PODCAST: MARY WEAR

‘Remember how seriously we all took it? Not that we took ourselves seriously or that we didn’t have fun, but we just tried so, so hard to make great work. It may be chip paper to most people, but we’d really sweated every last detail. Even on the bad ads, we’d stay lat trying desperately to improve them. Like we were on a mission. It seemed so important.’ I enjoyed chatting to Mary. Although afterwards, I must confess, I wasRead more

Hands Up Who’s Heard Of MAD DOGS & ENGLISHMEN?

Remember Alessandro Volta? Douglas Engelbart? What about Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis? Thought not. Even if I asked who invented electric light, the computer mouse and social media, those names are still unlikely to come up. More likely, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg will spring to mind. They didn’t invent those ideas, they either stole from those guys or ‘built on their thinking’.But although now virtually forgotten, their work was crucial, take away their thinking would be likeRead more

PODCAST: Dave Waters.

Starting out as a creative is tough. Most days are divided into two parts, first you squeeze out as many ideas as you possibly can, second you try not to give up when your creative director tells you they are all crap. Occasionally you may get a ‘nice’, that will keep you going until maybe two months later when you may get a ‘cool’, even an ‘ok’ buoy the spirits. Encouragement is crucial. The first person of any note to say nice aboutRead more

IN-CAMERA 3: John Claridge.

I did this ad for free. My theory was; get freelance work, do it free in exchange for a free hand. I thought it would allow me to get together better work than I could in my day job. At the time asking John Claridge to shoot your layout was like asking Jay Z to write your jingle. The chances are he’s going to say no, but if he said yes, you’d almost certainly have a good ad. He said yes. The result wasRead more

TURNING STORIES INTO ADS: LWT. By Dave Trott & Paul Grubb.

I’ve written previous posts on ‘turning stories into ads’, The Guardian, the BBC’s Panorama and GQ. I wrote them because it struck me that although the brands were very different, what they wanted was exactly the same; An appropriate visual style to hold ideas about any subject under the sun. Take The Guardian, the ads I worked on ranged from the trial of mass murderer Fred West to the fact that footballer Jurgen Klinsmann couldn’t stay upright if their was another footballer within a circumferenceRead more