/

I’ve spoken about being a modern hermit before, so it will come as no surprise that I’m a big believer in the power of doing things on your own.

 

I’m an only child so I never really understood the fear of doing things on your own, or having to sit and amuse yourself. I have always just done what I wanted to, whether someone wanted to come with me or not.

 

I travelled all over Europe on my own when I was 18. I’ve been taking myself on solo cinema trips since I was 13. I’ve walked, and bus-ed, and train-ed, to anywhere I wanted to go. I’ve gone to gigs, eaten dinner, and danced all by myself, without a second thought.

 

I never thought doing any of those things was strange until people started questioning me on it.

 

Why aren’t you going with a friend? Isn’t your boyfriend going with you? Aren’t you scared? Aren’t you lonely? Oh, I would never do that on my own.

 

Those comments have come in waves throughout my life. But I hit a peak quite recently when I took myself on my second solo long weekend of the year to Bath.

 

So I wanted to say that it’s not weird to do things on your own.

 

It is weird to constantly need company. I know I’m an introvert and I’m inclined to like my own time. But even if you’re an extrovert and draw on the energy of having other people around, you need to know how to be on your own.

 

You need to get to know yourself, to feel that slight discomfort when you walk into a restaurant solo and sit in it. Just sit in that feeling. Lean into it, for want of a better phrase. It will pass. Then, beyond that discomfort, you’ll find another little bit of yourself.

 

When I take time with myself, when I’m not working or distracting myself, I often have to face things I’ve been ignoring. That’s not always a fun conversation to have, my demons aren’t always kind. But I do come out of those conversations stronger, wiser, and more sure of myself.

 

Doing things on my own makes me better aware of who I am with other people and how to do more with them.

 

Time alone isn’t weird it’s necessary. Take yourself on a date, you might just find someone you can love.

/

September is potentially my favourite month of the year. It’s my birthday month. It’s back to school season. It’s just starting to be sweater weather. What’s not to like?

This September has also been filled with some great content, so here are my favourite picks.

 

stop watch illustration

SHORT READS, IF YOU’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES:

Kaye Blegvad on the making of Dog Years, her book about surviving depression

I’m a huge Kaye Blegvad fan. I’m always wearing at least 4 things designed by her, honestly. So as you might imagine I absolutely loved getting to read about her book, Dog Years, which began life as a presentation, before being published as a visual essay on Buzzfeed, and is now in print, via her own hard work and a Kickstarter project, which raised fives times its initial goal, (NBD). Thanks It’s Nice That!

A Right-Size Dream

I have to admit something to you all today. I’ve never read a Moomin comic. But after reading this wonderful piece on its creator Tove Jansson and her desire for a quiet life in The Paris Review, I think I’m going to have to.

A Visual History of the Creation of Disneyland

I’ve never been to Disneyland but that doesn’t mean I’m not more than a little bit interested in the magic it has created for so many people. This visual essay shows how Disney’s ambitious vision was brought to life by his team of “Imagineers”. The images include some wonderful initial sketches and the quotes are from Disney himself.

Is social media influencing book cover design?
You already know I’m a big fan of book cover design. But with ‘bookstagramming’ becoming a force in marketing, are designers making covers more colourful, bolder and cleaner, to stand out on our screens?

Happy Birthday, Minifig! Lego’s Tiny Plastic People Turn 40

The lego minifigure just turned 40! Lego was my greatest joy (next to digging holes and reading) as a child and I’m so glad I still get to play with it as part of my job – seriously. This piece from Wired includes some wonderful images, and a video from Lego themselves, documenting the development of our favourite yellow characters.

Google image search is now a design tool

“Picular is a new color search tool that lets you enter any search term and presents you with a slew of options, basing all of its color choices on what pops up first in Google image search. It’s a color-picker, courtesy of internet hive mind.”

 

Dentures illustration

LONG READS, IF YOU WANT SOMETHING TO GET YOUR TEETH STUCK INTO:

Meet the Literary Design Studio Bringing Classic Literature to New Technology

I don’t read as much as I’d like to anymore. But I still love books (I studied literature at Uni!). I still love stories. I certainly still love thinking about how they come together. So this interview with digital bookmakers Plympton’s CEO, Jennifer 8. Lee, and her co-founder, Yael Goldstein Love about crowdsourcing creatives, whether they fear (or are causing) the death of print, and how they’re bringing classic literature to the brink of new technology, was right up my street. How do you think we will be reading in 10 years?

Braille for a New Digital Age

At work (day job work) I’m a bit of a broken record when it comes to putting accessibility at the heart of everything we design, test, and create. Kristina Tsvetanova’s Bitlab and their new form of braille is an incredibly exciting piece of design. It opens up the web, because “With this tool, the blind can surf the net, connect with friends and download books, like everyone else[.]”

