Aside from the immediate financial implications of not having enough work coming in, which are legion, there is an incredible stigma attached to how I feel, a sense of embarrassment, shame; and as anyone with at least a fleeting bar-stool psychologist’s interest will readily observe; embarrassment, or rather fear of embarrassment is a prime behavioural driver. So why do I find it embarrassing? In a disposable industry where you’re as good as the last thing you did, if you haven’t done anything in a while, then it follows that you’re not very good, doesn’t it? Only, it’s not solely a design industry specific thing. Under the market forces / supply and demand paradigm, if you’re not busy, then it’s because what you do isn’t in high demand. Good things are always in high demand, aren’t they?

(A quick click on send and receive, just to check. No, still nothing; like it’s somehow a panacea to the deafening quiet or a substitute for real work and by real work, I mean paying work, because that’s the only kind that ultimately has any validity, right?).

But here’s the paradox, if things that are intrinsically good are always in high demand, then all of this, advertising, marketing, whatever is fundamentally a massive waste of everyone’s time. 

You can extrapolate this to the conclusion that an awful lot of what we do is manufacture demand, we ultimately create want for substandard or unnecessary products. But it’s ok, as long as everyone is busy; intoxicatingly busy. Take the money, stick a couple of glossy visuals in your portfolio, notch up another one for the client list, drop the big names to a steadily growing base of followers on twitter, share your wins on Facebook. 

It’s shit, but this is how we measure our relative success. This has very little to do with problem-solving, unless you keep one hand spare, so you can count the digits on the rare few projects that slipped past client services, relatively unspoilt, that you got away with. It has even less to do with the principles of good design practice, the idea that design might actually inspire or help to elevate the intrinsic goodness of things, educate people, or tell engaging stories about people with integrity or things that have purpose.

Postscript… 
All of which is quite clever, but intellectualising it doesn’t necessarily change how it feels. If this is how we measure our successes, then not scoring well, as such, can easily become a mark of failure. In honesty, it’s this fear of failure that haunts me; cognitive dissonance and all.

I wonder if it isn’t a quintessential part of being creative; that putting your ideas out there always involves a degree of vulnerability? Learning to fail and failure are not the same thing. The alluring busyness of doing work that follows trend, garners fame and attracts more-of-the-same work may bring a ready-made version of success; but in bypassing personal processes and conscious decision-making, it leaves a void in its passing.

I’ve fallen, once again, into bad habits. This is not a good place to find myself, hunched over a monitor, bent further out of shape at one, two, three in the morning, eating at my desk, if at all; forgetting how to do the simple things necessary to keep myself well, keep myself nice. I’m embarrassed to admit I’m not always as good as I’d like to think I am at looking after myself. Embarrassed enough to have deleted and retyped that last sentence three times.

Other than seeing last week’s jobs through press and raising the relevant invoices, I haven’t billed a single hour this week, yet I’ve spent 60 odd hours at my desk, repeatedly clicking send / receive / refresh, like it’s a panacea for an absence of paying work. The mortgage is due. I got another letter from HMRC last week. It’s my son’s birthday next week. Shit, have you seen the price of Lego Star Wars toys? I’m still at my desk, trying to push and shove my way through, keep busy; the familiarity of busyness. I feel obliged to make stuff, for myself, for all the wrong reasons. Go on, be creative. Do it; starting… now. Spending this amount of time in front of a screen is bad news. Social media makes a poor replacement for a horizon. I find it intoxicatingly easy to lose my sense of perspective and confuse having a lot of shit going on around me with being shit. A continuous stream of notifications, new tweets and posts providing an endless source of other people’s work to see, that is, to skim through, fawn over; a proliferation of design porn. And I’ve just spent eight hours working out the grid for a new typeface, I’m being left behind, aren’t I? That’s embarrassment again, the second time in as many paragraphs. Oh well, in for a penny and all that.

When I’m in this place, I feel vulnerable. If I’m dishonest about that, I get angry. With myself. Ultimately, I pitch myself in a competition I can never win. I forget that if it is a race at all, it was never about winning or losing, but personal bests.

Yesterday, was ‘insect’ day. I spent the day with my six year old daughter, making origami animals and drawing kawaii sea creatures. I saw the tears of frustration warm into a smile across her face, surprised, as she started to believe that she could draw, she could do it, do anything. I’ve spent all week doubting myself, disliking my work, stressed about meeting this month’s mortgage, thinking I might be yesterday’s man.…
“Maybe, when I’m older, I could be a really good artist; just like you Daddy.”

