A Tale of Two Cakes

November 8, 2009

This weekend we celebrated the 50th wedding anniversary of my husband’s parents. In the scale of people I know, my in-laws rank amongst the most interesting, most intelligent, and most accomplished. In the scale of marriages I know, anybody who makes fifty years deserves a party. So party we did. All of my husband’s living [...]

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Shortlist

October 21, 2009

Now, I may have railed against free pitching in the past, but that doesn’t mean I’m against all types of pro bono work. We’ve been shortlisted for the DBA Helen Hamlyn Inclusive Design Challenge! Very exciting. I had the privilege of working with Stuart May at PDD, who designed a fabulous concept for the challenge back [...]

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Rethinking Agency Relationships – Part II

October 5, 2009

Ok – so we covered the hygiene factors. Now, we get a bit more primal: fear, discontent, and hope. Fear Fear can be a force for good or evil – driving you to action or freezing you in place. Assuming the work that you are delegating is relatively complicated and important, passing it out of [...]

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Rethinking Agency Relationships – The Easy Part

September 26, 2009

I know, there must be at least five million and thirteen lists like this* floating around the Internet. However, I figure that in a 16-year career, I’ve managed to spend twelve of those “client side” AND twelve of those “agency side,” so I probably have a unique perspective. (And yes, some days it does feel [...]

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Fanning the flames

September 20, 2009

The past months have been that horrible combination of crushingly busy, yet mind-numbingly boring. Like shovelling coal with data until somebody finally blows the whistle and releases you from the misery, just to return the next morning for more of the same. The complexity of some of the work we do demands this rigour, but [...]

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Why do we give our work away?

August 17, 2009

So, today’s email from Design Week included news that Transport for London is running a design competition, to update their textiles. Just the latest in a long run of competitions and “kick-start” funded initiatives from London, the Design Council, and assorted government authorities. High profile, exciting work, but with “awards” that bear absolutely no resemblance [...]

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IDEA 2009 Awards

August 5, 2009

The 2009 International Design Excellence Awards winners are now live on Business Week. No nail biting this year, as our agency is too young to have anything we can take public yet. I love product design, but hate the LONG lead times into production. Only a few of the 151 winners caught my eye this [...]

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Like bees to honey

August 2, 2009

When I bake, I usually focus on perfecting the way it tastes, rather than the way it looks. I may be a bit crazy when it comes to cakes, but I’m definitely not one of those sugarcraft fanatics making sculptures out of marzipan. Once a year, I do challenge myself to stretch out of that [...]

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The means not the end

July 30, 2009

In a nice segue from my last post, Stephen Bayley writes in today’s Times about the questions raised by VW’s takeover of Porsche: Here was not so much the completion of an operatic ritual of humiliation and subjugation but astonishing evidence of the ultimate in intellectual property development. This is of interest not just to [...]

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Brand? Product? Product? Brand?

July 28, 2009

The Business Week Innovation site has posted 5 questions with James Dyson. I have to admit I didn’t make it past the first 2 minutes, because I had to stop short at this quote (slightly paraphrased): “I never use the world ‘brand.’ I don’t think we have a brand. We have products.” On the one [...]

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