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 […]
How’re you holding up? Trouble concentrating? Me too. There’s a Czech word for that – litost. The author Milan Kundera caught it – “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” Ok, ok, so misery is maybe a bit strong (but not for many who really are in actual crisis) […]
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 […]
Well, there’s a thing. A few articles up (the one about yellow) I made a rather tongue-in-check prediction about ‘next years colour’ and yesterday afternoon what drops into my inbox? “Colour of the Year 2023 – Wild Wonder’ Yep. Yellow. Well, yellow-ish – it’s a sort-of straw colour (or hue?) – but what the heck. […]
I have so little knowledge of how other industry’s work (like programming – proper coding, not playing with Webflow) it’s not surprising to sometimes happen on words or idioms that people in other work-spaces have as part of a wonderful alternative lexicon or jargon particular to it. By way of illustration, a word that came […]
Sparked by a post on a social media thread where you least likely find much that was meme-worthy*, @Rob Estreitinho had a nice graph illustrating the rise and fall of social sites ranked by the volume of the popular shortcut-to-the-heart-of-culture message, format, thing they emit. Knowing (well, hang on. Assuming) everyone knows what memes are, […]
Our job as communicators ordinarily demands we get to the point. Quick-snap. We’re paid to reward with clarity, supposedly because we possess some kind of second-sight that our commissioners lack (or pretend to. I know most of my clients are way smarter than me.) Leaving our audiences perplexed or confused? How’s that going to help […]
“Humanity makes headway by going in circles” You know that feeling, where you’ve been stuck in a project that just seems endless? The one with the file names that spiral into _final_FINAL_v23_081022_update.pdf Exhausting isn’t it? And more importantly, how on earth to you keep mentally attached – or better still, keep finding at ways to […]
Anyone who gets to work with brands, at the execution rather than origination-end of things, will know what a joy it can be to work within the strictures of The Guideline. They’re fun things, full of blowy intention and contorted neologisms fronting up a series of Rules about what you may and may not do […]
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