Lessons from Voltaire on Finding Purpose in Life

If you’re feeling a little bit philosophical or just looking for some food for thought, this Medium article is the one for you. I’m in a bit of a “what do I want to do?” rut at the minute and this was a wonderful salve.

Home is where the art is: what Paula Rego, Lubaina Himid and other artists hang on their walls

“Who are the painters’ painters, the sculptors’ sculptors? Five artists tell us about the works that adorn their personal spaces by Tim Adams. Interviews by and Killian Fox”

WHO TO FOLLOW, IF YOU WANT TO SPRUCE UP YOUR INSTAGRAM FEED:

@g.r_julia

Julia G.R’s ladies all have an awkward kind of sadness that I really identify with, which is probably why I’ve been really loving her watercolour illustrations recently. But I also love how she maintains her style whether she’s working in black and white, monochrome or using all the colours under the sun. Plus she’s another one of these clever people who create Instagram grids.

@sophyhollington

I started getting into tarot a few months ago, and my fascination with it has only grown and grown. Sophy Hollington’s Autonomic Tarot deck is absolutely stunning and very high on my wishlist – is it too late to buy myself a birthday present? I wanted to share her work as my Sunday social favourite because it’s just so distinctive and so different to a lot of what I’m seeing at the minute.

/

Today I want to talk about something a little different. In fact, it isn’t a thing at all. It’s a way of thinking, a mindset if you will.

 

I’ve spent a lot of introspective time recently evaluating how I approach the world and why. The big conclusion of that time has been realising that I need to shift into what I’m calling a making mindset. It’s not something new, or revolutionary, I think it’s pretty similar to the idea of a growth mindset, but it is a big shift in how I work.

 

To give you some background as to how I think now, we have to step back into my childhood. Don’t worry this isn’t going to become too much of a therapy session.

 

I was labelled a ‘smart’ or ‘gifted’ kid at school – I’m not sure I actually ever was but it was what it was. That was pretty much the extent of my identity. I was expected to do well. If I raised my hand and gave a wrong answer I was genuinely laughed at and lost myself in a shame spiral. So, not hitting those academic targets first time wasn’t an option.

 

The work I was given before I went to uni never challenged me too much. I worked hard, but I didn’t have to.

 

So when I got to university and it was so much harder, and I was so much of a smaller fish, I had no coping methods. When I wasn’t instantly good at something my first instinct was to bail to protect myself from the potential shame and embarrassment. I was focused on an outcome because I’d never really had to learn how to learn.

 

That focus on an end goal rather than the doing and the learning has been central to how I’ve approached things right up until recently.

Now I want to pay close attention to what I’m doing not what I’m going to produce at the end of it all. That extends from this blog to my illustration, right the way into my proper job.

 

I spend the most of my time making the thing, rather than with the finished product, so doesn’t it make sense to make sure I’m enjoying that making. Plus, I know that if I focus on the process, on my own skills, on the making, that’s how I’m actually going to make better work.

 

That’s part of the reason I’ve pledged, to myself, to take on the rejection letters project. I’m going to focus on making and putting myself out there. In the process, I’m going to open myself up to rejection, I’m going to wear that failure like a badge of honour, to try to shake off some of the fear that’s held me back from just making the thing in the past.

 

I hope you can join me in the making mindset. Let’s just learn for the sake of learning, make for the sake of making.

/

Most of the design stories I share with you here begin with a clever person trying to solve a problem. Perhaps they want to satiate a young child’s impatience, help people cross the road, or just ensure workers trousers stay up, but they all have a purpose. That’s what design is right?

 

design (verb), as a discipline: plan the creation of a product or service with the intention of improving human experience with respect to a specified problem.

 

Today’s design story doesn’t start with a purpose, instead, it starts with play. An automotive engineer named George Carwadine lost his job when his company, the Hortsman Car Company, went bankrupt in 1931. Flush with time to himself, Carwadine did what any self-respecting tinkerer would do; he set up a workshop in his garden shed. For him, this career break was the perfect opportunity to play around with the theory of ‘constant tension’, balancing weights using springs, cranks and levers.

 

He had no purpose for his tinkering, he just wanted to see what he could make. What he made was a “supported and balanced by a sequence of springs, cams, levers and weights, [which] could be constantly repositioned”. This became the basis for the arm of a lamp, which could focus light in specific directions, yet remained perfectly balanced and stayed in the pose in which it was set.

