I’m awful at taking photographs. Awful.

 

I’m technically not very good but I’m even worse at remembering to take out my camera and click the button or to just snap something with my phone. I’m perhaps the worst when it comes to getting any photographs of myself. Whenever I need one, I’m still digging out an accidental snap a friend took 4 years ago – I’m not sure there’s one more recent where I’m not gurning.

 

I’ve made many attempts to try to shake this weird relationship with cameras, because I’d desperately like to have more moments documented. I’d love to have images I can thumb through when nostalgia strikes, when I want inspiration or just when I want a more personal reference to draw from. I know it can be done. I’ve watched longingly as friends have completed photo or video a day challenges, infinitely impressed at their follow through.

 

I’ve tried to set myself similar challenges in order to force myself to get better. But I’ve fallen short every time.

 

I think there are two reasons, I can’t bring myself to do a daily challenge. First, I live a pretty routined life and every day challenges like taking a photo everyday can be a bit of an uncomfortable reminder of how similar the things I see every day are. Second, I’m embarrassed to take photos, particularly in public and even more so with people in. This is before we get into any of the psychology of why I’m personally so camera shy.

 

So, instead of setting myself a challenge I knew I was going to fail at again this year. I wanted to try to tackle one of those underlying reasons. Rather than trying to take on my quotidien existence all at once, I’ve been working towards getting more comfortable behind the camera.

 

At the start of this year, I bought a super cheap film camera and a load of film which I promised myself I would finish within the year. I didn’t have to use it every day but I did have to get through it.

I didn’t need to buy a camera to start taking photos, especially when the ones my phone takes without even trying are probably better quality. But it was a little bit of encouragement. It was also a challenge, something I could learn. Having a new camera to figure out made it a project about that rather than the photos. Working on film also meant I didn’t have instant feedback, I had to get to then end of the roll before I could see the pictures and I couldn’t pick them apart.

 

Plus, it didn’t hurt that my favourite photos (family and otherwise) have usually been shot on film.

 

So, I loaded up the film and headed out. I’ve tried to take my camera on walks and adventures when I know I might see something nice, or want to take a moment with me for the future. I’ve also set out on trips with the purpose of taking photos, which has led to a few adventures in itself. I finally got out to Barbican Conservatory after 3 years in London.

 

When I’ve been with other people I’ve made clear that I’m doing a project and taking photos. No one has batted an eye, they probably wouldn’t have cared either way. Doing it for the ‘gram has become pretty standard. But declaring it as a project, just like saying you have a personal policy to set a boundary, has given it the legitimacy I needed in my mind.

Most of the pictures I’ve taken have been pretty bad, but it’s been nice to be a beginner. I’ve had images to thumb through and turn into new art, just like I wanted. Sure it’s been frustrating when half a roll turns out hinkey (protip: don’t go to a Kodak express to get your film developed) but I’m trying to get comfortable with the messy bits of the process as well as just holding the camera.

 

But the images I’m not happy with have taught me how to use the camera better – be slower (probably good life advice generally) and focus on things a little further away. I’m also trying to rework them into new pieces of art, so all is not lost.

 

I’m still not comfortable taking photos of other people or being in photos, but I’m working on it.

But I wanted to share this little bit of progress to talk about tackling things in baby steps and the freedom that comes from accepting you’re probably a bit shit at something before you start.

 

Experiment and turn being bad into part of the project.

My alarm clock is my biggest nemesis. I am not a morning person. Every awakening is a rude awakening, but the shrill ringing of my alarm is the rudest. It’s mean and it’s loud and it’s my least favourite sound. But I thought I could use the power of the design story to face my enemy and hopefully learn to appreciate it a little more.

There was a time before the alarm clocks we know and hate. In that magical land that time forgot (not the one with adorable dinosaurs), most people didn’t just sleep all day. So how did they do it?

You could argue that our ancestors were just better in tune with their own bodies and the rhythms of nature. With limited artificial light and being subjected more keenly to the change in temperatures through the day, they went to sleep when the day got dark and rose again when the light did. In nature, animals rely on their circadian rhythms and they get by just fine.

