A collection of notes and quotes written down in my notebook while at Interesting 2008.

Wandering in

“To thine own self be true”

Coffee

Singing along to ‘The Final Countdown’ with 349 other people and loving it
A chalkboard on the lid of a mac
Lego vignettes
Horses have a blind spot right in front of their nose
“I’m tired of authenticity, it’s time to start exploring possibilities”
“Not who we are but who we could be”
I’m a Creative Generalist
“It’s a rack of macs!”
“The way to be interesting is to be interested”
Place = security v. space = freedom

Tea and a wee (meeting the guys from www.rememble.com and the School of Everything)

An Aubrey Beardsley/Jimi Hendrix mash-up
“The smallest mask is the red nose”
The World of Warcraft would be 12 km in diameter and 500 x heavier than lead
“Enjoy them but spend them at your peril”
“Light is like a felt-tip on cheap paper”
In progress are the seeds of catastrophe and in catastrophe are the seeds of progess
Riffing on the scotch-egg format
On the web people become places
“Moral ambiguity is not required”
A hall of bunting, custard creams and tea
“Courage is what it takes to stand and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

Lunch

“Tending your lawn is the perfect way of claiming your new territory”
“I’m searching for the perfect funny word”
Who knew it would be possible to do a interesting talk on the subject of toilets?
“Gin - the most important technology of the 18th century”
“It sweeps as it beats as it cleans”
Stimming with melody and sound from this film-maker (sound)

Tea break

Making an awesome zoetrope out of a record-player
Mashematics
Hiraeth and putting people in the moment
“Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow”
Studied clumsiness in drawing
“We registered his domain name before registering his birth”

Perhaps I should call this bit of the website ‘Cat Watch’. But I couldn’t resist putting up this photo - I love the way that you can see the full shape of the lawn in this picture. I’m really pleased with the way the design turned out.

Sometimes you just have to draw.

There is nothing scarier than a big blank piece of paper. We sit in front of it waiting for judgement. I recently came across this website http://drawanyway.com that I thought was a wonderful exponent of the view that I have always held: anyone can draw.

“Oh but I can’t, I was no good as a child and after the accident with red crayon on the wall I was never allowed near unlined paper again!”

Sorry, heard it, many, many times and I hate the idea that the natural impulse you and others like you had as children; to pick up the nearest smudgy thing and smudge it over something else, got squished. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we demand that everyone learns how to write to a reasonable degree of competency, but we don’t use this standard where drawing is concerned. Apparently you are only supposed to draw if you are a child prodigy in the subject. It seems the lesson we learn in the west is that you should only pick up your pencils with a sense of purpose if you have at least a 50% chance of being a Leonardo.

Where writing is concerned, we accept that most of us will write enough to get through life and work, and that some of us will excel. There needs to be a paradigm shift in how we approach drawing and its place in our education and our lives. We need to approach it in a similar way to the way we teach writing.

I came across Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered, from which the title of this piece is taken, and gave it as presents to my whole family one Christmas (some draw, some don’t, no insult intended) and after I gave a few more to friends, I finally got one for myself. It teaches you how to smudge with impunity and if you have ever wanted to have a go at being the next Quentin Blake, this is the book for you. Liberating and fun, you can do bits of it in the loo if the crossword is being too taxing, and don’t worry about finding a pen because it comes with one and two pencils: black and red and they are both watercolour so that you can use a bit of spit to do fantastic cloud shapes.

If you really want to challenge your preconceptions about how rubbish you are, you might like to try Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. The one exercise I can remember is where she got a load of teenagers to copy a picture of a seated gentleman and then turned the original upside down and got them to try it again. The second attempts were much more accurate and the point is made, yet again, about drawing what you see, not what you think you see.

