RAF
Benevolent
Fund

The RAF Benevolent Fund is one of the largest military charities in the UK. It supports serving and retired RAF personnel and their families — practical help with money, housing, care and mental health, for people at every stage of a service life and long after it.

My work for the Fund sits across three things rather than one. I design the paid social creative for Meta campaigns, I design merchandise for the retail range, and I consult on the Shopify store that sells it. That means the thing which gets designed is the thing that can actually be printed, listed and advertised — the same person is across the artwork, the ad and the product page.

A range of apparel and accessory designs drawing on the RAF’s own visual language (the roundel, the Red Arrows, the Spitfire silhouette) without slipping into pastiche.

The lead design takes the Red Arrows’ smoke trails and lets them resolve into the Union flag: one idea, readable at ten metres on a t-shirt and at 40 pixels in a product thumbnail. Everything is drawn in vector, so a design can go from a garment to a window sticker to a social post without being redrawn.

Creative for Meta campaigns across the retail range and seasonal appeals. Product photography, layout, and the copy hierarchy that has to survive being seen for a second and a half on a phone.

Working to a charity’s brand guidelines is its own discipline: the marks and the tone are fixed, and the job is to find room to be interesting inside them rather than around them.

Practical store work alongside the creative: product setup and merchandising, template and theme adjustments, and making sure a new range can actually be launched without a developer in the loop.

This is the part most design suppliers can’t take on, and it is usually where campaigns stall: the creative is ready and the store isn’t.