But never to settle with what our mama (nature) gave us, from very early on people have tried to find ways to mark time and set alarms.

One of my favourite pseudo alarm clocks comes from China in the form of candle clocks. These had the benefit of working night or day, unlike sundials. Candles were marked with even gradations. When the candle burned down, each marking would then represent a unit of time. At their chosen marking they would insert nails into the candle. Then when the candle had melted enough the nails would fall from the candle, no longer held in by wax, and create a sound as they fell into the metal tray below.

In 1319, the first chiming of the first church bells was recorded. These acted, essentially, as giant communal alarm clocks, with regular chiming on the hour every hour. Depending on where you were you even got some ringtones as fancy as anything your iPhone will produce thanks to the artists stylings of skilled campanologists.

Leaving behind China’s ingenuity and the artistry of campanology we turn to Britain in the 1800s, where the upper classes quickly came to the realisation – why invent something when you can just pay someone to do to a job for you? Thus, the occupation of knocker-upper was created. Using everything from pea-shooters, to truncheons, to just a good old-fashioned rap on the door, knocker uppers when around the houses of their clients knocking to wake them up. So they were exactly what their name suggests. As the working classes in cities expanded so did the work of knocker uppers. In fact, they were still knocking as late as 1970.

Perhaps that’s because the first mass-produced personal alarm clock didn’t enter the market until the 1870s. If you ask someone on the street to draw you an alarm clock they’re likely to draw you a round face with a bell either side and two little feet. I actually still rely on pretty much exactly this kind of clock – the one you can see below! This clock was originally manufactured in a hand wound form by the Seth E. Thomas Clock Company. But it rose to fame after Thomas’s death in 1859 some time closer to 1900 in the hands of the Wesclox Company. The Westclox alarm had “a mainspring for the time-mechanism, and a bell-spring, for the alarm. They also featured a dial at the top for the user to set the alarm to ring at whatever time they chose. These clocks ran on 36-hour springs, and had to be wound each morning (or evening). The bell-springs generally had to be wound up every two or three days, depending on how deep the sleeper happened to be!

We wouldn’t have the annoying beep-beep beep-beep of the digital alarm clock without the invention of the electrical doorbell in 1831. Joseph Henry’s decision to use a tightly coiled electromagnet to make a high-pitched noise, would change the sound of mornings as well as unexpected guests forever. Well, at least it would in just over 6- years later when Austrian Josef Pallweber got his hands on the buzzer and made it a part of his clocks.

But it seems that many of us have replaced the single use alarm clock with, you guessed it, our smartphones. In a survey by O2, in 2012, 54% of their customers had replaced an alarm clock with their phone. Despite a number of studies telling us not to, telling us not to have our phones be the first thing we see, I would bet that number has increased in the 7 years since that study.

But, whatever form your alarm takes, the elephant in the room of alarm clock we’ve not discussed is why we need them. I hear you saying so that we wake up on time. I hear it, and I raise it another why. Back in the days of relying on church bells and calling cockerels people got up early to make the most of the day light and in many places because morning prayers were seen as particularly spiritual. Then our good friend the industrial revolution came along closely followed by its BFF the 9-5. So instead of following our own circadian rhythms we had a set time we needed to be awake. It was precise. It was mechanical. It was just like our alarm clocks.

I’m not sure I’ll ever love my alarm clock, but I am glad I don’t have to rely on a burning and candles to help me get to work on time. That said I don’t think I’d be hitting snooze quite as often if I had to pay a stranger to knock on my door every morning. I’m just going to stick with my trusty Newgate for now though.

I loved playing with Lego as a child, and I’ve somehow found a job where I get to play with Lego for work, so I still love playing with it. I’m clearly not the only one who thinks it’s great The Inventors Workshop quizzed 2,000 toy industry experts on their top toy of all time, and LEGO came out on top. So how did Lego come to reign supreme?

 

Lego has always been a family business. In the early 1920s Ole Kirk Christiansen, and his 12 year old son Godtfred, made wooden stepladders and ironing boards. They worked out of a small shop in Billund Denmark. Business was going well until, in 1924, “his sons accidentally set a pile of wood chips in the shop on fire”. The fire destroyed not only their workshop, but their home as well.

