Ok, so i was sort of waiting for the podcast to come out in order to write this post, but in the end, i couldn't help it. As i was saying some time ago, Filter Design Competition was a perfect pretext to have some great designers come here and talk to our young designers. Happily, Ben Terrett was kind enough to accept our invitation, and, more than that, his colleague, Kingsley Gratrick (an adorable guy, whose name we kept on misspelling), also expressed his interest in coming here and helping us out.
Ben and Kingsley proved to me once again, in case this was necessary, that if you actually want to do something, one first step would be to simply try and ask. Just as they reminded me that failure is to be embraced, and that you have to be persistant if you really want to achieve something. Radu was talking the other days about the students who keep on complaining that agencies don't want them and about the people who always seem to think that luck is somewhat against them; well, Ben admitted that he applied for a job loads of times until actually getting one. Just like he admitted that they sometimes lose pitches because they didn't explain properly the reasoning behind their work.
The days spent with them were amazingly refreshing and inspiring - pretty much like Oricum, The Design Conspiracy started as the dream of some college friends to do cool stuff. To "create intrigue and provoke reaction", which is an aim anybody working in our industry should have, in my opinion. Brilliant, modest, funny, Kingsley and Ben didn't mind spending a lot of time with a bunch of kids, listening to us and trying to provide solutions or at least pieces of advice, coming from their experience. They were extremely open and helpful, and, apart from feedback for Filter finalists, as well as their conference which was filled with case studies and insights, they also agreed to record a very constructive podcast with us. As soon as we finish uploading it, you can hear them talking about The Design Conspiracy, their policies and projects, how it feels like to be a designer, how design is the new management consultancy. And we've also talked about hiring and firing people, how to manage the tension between being friends and colleagues, measuring efectiveness in design, sustainable design. And many other things, including Kingsley's musical career, planners, fonts, websites, the relationship between strategy and design.
All in all, we can hardly wait for them to come back here, and, as Cosmin said in some comment: "we miss them already". Thank you very much, guys !
5 comments:
It was a pleasure to be invited. The hospitality and enthusiasm of you guys is amazing.
Thanks again. Hopefully we'll see you in June?
thank you for coming; having you around was really charming !
and yes, we'll surely meet again in June :)
I really enjoyed reading about this exchange.
When you wrote, "failure is to be embraced" it reminded me of what I have often taught clients. I call it the doctrine of accelerated failure.
My idea is this; if success is simply the intelligent application of failure to the task at hand. Then we need to fail fast and often so that we can learn, change and achieve success.
Good to find your blog via a comment at Gavin's.w
mike, thank you for dropping by - i'm really glad you did.
i think it's great to be able to teach clients this doctrine of accelerated failure. most clients here freak out when hearing anything about failure - which is really frustrating, cause their total refusal of taking risks limits our possibilities very much, by preventing us from using trends, or setting trends.
finally diana wrote something on our encounter with the conspirationists.
I was waiting for this so I can write my own impressions [even if they aren't that fresh anymore]
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