How to summise Liverpool’s Mercy? Getting to know them a little makes it clear they’re not cut from a cloth of norm. Not your average run of the mill graphic show ponies, these chaps and chapettes have more than a trick or two in their stable immersing themselves in a broad world or workshops, performance, arts events, exhibition and, intriguingly, a venture where they set up their interns last year (but that’s a story for another day)… oh, and of course a sprinkling design.

So, if we can’t encapsulate them in a paragraph, can they? They say; “Everyone always tells us that they can’t really work out what it is that we do and that’s great because it means we can keep inventing new things, and ways of doing them without looking like we just made it up… We’re equally a design agency and an arts organisation and neither side would survive without the other. Our arts events allow us to collaborate in circles we’d never impregnate as designers (or art directors or whatever). Ditto, the arts organisation gains an independent sustainability from commissions and sponsorship that filter through the agency.”

“We’re a very small, very tight team and we’ve grown very very slowly over the last 10 years. We don’t have sixteen wages to pay every month and we don’t have to chase shitty jobs. We still try go on holiday together every year and we love each other very a lot.”

Mercy have been on our hit list to feature for quite a while – I love these guys’ work and moreover, their ethos (plus their application of the word impregnate). Personality and talent in abundance, they’re one to keep a eye on as they continue to break moulds.

Tw. @mercyuk