When I worked at Target Direct, I never drew, my creative partner, the art director did all the drawing. Then I became a consultant the first time round and suddenly I had to explain my ideas and concepts by myself. I have yet to meet another copywriter who does scamps of their concept work, which I think is a great shame because being able to explain ideas in both words and pictures makes it easier for the client to understand what you’re about without scaring them. Showing up with a gorgeous Mac-ed up version that may well have got the logo a little bit wrong could make them think that you have already spent half the budget, that they are too late to take part in the creative process, or they will be so hung up on the incorrect logo, they will miss the impact of the concept.

Sometimes you just have to draw. And you don’t have to be a Leonardo; you just have to be yourself.

Photo by S. Arrowsmith
The garden is just starting to wake up and I should get off my backside and go and do some weeding. I planted a pack of six Hellebore plants in Oct 06 and after a very long wait they have finally flowered!

It would appear that we have our very own garden Robin. Happy Christmas!

It’s all been very quiet in the garden this autumn. Some mulch got put down, mainly to stop the cats digging up the new bulbs that we put in. And as I write this I am wincing slightly because there are still some that need to go in the ground and are currently malingering in the kitchen by the back door. Every time I get determined, we have another frost and I abandon ideas of digging. It would appear that I find it all too easy to procrastinate. Fair weather gardener me.

When I moved to Cambridge I brought with me several plants in pots, including a pot of Japanese Anemones that hadn’t flowered for four years. Last November I took them out, divided them into three and planted them out. And this year they flowered their hats off!

This swiss chard, ‘rainbow lights’ didn’t get eaten when it grew bigger than salad leaf size. I discovered that growing pretty veg is no guarantee of taste. I imagined that something this beautiful would taste amazing. It didn’t, it has a very strong soapy flavour that isn’t to my taste. At least it looked splendid.

It is amazing what can happen in a few short weeks. The first picture was taken at the beginning of August, the stuff growing over the frame is a variety of runner bean called ‘Painted Lady’ which I chose to be decorative as well as edible. It was actually my third sowing of due to the slugs and snails helping themselves (see events in May), I’m afraid I resorted to slug pellets. The second picture was taken today. I have eaten a few and can report that they are delicious - sliced very finely, boiled for 5 mins and tossed with a little butter and black pepper.

This is the famous “View from 9th Avenue” by Saul Steinberg. It has been ripped off many times featuring other cities such as Paris or London to portray the closed off views that people are prone to. I am fascinated by paradigm shifts, the radical change of a person’s or a society’s views. Trying to make changes happen in order to get your message across can take massive effort and many years and yet the moment of change will take place almost in an instant – take the Fairtrade movement or women’s rights as examples.

I’m always trying to find ways to help people communicate in a way that will relate to another person’s point of view and I’ve recently started using “View from 9th Avenue” as a tool in communication workshops. It is excellent for helping people ‘walk in the other man’s shoes’ and it works surprisingly well for internal communications challenges as well as external ones. And it is a fun creative session, so great for running in the ‘graveyard slot’ when everyone is trying not to fall asleep after lunch.

So far I’ve found two applications – I’d be interested if anyone can see anymore.

Seeing someone else’s point of view.
If a team or a department are having a hard time making themselves understood, you can use this image to help them understand where the other party is coming from – and is really non-confrontational. Get people in pairs or groups to visualise themselves or their department as the little strip of land in the distance (the bit marked China/Japan/Russia), and draw it on a piece of flip chart paper. They then have to draw the picture from the other person’s point of view. What would be the oceans? What would be the landmarks? What are the things closest in view? Get the groups to present back to each other and then bring people together in a larger group and invite suggestions and ideas about how to reframe their approach. Most often the ideas will be about highlighting in communications – how departmental requests will ultimately solve a problem for the person being asked, or make their job easier.

Getting rid of the obstacle.
The way it works is to get people in pairs or groups to draw their own work landscapes with the end objective visualised as the little strip of land in the distance, they then ‘back-fill’ by drawing all the stuff that stops them seeing the objective clearly. There is usually a lot of energy at this point because everyone will be enjoying the moan about problems – it’s a good way of getting this out of people’s systems in a controlled way. The solution is then for people to draw a road to the objective that successfully navigates the obstacles. Of course if this is a session that turns up real monster blocks, then you can design the workshop to have breakout sessions at this point and give a challenge to each group to work on.

