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!

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.

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.

A memorial to Paul’s work and approach is well worth 20 mins to browse and be inspired. Click on Paul’s picture to be taken to a collection of articles written by Paul Rand, interviews, videos and  information. A real treasure for the business design fascinated.

I found this a touching client piece on an individual designer’s impact both personally and the business world.

But, on the upside, this emphasis on impact, interaction and beauty can lend itself to a more easily navigable and digestible information environment. For example, this. It’s a visual, interactive representation of the scientific evidence for popular health supplements. 5 minutes playing with this app reveals more about the evidence base (or lack thereof) for health supplements than 5 days on PubMed. And it looks nice too. I like it.

8 1/2 minutes seems crazily long now given our obsession with the 30 sec TVC and the interuptive nature of much or our marketing. But watching this the charm, execution and humour grabbed me way and beyond my usual attention span. It’s pretty interesting to see that COI communications seems to have taken a backward step when it comes to explaining change to the man in the street.

The Design Museum has joined forces with Beefeater 24, to bring a series of talks and gin to celebrate the fearlessly progressive spirit of London’s greatest creative minds, past and present. We were lucky enough to be invited along. Read more about Wayne here.  

Wayne was pretty insistent that us in the creative world;

1.  Stick to our guns and hold on to our principles despite the risk of missing out on short term cash. Do what you want to do, not what you need to do. 
2. Know our customer as well as we can. Research them, be with them, and understand them. For God’s sakes don’t hide in the office. See the white of their eyes. 
3. Understand that environments need to be built that fosters creativity. Gives space to make mistakes. Let the kids do it their way. Expect anyone to be able to do anything, give them the freedom to conclude themselves.
4. Champion the evolution. Humans instinctively want something better. They know when they are making do, OK is not a natural human state. But only very few ‘intolerants’ make a difference and change it. So be one.

At no time did regulatory, PI, sales aids or brand planning feature. But the 2 hours was so valuable and a real delight. How can this be beaten? Well – the next one sees us with Paul Smith. We have a couple of tickets spare – shout if you want to come along –  beapart@hivehealth.com.

I bought my first 12 inc record album. The band was called The Prodigy and the album was called Experience and I had managed to purchase a limited edition white sleeve special. The slick minimalist style of the cover contrasted vastly with the atmospheric colouring and transient use of typography within the inner sleeve. The music was an array of cutting edge sounds and lyrics mixed with mesmerising beats and a unique series of piano keys. Fast forward 18 years and the band are once again proving that they see design as an essential ingredient in expressing their music.

The use of animated graphics in the new video for Warriors Dance  is truly magical and inspiring….

Every page of this document is more ridiculous than the last, culminating with an explanation of a process whereby Pepsi’s new logo will manifest its own gravitational pull (see above). Incredible. Some argue the document is authentic, others that it’s a hoax. I think it’s an extremely successful viral marketing campaign, run by the Arnell Group on behalf of Pepsi. Probably.

This might be a good time to mention that the new logo is basically the same as the old one, except that it now looks a bit more like a lopsided grin.