No, Manon, It is me who needs to remember to be much more like you.

Throughout my secondary education, the arts were generally given a third place slot, behind academia and sport. The lads (it was single sex at the time) who got on, who were seen to be a success, and thus rewarded with rank and status were academic high-flyers or members of the first 11 / first 15. I survived it because I was a top of the class kinda kid, earmarked from the age of about 11 or 12 for the role of head boy and a place at Oxbridge. Lucky me.

Only, at no point was I ever asked what I might want to do with my life. It was assumed that because I was considered bright, I would naturally go on to take my rightful place in a worthy career: law, medicine, finance or high-ranking military. The arts were a fall-back for the less fortunate. At GCSE options, we had eight core mandatory subjects and two option groups. Art, Music and Drama resided in a single option group, along with Latin & German. If you were good at languages, you studied a third language, there wasn’t a conversation about it; you placed your chips on the safest bet.

No surprises, I left school at 16 with exactly what I was expected to achieve. The system had worked. That is, it delivered precisely within the parameters it was set up to achieve. When I went for the entry interview for college, I remember the principal talking to my mum, “At this point, we’d ordinarily look at a student’s results and help them make the right decisions, what path they should take, based on their strengths. Looking at Neil’s results, he really could do anything…” This conversation has stayed with me for years, how he addressed it to my mum and not me, how little I actually knew about what I felt passionate about, what I might actually want to do with theses choices, with my life. I started out studying Economics, Accounting, French and Sociology. The latter being a bit of a wild-card, with a view to it being the subject I’d drop if proved detrimental to the others, the ‘proper’ choices. By the end of the first year, I was studying Sociology, Media & Communications and Business Studies. In the second year, Business Studies gave way to Photography.

Not that I finished my second year. I dropped out. I travelled, I worked. I spent time unable to work, signed off, unable, with manic depression. I found my way back into education, aged 21. I studied a BTEC in Media. I worked a part-time job in a train station cafe, to pay for my bedroom studio. Between lectures and serving tea, I learned my way around a mac, I made music and films. I got by on very little sleep. I watched my friends graduate from university. I worked tirelessly to compensate for the sense of failure I felt. My formal education had only ever geared me for success; exclusively, one type of success; failure was not an option. In all honestly, this sense of self-doubt is still with me many years later, I question the validity of what I’m doing, whether I’m any good at it and whether I should be doing something else altogether. I’ve learned how to utilise this to motivate myself, but I’m not always sure it’s the same thing as it feeling natural or flowing freely.

I’ve worked, professionally as a designer and creative for nearly 15 years.

As parents, my wife and I have always placed an emphasis on our children’s sense of creativity, the empowerment it offers them to make informed choices, that it isn’t always about right or wrong answers, it’s ok to make mistakes. We nurture their urges to draw, to dance, to play music, put on shows; to devour books and tell their own stories. We encourage them to value what they love, to negotiate for what they believe in and to express it respectfully and eloquently. I don’t think we’re unique, amongst parents, in wanting to give our kids the opportunities we feel we didn’t have. I also don’t think we’re alone in feeling that our children are special, a gift. We’ve tried to find schools for them that share or reflect our ideas, that similarly value creativity as foundation to their education, whatever they might choose to to do in their lives. Being creative is essential to instilling confidence, to developing analytical and problem-solving skills; engendering a sense that making mistakes isn’t failure, it’s sometimes just part of a process or journey.

Creativity in education is something I feel passionate about. During time of austerity, when the arts are under attack from budget cuts and ideological functionalism across the board, maintaining the arts in education isn’t just nice, it’s imperative. Please click the link below for more information and to lend your support.

Bacc For The Future petition

There is a competitive element to what we do, winning pitches and the like; but aside from all that; I make things because I need to, it fulfils an essential yearning in me. It feels wasteful, that is, it’s not enough for me to have nothing but a pay-cheque to show for the last year of my work.

The vast percentage of my time was being asked to make stuff look like other stuff. Cool stuff that someone found on the internet, stuff that’s on trend right now. The low-point of this was when I was handed a book by a well-known, highly decorated, and by all accounts, much respected Executive Creative Director. He told me to make the brand book I was working on (for a vast monolithic FMCG brand) ‘look more like this’. This particular book was a hardback-bound copy of some apparently (if you’re so inclined) famous advertising guru’s tweets. Only it turns out they weren’t tweeted by him. At all. But… they sounded like the sort of thing he might say, so he had them published, in a book. For what it’s worth, I didn’t think this book was particularly well-designed. Not that this mattered, because two days later, upon reviewing the work, I was told that it shouldn’t actually look like the badly-designed and altogether superfluous (given the very nature of the internet) book of non-tweets of things that sound like something someone marginally famous might have said, anyway. 