In my talk I mentioned the way that we can so often fall into cliche and clutter, and lose the opportunity to be powerful with our messaging in the course of our work as communicators. The difference between getting a message across and not is usually found in the murky area between merely illustrating with words and pictures and the space between two almost dissonant elements that put together say so much more.

If for example I use the words ‘unlocking potential’ and illustrate it with the picture of a key in a lock, I would then have to provide much more description in order to provide context and deliver a message. It is cliche and almost useless as a communication device. Alternatively if I place the words ‘unlocking potential’ next to the picture of a girl at a blackboard in a classroom in Africa, immediately you start receiving a message about the importance of education for the development of children. Add the relevant logo and the message is further clarified.

The next challenge to overcome is clutter. The danger of implicit messaging within an organisation is that many people inside the organisation are over-familiar with the subject matter and can become blind to powerful subtleties. Falling back on being explicit seems like the obvious thing to do. Being explicit is not a bad thing in of itself, in many situations it can be the best technique, but the danger is that the communications piece will not just attract one explicit message but many, and as soon as clarity is lost, you may as well abandon it for all the good it will do. It has ceased to be effective. I was delighted to discover a spoof video that Microsoft produced to explain this particular problem by ‘redesigning’ the ipod packaging. While I giggled at the various points highlighted, inside I felt not a little chagrin at 12 years of having had the same conversations with various clients and directors - my career flashed before me in those 3 mins.

I’m not normally one for quoting ad gurus but in the words of Leo Burnett:
‘I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.’

You will have to make do with a picture of our cat Parsley instead, because the slugs and snails have eaten 80% of the seedlings. Given that I’d stumped up £25 for Suttons seeds, and spent hours getting soil just right, gastropods are not my friends. They never were, but now I have a grudge. There will have to be a re-sowing and I have given in and bought slug pellets because brutes have just started on the Sweet Peas.

I have consoled myself by persuading my other half to buy me some pots of Cosmos. Pink and white. Very sweet.

Some how we had to persuade agencies to return a pitch for a full media campaign in two weeks and we had to get something that was ready to use. After the pitch we would be in production time for a full media launch, there would be no time to refine. This was a tall order — time to chuck the rule book out.

After refining the strategy with the Fundraising Director I sent the brief out with the offer that Oxfam’s Creative Director (me) would spend as much time with them as they wanted during the development process. This raised eyebrows and hopes in turn. Unsurprisingly several of the invited agencies said that there was no way they could deliver in two weeks but three said yes and that was the end of my life for the next three months. Two of the agencies really took advantage of my presence during the two week process as I spent time with them helping them to understand the brand and going through initial ideas with them. I also spent time with the Oxfam Directors who were on the pitch board, coaching them on how to be positive and maximise the pitch as a growing ideas session rather than as a judgement session. I was worried that we wouldn’t have a pret-a-porter and I needed them to see potential in anything we saw on pitch day. As it turned out, the coaching wasn’t needed because there were two excellent campaigns ready to buy and we went with I’m In.

Having been on pitches on both sides, I don’t think I will hesitate to chuck out the rule book again, I think there are more than a few agencies and organisations that might be ready to do the same. Trust and transparity. Very very important.

Coaching
Train staff to be inspiring in writing and face to face
Introduce and nurture an ideas culture with brainstorms and philosophy
Deliver a motivational presentation or workshop
Review ways of working to improve communication
Run a creative away-day for your team
Help make your presentations and pitches really powerful (coaching/writing)

Commissioning
Project manage a marketing campaign
Set up an internal agency or comms team
Appoint a new communications agency or reinvigorate an existing relationship
Commission your brochures and website
Liaising with designers, photographers and printers