s some of the things I can help you with:

• Ghostwriting for senior leaders
• Creating compelling narrative and purpose for your organisation/product/team
• Problem solving: content strategy, operations and scaling up agile content teams
• Fractional content leadership
• Writing for web: including content design and copywriting

I’ve worked on digital transformation projects in the public and private sector, in retail, fashion and government.

Together with Nicola I’m a director of the high street pop-up retail and event space Host of Leyton.

Training and Experience

I’ve worked in and for digital design teams for over 10 years. I worked in the ‘Creative team’ at Government Digital Service between 2015-17, which was my introduction to user centred design.

I was mainly helping product teams and senior leaders communicate (blog posts, posters, decks) and then moved ‘product-side’ when I joined Essex County Council’s newly formed Service Design team to work on its website alpha.

I also spent 3 years working for the luxury menswear brand Ermenegildo Zegna, when it was still family-owned. I helped the head of omnichannel with his internal storytelling as the brand repositioned, as well as working as part of a small team that were scaling up and improving the digital offer. I also wrote (almost all) the copy for 300+ launches (landing pages, emails, socials, in store sales material, etc etc). Over this period profits increased 67%. Clearly not all down to me, though I like to think I played a part.

Prior to that my background was in design journalism and then copywriting. Academic stuff was mainly sociology and political theory.

I studied Art Foundation at New College Durham, and Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge.

Sectors I’ve worked in

Technology, ‘digital’, central government, local government, fashion/menswear, luxury retail, change & transformation projects, all things trade and Brexit, working with senior leaders

Selected clients I’ve worked with

Superflux, IKEA, Art on the Underground, Coco di Mama,Design Council, Department for International Trade, Department for Education, Dezeen, Ermenegildo Zegna, Essex County Council, Flamingo, Government Digital Service, Hannah Barry Gallery, Hopkins Architects, Olympic Delivery Authority, Shelter, Victoria & Albert Museum

Interests

A regularly changing list, including: Channel shift, content personalisation, the ups and downsides of digital transformation, UK food culture, Type II diabetes and exercise, regenerative farming, social mobility, changing face of retail and high streets, AI and existential risk, ethnography.

Where You’ll Find Me

/ Very rarely, on twitter: twitter.com/jamesapallister

/ For the last 8 years I’ve been working for various clients through my micro editorial agency Buchanan Ryan Ltd, AKA Studio Pallister.

/ I also run an events space and small business incubator in East London called Host of Leyton. Together with my wife Nicola Read we renovated the former spare car parts shop and created Host.