“Make it look like something else.” is never an acceptable brief. It stifles innovation and undermines the creative. But, as long as everyone gets paid, or rather, someone, somewhere is paying for this monumental waste of everyone’s time, it goes on, unchecked. The only questioning I heard with any conviction, was whether the client will ‘buy’ it.

I was repeatedly asked to waste days, amounting to weeks, of resource and budget, visualising and revisualising what a campaign might look like; photoshopping adverts with greek copy and lo-res shutterstock comps into magazine spreads, adshels and other, assorted ‘disruptive media’. Process dictates that these are presented to the client long before anything is conceptually ironed out. Why? Are there people who struggle to know what a double page spread looks like? My mum knows what a magazine advert is, she’s 67, she struggles with getting money out of a cashpoint; but fundamentally, she doesn’t commission or sell creative for a job. Perhaps if there was a more open dialogue between creative and client, for the purpose of problem-solving, then there wouldn’t be the need to waste time making visual selling-aids for suits? I can’t shake the idea that time would be better spent on developing our storytelling or craft.

I watched this beautifully simple film in its entirety, bathed in the warm fuzzy glow of nostalgia, as it took a leisurely tour through the streets of my childhood. Things change, things stay the same; mmm memories of playing football in the street, with a couple of sparsely parked cars for goalposts… I was left bothered by one question, when did we all get so busy?

I’m struck by how regularly I answer the question, “How are you?” or “How’s business?”, with the stock answer, “Oh, you know… busy.” Like busy is in itself a good thing, a measure of time well spent or a reflection on the relative success of my work and endeavours. They say ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’: our culture increasingly demands busyness, yield, efficiency.

The late Bill Hicks used to tell a story, in simpler terms:

“Hicks, how come you’re not working?”
“There’s nothing to do.”
“Well, you pretend like you’re working, son.”
“Why don’t you pretend I’m working. You get paid more than me. You fantasise.”

This isn’t just about our relationships with work, it pervades all aspects of life. That I’m flitting between writing this and the three open browser tabs on my other monitor (James Bond übervillain in my mind, Scoody-Doo janitor in reality) isn’t wasted on me. But… what if we engendered a sense of constructive fantasy, one that rewarded its wild flights, rather than exhausting it in pursuit of perfunctory productivity?

In creative industry, projects, driven as they are by deadlines, deliverables, results; don’t always give us the time we’d like to breathe, think, reflect. But, we also become bound by the constraints of our own process, we don’t always take the time, remember to make the time; to imagine, to explore (and not in that odious blue-sky, whiteboard kinda way; where people are self-consciously hindered by fear of looking stupid in front of their peers); to make actual mistakes. To keep them, revisit and reflect upon them, maybe even learn to love them a little bit.

Looking back over old work and workings, I come across things that, given time, have come to take on different meanings. Maybe it’s human nature to strive to make a coherent narrative out of the past, hindsight joins the dots? Notwithstanding, I find keeping a record of otherwise discarded ideas and treasuring my mistakes affords me the opportunity to learn more about my problem-solving (and that under duress it can be viciously divisive). But, I also discover that the priorities and prejudices that inform this decision-making process are fluid – over time they shift, both with external criteria or requirements and through new experiences and perspective.

When creative process becomes too rigid, ordained, it becomes formulaic: it’s a strategy devised to deal with busyness that becomes just another way of being busy.

Southsea Driveby Video

I have aspirations for crafting some heavyweight facial furniture, that wouldn’t look amiss on Burt Reynolds’ top lip, that makes me look like I’ve just walked out of a 70′s roadside diner… I fear the reality may well be somewhat more embarrassingly boyish and altogether wispy.

You can follow my progress or sponsor the barenaked space between my nose and my mouth on the link below:

my mobro space

Spec work and design competitions completely undermine the craft of good process and inhibit us building robust, meaningful relationships with clients. It’s something we’ve done in the past, and it’s never, not once, left me feeling anything other than disappointed, frustrated and a little dirty (not in a good way).

Give a click on the link below to add your face…

#antispec