This month, as the daylight hours diminish, I’ve found myself making headway on the piles of books which accumulate, quietly over time, like colourful stalagmites, around our house. And there is one in particular which has delighted and appalled me in equal measure …
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Of all the projects I’ve been involved with since my career in design and branding kicked off some twenty years ago, there are few I feel as fondly towards as the Studiocanal cinema ident …
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Webinar. Perhaps one of the ugliest words to have been tumbled out of the lexicon of late stage capitalism. Pre-pandemic few people had anything but the haziest idea of what these three syllables refer to …
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There’s not enough time. We don’t have enough budget. There’s no way I’d be able to do that. If you’re a creative person then you’ll know that limitations are everywhere …
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If you’re reading this then there’s a good chance you’re a creative professional. And if you’re a creative professional then there’s an equally good chance that you have a long lost personal project tucked away somewhere in a bottom drawer …
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Pandemic. Lockdown. Quarantine. All concepts which most of us could have reasonably hoped we would never experience. And yet here we are entering another week of Zoom calls, home schooling, and … is it too early to have a glass of wine yet?
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James Sommerville has come a long way. From eking out a living as a pavement artist on the mean streets of Huddersfield through to becoming the Global Head of Design for Coca Cola. Along the way he set up the design agency Attik in his nan’s – you guessed it – attic …
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When I was a kid I used to love writing stories. Or rather I used to love the idea of writing stories. The problem was that my stories would often not be much longer than a few words; I could rarely get beyond the opening sentence …
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Creativity and madness. That the two go hand in hand has become a cliché. What is the truth? Is there really a higher incidence of mental illness among creative people, or is this just an easy fallacy to explain the behaviour of those who see the world differently?
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Anyone who has watched Eraserhead, Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks will know that defying formal conventions is one of the things that makes David Lynch so, well, Lynchian, and sure enough Room to Dream is a biography like no other …
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I have a feeling that your most effective marketing strategy for 2020 isn’t going to be conceived in a meeting room. It’s not going to be worked out on a whiteboard during a departmental brainstorm …
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Last night there was a storm in Wales. The wind battered our small house. When I woke this morning to fallen trees, to neighbours counting the cost of the damage and, of course, to the result of last night’s election … Image by Don McCullin.
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It’s Summer 2012. The hot Spanish sun is unforgiving as it beats down on the quiet streets of Borja, a medieval town a few hours north east of Madrid …
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My fingers feel the smooth plastic on the keyboard as I type this sentence. I hear the rhythmic clatter of the keys. I know I am human. But how do you? The words you’re reading right now could have been generated by a machine …
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Of all the ads I’ve shown, to the many hundreds of people I’ve worked with, none has consistently produced as profound and heartfelt an impact as this one from TV2 in Denmark …
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Thanks to wildlife documentaries like Planet Earth we’ve become accustomed to witnessing spectacular scenes of animal behaviour. A polar bear fighting a walrus, snow leopards hunting, even an iguana being chased by snakes. Yet of all the extraordinary scenes to have been filmed, perhaps none is as bizarre as this one …
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There’s a been a lot of talk about Elton John recently. Rocketman, the movie which tells the story of his colourful life, is receiving great reviews and the man himself is about to embark on another last ever tour. I’ve yet to see the film, but one thing which has always struck me as remarkable about Elton’s story is how, in the telling of it, Bernie Taupin rarely gets a mention …
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