It has been a very inspiring couple of days at Soho Create in London. It would be hard to sum up but I have to say that if I heard a reoccurring thing it was the inspiration of Punk and its DIY ethos. Apart from that – somewhat unpredictable – subject it really became a list of diverse insights and anecdotes from some very diverse people. There were also quite a few reference to a time before all sorts of digital influences – Google, Wacom, ProTools, Adobe and social media. It wasn’t really lamented – more celebrated and created some great analogies.
Running up Parliament Hill early this morning when a pack of runners doing a 10k ran the other way on the turf in “silence”. I say silence – their sound was actually incredible. About a hundred people not saying anything, feet hitting mud and grass, breathing in a sort of unison. It was only silence in a social sense. The actual experience of it was a sort of soft rythmic murmur.
A colleague asked me if there is anything I always do when I approach a project. Initially I really wasn’t sure what to say. After some thought the closest I could get to an answer was this: I am always looking for – and at – structure. Before any project begins you have to find its potential structure. That will allow you to build it… or reveal it.
Amazing illustration this week about the importance of the crop. The crop has seen a lot of changes over the past decade. The demands of working on multiple platforms and copy rich print pages has created a new kind of kind of frame that is often infinitely extendable. It’s a world away from Harold Evans “Pictures on a Page”. The subtleties are pretty much gone as we fit densely packed copy in and around the image that – generally – will not have been given much thought. On shoots I pretty much have explain that the crop is dead again and again.



