Always looking for the story underneath.
I’m James Coulson, a creative director and designer. British-born and New York-based.
I’ve spent my career finding the right visual language for an idea and executing it with enough craft that people feel it.
I came up through broadcast, designing and directing multimillion-dollar network rebrands, from naming through brand mark, typeface and on-air system, alongside image campaigns and title sequences. It’s where I learned that a brand is a system, a set of decisions that has to hold together whether it’s a printed mark or a film.
That thinking shapes everything I make now. But the skill that has served me most across all of it is simpler: translating ideas into stories people can understand.
My instinct is to find the human story inside an idea and express it visually. Not dumbed down, distilled.
My work has included collaborations with companies such as Anthropic, IBM, BMW, HBO, Broadcom, Syfy, SevenRooms and SearchStax.
My background spans brand design, motion, editorial, live action, CG and visual effects. I move between creative direction and hands-on execution, shaping projects from concept through execution so the thinking and craft stay closely connected.
I teach filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which keeps me close to the fundamentals of storytelling and what makes a story land.
Outside of client work, I created Other America, a documentary series that took me 14,000 miles across the United States alone with a single camera. Travelling blue highways and through towns rarely seen in guidebooks, I filmed and interviewed strangers whose stories revealed a very different picture of the country. The journey became a series of twelve short films.
The instinct behind that project was curiosity about people and the search for meaning beneath the surface. It is the same instinct I bring to my work.
My work has received Emmy, Clio, Promax and New York Festivals Awards, and has been featured in Motionographer, Stash, The Guardian, BBC America and AIGA.
I studied at Ravensbourne in London. An exchange programme took me to the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and the Dutch approach to design thinking stayed with me. I went back for postgraduate study at the Jan van Eyck Academy, supported by a Dutch government scholarship. That environment shaped how I think about the relationship between concept and craft.
Based in New York. Working with clients worldwide.
Find out more about how I work.