 

And so began the disastrous history of the Kirk Christiansen family. Ole didn’t see the fire as a set back though, he took it as an opportunity to create a bigger, better workshop. Once again he grew his business.

But the Great Depression and the loss of Ole’s wife pushed the company into layoffs and closures. Once again faced by adversity, rather than give up Ole decided to double down on the work he loved best building toys with his sons. The gamble didn’t pay off immediately. But Ole’s dedication and refusal to cut corners pulled the Kirk Christiansens through once again. In 1934, the business took the name of LEGO, which came from the Danish words “LEg GOdt,” meaning “play well.”

 

Another disastrous fire in 1942 led to the creation of the Lego we all know, love, and have felt the pain of stepping on today. Having to rebuild his factory from the ground up, Ole invested in Denmark’s first plastic-injection molding machine. He wasn’t able to use it commercially until after the war induced materials shortage in 1947. But he’d had plenty of time to play, so in 1949 Lego released what they called their “Automatic Binding Brick”.

 

The bricks were inspired by a similar design by British company Kiddicraft. But Ole’s son, as his father’s health declined, took the brick one step further. He turned a simple block into a system of play. Every block they created, he realised, should fit with the next, creating infinite possibilities of play. He wanted to unlock the potential for play in children, giving them the opportunity to build and rebuild just as Lego itself had.

 

Unfortunately Ole died just before that dream was realised in 1952. But his legacy carried on thanks to his son’s ingenuity. In fact, “any LEGO block produced since 1955 can interlock with any other.

Disasters have also led to some of Lego’s greatest recent achievements. Near financial ruin led to one of my favourites, because it means I get to play with Lego at work. “The idea of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology originated in 1996 when the two professors Johan Roos and Bart Victor at IMD in Switzerland and LEGO Group CEO and owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen were exploring alternative strategic planning tools and systems.” Essentially they realised that Lego was so universal, that it created a safe language to help people communicate and work together. So, today you have businessmen in identical grey suits playing with Lego and talking about their models in order to start conversations on topics that are hard to broach without something to fiddle with. Where in traditional design workshops conversations can be anchored by the most eloquent person in the room, or the one who can draw the best prototype, everyone can build with Lego and everyone can build together with Lego.

 

Lego may be the the best toy of all time, but it got there through overcoming failures. If there’s a moral to this design story is that in the face of adversity you have to keep going, or rather you have to keep playing as well as you can.

When I was looking for inspiration for another design story, I tipped out the contents of the font pocket of my bag, where many treasures can be found. One of the many things that poured out was my emergency safety pin, and I realised I had no idea how something I’ve turned to in moments of clothing strife and was so common in my childhood as the daughter of a frequent fun-runner came to be.

 

People have been using pins to hold their clothes in place for centuries. In Homer’s Odyssey there’s a wonderful description of Odysseus wearing a pin which holds great symbolic value within the text:

Odysseus wore a woolen purple cloak,

a two-fold one, and in it was a pin of gold,

with double grooves, and on the front was a marvelous design”  (Odyssey 19.225–227)

These pins had great significance as both a marker of social status and spiritual connection. While changes in fashion may have made the pin less useful in the mediterranean as the years moved on, by the time ancient Rome was flourishing so was the humble clothing pin. These pins were known as fibulae and came in a number of pieces: the body, the pin, the spring and the hinge. The body of the fibulae was typically made of bronze, but just like Odysseus’s pin they were often made of finer metals and adorned with jewels as decoration.

 

Those ancient pins are absolutely wonderful to look at, they were always some of my favourite objects to spend time with at the Ashmolean. But they’re quite a step away from the humble safety pin. For that simple single wire design we need to turn to New York in 1849.

