Hive Health

A couple of weeks back I went on a D&AD course called Taking Ideas for a walk. The course tutor was an extremely enthusiastic graphic designer called Malcolm Kennard, who proceeded to do the obligatory ice breakers and then talk in depth about his experiences and the ways in which he tackles a typical brief. All very enlightening, especially when he spoke about finding inspiration by observation, sometimes in the least likely places! I appreciate that going to galleries aren’t the most original places to go for inspiration, but I’d never dreamed about finding it in a Turkish bath in Budapest!

The day progressed with a number of small uni style briefs, with few restrictions and constraints but a whole lot of scope – lovely! The aim here being to get us back into that early mindset we all use to have, before the commercial world took a firm grip and creative expression became more of a challenge to channel through all the rules, regulations and pressured clients!

Our final task of the day presented us with a mop and bucket and the brief headline Work, Play and Rest! A mop and bucket already works, so it was how I reflected the latter two aspects in my creation that would be assessed. My solution is pictured above.

Being a kid for a day again was truly inspiring. Tapping back into that freedom of expression was really refreshing, and is something that I’ll be aiming to do a lot more often!

It struck me lying in a restaurant after lunch what an overlapping world we all live in.

Around the table sat a social media planner, product designer and a sociologist. Our conversation focused on developing anything to be better than it was . Those ‘things’ that make your competitors spit blood and wish they had made it themselves. I use ‘things’ here as it helps with knitting us together somewhat. Although widgets, products, research papers and communications all seem dead far way from each other our worlds link closely when you need to produce something that connects.

Interestingly what the sociologist called participant observation – which in her field mostly seemed to cover deviant behaviour, the product designer knew as a consumer closeness, and I and the social media planner knew as planning. All involve long periods of either following, viewing and recording interactions with other players, structures or items. It’s all about intimate familiarity with someone and often something. We all seek to view, with permission and learn from it.

The social media planner and I looked on with interest; this approach is something we know really well. We scoffed at the pomposity of the terminology. Participant observation total toss. Surely this is exactly what we do?  Having opened my mouth way before engaging brain. It turns out (most obviously) now that the world of participant observation is pretty old, whilst us lot in advertising hark to Berbach in the 1950s and the rise of planning. Our Sociologist colleagues top trump us with their Bernbach equivalent – the Persian anthropologist Abu Rayhan al-biruni who was collating people patterns in order to solve problems a little further back in 973-1048.

The product designer, seeing me floored with historical accuracy, decided to fill me in with the history of ”industrial design” and the birth in the early 1900s of industrialised consumer products. I sat fascinated (but pretending to be bored) at the world of Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 to establish a partnership between product manufacturers and design professionals to improve the competitiveness of German companies in global markets. It’s apparently this that built the foundation for German user centric design and creativity and placed them on a competitive footing with England and the United States.

Finding myself between established audience centric disciplines. I sought the bleeding edge with the social media planner – an online anthropologist. Her faculty of genius came mostly with names like Wolfsninjaw536, and most notably from a insightnip546 and were at the early days of defining the discipline. Just like the days when Madison Avenue was split between Bill Berbach and ‘the depth boys’ and Rosser Reeves who ran the Ted Bates agency and fronted the ‘find a USP and repeat it loads’ clan. More can be read about this in this brilliant BBC film and article. Her world was splitting into factions all trying to distill a client sellable truth, in a chaotically mobile landscape.

Whats does this all mean? That techniques of all of us are useful to all of us? That terminological transparency would help us all? Perhaps – but simply for me it that what we know to be useful is more often that not being used and bettered by many other disciplines.

A fascinating lunch with a pretty academic discussion and loads of overlap at the least.  A new group of people to borrow stuff for the problems we tackle day to day at the most.

Today I shopped around D&AD New Blood with our creative director Adam. New Blood is a graduate design and advertising showcase. Adam was keen to find names for our talent database, I wanted to photograph some visual storytelling.

VS is a big thing in my mind right now, and I’m turning over what it actually means. Are paintings visual stories? Is an ad a story only when there’s no dialogue or text? I deliberately blurred my shots so that I won’t be able to read the text (if any) when I look at them later.

But I didn’t need my camera to understand more. My creative writing tutor says a story needs a beginning, middle, an end and a problem to solve. So, I spent some time with the visual stories I really liked. The first was from the celebrated young illustrator Jay Wright from UWE Bristol. His poster, The Tin Lungs You Don’t Have, showed me two lungs, each framing a day-in-the-life of (right) a non-smoker and (left) his unhappy counterpart. Each had a different lifestyle, and each ended the day on a different outcome. I am not sure I grasped everything Jay was trying to do here. But as a fresh take on the usual anti smoking brief, this was a masterpiece of a wordless story.

I loved the work for WWF by Middlesex Uni’s  Shamas Bedi. Giant pencil drawings of “cuddly” sea creatures: a turtle, a blue whale, were minutely composed of hundreds of different species. There was  plankton –  those charismatic little guys – corals, feeder fish, penguins, sharks  and seabirds. My conscience didn’t need to read “Save our coral reefs” to jiggle fragile ecosystems up a notch – although the line was there. Enough was spelt out in the drawings within drawings, all immaculately proportioned and wittily placed. Life isn’t in the big details and sometimes that can hit home like a gush of salty water up the nose.

I’m a copywriter but I want to tell my stories more visually.  Pictures take us back to being tiny kids when everything was a picture, even each letter of a word.  Visual storytelling is strong because it leads you directly to the prize. It’s vulnerable because you might not follow. It’s got real heart and I love it.

A few months back I was fortunate enough to be invited to a talk by King’s Speech set Designer Eve Stewart. Curious as hell to know how an Oscar nominated set designer goes about her work, I showed up at The Billiard Room on 33 Portland Place on the afternoon of the 6th May.

To add extra spice, The Billiard Room was the actual location where the speech therapy sessions where filmed – atmospheric distressed wall and all. On a funny note, i have since heard it is also the site of alleged “sex parties” and so-called “porn discos”.

A really insightful talk followed. Eve opened up about her inspirations and how she achieved that really distinguished wall effect using a blow torch and a canvas of water paints. However, the thing which really resonated with me was her mention of going that bit further to infuse her craft with – I can’t recall how she put it – functional emotion. Once her sets were designed, Eve would create a note or scribble that the characters may once have used – a shopping list, a letter from loved one or a reminder note about some drinks they might be hosting. She would slip this quietly into the relevant actor’s pocket. When they chanced upon it later, the realism  would absorb them further into their role and make their surroundings feel even more genuine.

Finding new ways to stretch the effectiveness of her craft seems to be another art that Eve has mastered! I guess this explains her 2 Oscar nominations.