 

“Soon after his discovery, Carwardine struck up a fruitful partnership with spring manufacturers Herbert Terry & Sons.” They worked together to develop the lamp. Their first port of call was to the Patent Office to protect their design. Carwadine wanted to call their lamp the ‘Equipoise’. But their application was rejected. Equipoise already existed. So with a bit of teamwork, Carwadine and Terry came up with Anglepoise.

“The first version of the Anglepoise lamp, the 1208, was produced by Herbert Terry & Sons in 1934 with four springs.”

 

This lamp was mainly intended for use as part of the war effort.

 

It was sold as a blackout companion. The Anglepoise’s closed shade and ability to direct light meant it could offer illumination without drawing wider attention. Plus it was compatible with low-voltage bulbs meaning it used very little energy. This idea of direct, low-voltage light was quickly adapted for bomber aircraft. One such lamp was found at the bottom of loch ness over 50 years later. With a new battery, it still worked. So I think we can safely add hard wearing to the list of the Anglepoise’s credits.

 

Due to the lamp’s popularity during the war, there was an appetite for a more domestic version. But there were two snags, the lamp was too large for homes and there was a fear that ladies’ hair would get caught in the springs. So, Carwadine and Terry simplified. They turned their four spring creation into a smaller 3 spring lamp. This was the 1227. That lamp is still being sold today. Most recently Paul Smith and Margaret Howell have added their own colourful spins on the design. But those 3 springs have remained the same.

But perhaps the Anglepoise’s greatest shining moment (humour me) was its personification in the two-minute film, Luxo Jr. Before Pixar was Pixar, they needed a way to show off their tech. So John Lasseter turned to what he could see on his desk,  a Luxo-branded Anglepoise lamp:

 

“I started working on doing lamps. I modelled one Luxo lamp, and then a friend of mine came over with his baby. And then I went back to working on the lamp and wondered what the lamp would look like as a baby. I scaled different parts of it down: the springs are the same diameter, but they’re much shorter. The same with the rods. The shade is small but the bulb is the same size. The reason the bulb is the same size is because that’s something you buy at the hardware store; it doesn’t grow.”

 

The film that came out of that experiment, just like the lamp that inspired it has lived on. Those 13 seconds at the start of a Pixar movie are some of the most joyous you can spend at a cinema.

 

A life-saving light source, a design legacy, and immortalisation in film, perhaps tinkering away in your shed isn’t all that unproductive after all.

/

I’ve recently got into a bit of a rut with my reading, after picking up a few longer reads I struggled to get into. So, when I had Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, a short bright yellow oddball novel, recommended to me at least 3 times by The New York Times I had high hopes that it would be the remedy. I raced through it’s 163 pages in two hungry sittings so you could say it did the trick.

 

Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Convenience Store Woman is Sayaka Murata’s debut English-language novel. Despite being one of the most exciting voices in fiction at the minute, Murata still works part time in a convenience store, which was where she found her inspiration for her latest novel.

 

The story follows a self-defined peculiar woman named Keiko as she struggles to learn how to fit in. The core of her attempts to conform is a convenience store, the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, where she’s worked for 18 years. She develops a deep, and almost romantic, relationship with the store which has given her life structure. But pressures from her friends and family push her to reconsider that relationship.

This is my alternative cover design for Convenience Store Woman, it’s a new more illustrated take on that bright yellow background.

Convenience Store Woman is certainly not a thriller but it’s surprisingly difficult to put down. Every small twist has you wanting to know more and Murata/Takemori’s prose has a real rhythm to it. It’s also absurdly deadpan funny. While the narrative bobs and weaves, Keiko’s narration stay ramrod straight and stuck to her tone. So you’re left with a story that’s at once unflinchingly unemotional and self-aware, and has the off-beat charm of an Amelie or Shopgirl.

 

Instead of my normal “I’d recommend this book if…” conclusion, I’ll just leave you with this review so you can decide for yourself:

 

“A slim, spare and difficult-to-define little book, both very funny and achingly sad in turns, told from the point of view of a woman who’s trying to find her place in the world . . . This empathetic novel is also a touching exploration of loneliness and alienation, feelings and conditions that, for better or for worse, can be recognized by people worldwide.”—Book Reporter

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ

  • Keiko picks up characteristics from those around her very directly. Have you ever picked up behaviours from those around you? Did you know you were doing it?
  • If Keiko doesn’t see herself as having a stable personality, does she have a stable narrating voice?
  • There’s a lot discussion in the novel about societal structures and expectations, to what extent do you feel these are real or perceived by the characters?
  • Convenience Store Woman might takes the idea of being defined by your work to an extreme, have you ever felt defined by your job? How?

 

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

 

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…