
Ah, October, season of mellow missed meetings and fruit-less-ness. Anyone that’s been around the block a bit will know that as sure as Spring/Summer trends predict Breton stripy tops, clients will gaze nonchalantly at gmail calendars and splutter ‘but we’ve 12 weeks’ to the booze-fuelled close down masquerading at a religious holiday – when it’s […]

Every time it happens – and it’s rarer these days – I just want to grind my teeth. That moment when the client says, super-casual-like, ‘just have a play around with it.’ Because that’s really what we do, isn’t it? Creative work can be regarded as a kind of (semi) legitimised play, with crayons and […]

Had a walk around the famous (well, it is, sort of) Park Hill estate in Sheffield and up close you can understand why the rehabilitation of this maligned solution to post-war housing is such a success. The superstructure is a designer’s dream of wonderful grids, cutaways and reveals, with the rescued concrete frame now a […]

Yesterday, upon the stair,I met a man who wasn’t thereHe wasn’t there again todayI wish, I wish he’d go away… Antigonish [I met a man who wasn’t there] – Hughes Mearns Yesterday I didn’t write a post. I couldn’t find anywhere to even begin. Everything seemed to be ‘there’ but ‘not there’. Stories about things […]

Honestly, the rabbit-holes a single word can take you down. Like bits of grit in my eye (ear?), any unfamiliar coinage I find impossible to resist – especially when a word which begin life as a total fiction, somehow sticks (like ‘chortle’, or ‘meme’); and more especially when they attach themselves (well, find attachment) to […]

Or ’In praise of design’s own wriggly tin’ Round these parts, and especially in the rural-economy side of things, there are hundreds of buildings of all shapes and sizes composed for the greater part of wriggly tin (or corrugated iron sheeting to give it its more formal name.) The one in the feature image is […]