Michael Johnson was born in Derby in 1964. He trained at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, then worked across a sequence of studios and disciplines: spells at Wolff Olins and Sedley Place in London, and a period at Dentsu in Tokyo gave him an early view of design at different scales and in different commercial cultures.
In 1992, aged twenty-eight, he founded johnson banks in London. The early years were lean: a small studio, a small client list, a deliberate focus on work where the brief had something at stake beyond aesthetics. An early project for the Royal Mail — fruit and vegetable stamps — won a D&AD black pencil in 2004, one of only a handful awarded that year. The studio grew slowly and stayed small by design: six to seven full-time staff, enough to take on ambitious briefs without the overhead that forces studios to accept anything offered.
Johnson served as President of D&AD, the youngest person to hold the post at the time. He has lectured widely — visiting professor at Glasgow School of Art, visiting lecturer at Cambridge — and has been named the seventh most awarded designer in D&AD history. Nineteen designs are held in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
His first book, Problem Solved (2002; revised Phaidon edition 2012), catalogued recurring design problems and proposed practical responses. Branding: In Five and a Half Steps (Thames and Hudson, 2016) drew on twenty-five years of studio practice to lay out a process model for building brand identity. Both remain in print.