There we find Walter Hunt. Walter Hunt was a masterful inventor, he has several patents to his name including the sewing machine, the ice plough, a forerunner of the winchester repeating rifle and the street car bell amongst many more, including our beloved safety pin. But Walter wasn’t a great business man. In 1849 he owed a peer $15 (about $500 in today’s money) and he head debt collectors knocking at his door. So, Walter turned to his natural talent for invention and started playing with the only material he had to hand, a piece of wire. He turned that piece of wire into a shape which could safely clasp. He quickly patented his idea and sold that patent to W.R. Grace for what seemed to be a great sum at $400 (about $13,000 today), which was more than enough to pay off his debt.

 

W.R. Grace were able to turn that $400 investment in Walter’s idea into millions once they started manufacturing the “dress pin” as it was then known. This was just one example in a long string of many where Walter didn’t quite get to reap the rewards of his work.

 

It took a little while for the safety pin to become the ubiquitous clasp we all know and love. In 1870s another group of inventors added the safety guard to protect the users fingers properly. They also worked out how to mass produce the pin, which is always a major turning point in these design stories. “By 1914, American factories alone were making over 1.33 billion safety pins annually at a cost of $0.007 each, a stunning example of the industrial order’s democratization of an ancient and medieval luxury product.

While the need for the use of the safety pin started to wane as we moved into the late 1900s. There were better ways to secure nappies and diapers, clothes were being mass produced, there were just generally fewer things to secure. That was until the safety pin, which had once been a symbol of spirituality became a punk rock icon. Punks turned to the safety pin to hold their ripped clothes together after big nights and to attach patches signifying their favourite bands of the era. Famously, Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols wore a shirt held together with safety pins in the video for God Save the Queen. As Adam Wray writes for Billboard “as a result, the safety pin has come to symbolize punk’s scrappy, DIY ethos, even when it appears outside of a punk context.

 

Today, we have plenty of ways to secure our clothes, but the safety pin prevails. Thousands of them were used in the last Olympics because we’ve still not found a better way to quickly secure a numbered bib to a jersey. Mum’s across the world have a secret stash in sewing boxes. Not only that they still endure as a political symbol, even if it’s one quite different to the statement Odysseus was making in ancient Greece.

Around this time last year I designed a series of ‘podcast posters’ to celebrate some of the podcasts I love. A year on, in a strange manifest your destiny kind of way, I’m designing the real artwork for podcasts I love, most notably Emma Gannon’s Ctrl Alt Delete.

 

The new artwork we worked on together launched a little while ago but it’s still a thrill to see it pop up in my iTunes or when someone shares their favourite episode on social media.

 

Her decision to trust me with her new illustrated branding has kicked off a new wave of work for me, so I thought I’d take you all behind the scenes a little bit and show you how a piece of cover art like this can come together. If you’re interested in your own illustrated cover art or rebrand, I’ve left all the details at the bottom of this post.

 

But let’s get into the good stuff first.

 

Projects like this always start with someone getting in touch with me, and us just having a brief email conversation about what they want. For the Ctrl Alt Delete piece of work, Emma had already put together a great moodboard filled with pieces and colours she liked which was a brilliant guide.

 

Then I take that inspiration and turn it into drafts. Usually these focus on layout and are super sketchy like the ones above, but sometimes they’re more fleshed out. It completely depends on what I’m working on, and what we need to work out as a client-illustrator team.

I send those roughs off and get some guidance on what the client is looking for. In the case of Ctrl Alt Delete we decided to keep it simple and focus on the bright yellow that has become synonymous with Emma’s brand. So I fleshed out the sketch with a more worked up portrait, and went through that cycle of draft and feedback again before adding in the lettering.

 

Then there were just some final tweaks to do before the final artwork was settled, and put into place across Emma’s social media and most importantly on the podcast itself. These final tweaks can make all of the difference, and it’s so so crucial to me that whoever I’m working with is really happy with what they get in the end – especially if it’s got their face on it!

That was where the story ended on this particular piece of work. But I’ve also worked on social media banners and illustrated frames for sharing quotes and guest profiles for similar projects. So the sky really is the limit.

 

If you’ve got a podcast, or any other creative endeavour, and you’d like to chat about what we can do together head on over to my portfolio to see some of my other work or just drop me a line – I’d love to hear from you!