In 1962 a group of designers and art directors, which included David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Alan Fletcher, founded British Design & Art Direction to: “celebrate creative communication and raise standards within their industry”. Now called the D&AD, and with the ambition: “to inform, educate and inspire those who work in and around the creative industries,” every year they host an event called New Blood, showcasing the best graduate talent of the year.
I was very lucky to be invited to the private view at the end of June, and spotted one young man’s work in particular, that I just had to share with you, albeit a little while after the event.
Ask anybody for advice on how to be creative and among their top tips is sure to be “make mistakes.” It’s how we learn, but more importantly, it’s often how we make the unexpected connections that can lead to something new and brilliant. But we’re taught from an early age to do just the opposite. Mistakes are something to be hidden, ashamed of, corrected. So how do we undo that programming and free ourselves to mess things up a bit?
Realising how important mistakes are to the creative process, Simon Cheadle has invented a series of drawing tools to help us do just that. He has reinterpreted things like rulers, lined paper, and set squares to celebrate imperfections and challenge the idea that perfect is best.
Make Mistakes is an ongoing interactive project, so you can download a selection of your own tools from his website and send him the results of your experimentations, to be published on his website.
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- out and about :: 2 willow road
- out and about :: pulse
- out and about :: clerkenwell design week
- out and about :: paris flea markets
