Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
It’s very fantastic for you to be here. So tell us about you and your work.
Well, I’m a writer, but I come from a design background. So I worked for years as a graphic designer, working with products, working with illustration, working with music, working with film. And then about 20 years ago, I decided to pull them all together into one freelance career. And one of the things I noticed was how badly so many communications were. Companies that were communicating in a really bizarre sort of artificial non-human way. Many designers who were working with language but were not really reading, not really reading the words they were they were typesetting or working with. And designers who were quite scared of maybe I can bring all my design skills to language then starting with organizations, helping them to communicate better.
Wonderful, wonderful. So how did you arrive at that? What was your journey?
I think it was, I was always as a child, intensively creative. I just couldn’t stop making things and drawing, right the way through my childhood. and I always knew I was going to go to art school. I was completely useless at normal school. I couldn’t pass exams. I was non-academic. And it was only when I got to art school that I met people who thought the same as me did for the first time. And I just, the first year at art school was so amazing because I met people who were so much better than I was. Whereas when you’re in sort of senior school, you can, if you’re really good at something, you can, you sort of star in the school. Then you go to art school and you realize how useless you are and how so much clever students and lecturers are than you. That was a massive shock for me, but it’s really important to be challenged as early as possible. So I went to… I did a two-year foundation that was amazing. It just opened my eyes. This is a course where you are exposed to everything from every kind of creative medium. And then I went to the Middlesex College of Arts in London, which is, I did a graphic design course. And it was sort of okay, but it was very Swiss. Do you know what I mean by Swiss? Yes, of course. Yeah, so very, very strict, very organized, very structured, and run by a really good designer called Romake Marber, who in the 60s and 70s was a kind of iconic typographer. But I really felt that it was going in a direction I didn’t really want to go. And then I was lucky enough to get into the Royal College of Art. And the Royal College was amazing. It was an MA course in those days. It was a three-year course. I think now it’s only a year. I think it’s been cut right back. But supposedly we would have the opportunity to explore beyond graphic design, actually, into humanities and anthropology and politics. And that’s what I was really looking forward to. But I felt there that the course was… again closing in on me and trying to limit me in all sorts of ways. But I met two extraordinary people there in terms of lecturers. One was Bob Gill, the American designer, who was the rudest person I’d ever met. And Bob was extraordinary. He helped me to get rid of all the kind of aesthetic stuff that I’d picked up away, you know, what is good in Inverter’s good design. And the other one was Margaret Calvert. who of course designed the whole of the started designing the British motorway signing system went on to do all… I mean she really set the bar for direction designing around the world. So I had on one hand a Bob who was completely chaotic and really anti-design. On the other hand I had Margaret who was almost completely the opposite but they were both incredibly, they just had incredible brains. And I knew that if I could plug into something that they had, something that they had, then that would really help me a lot. But about halfway through the second year, I started to get increasingly frustrated with it. And I’d been in education and design education for years. So I had a big argument with the head of the department. and it resulted in me leaving the Royal College. And I look it back, I think it was the best thing I ever did because it threw me out into the cruel world again. And then I went on to do a whole series of things over the years, working in every possible area. And I think that kind of eclectic creativity that I’ve picked up along the way has really helped. The students I’ve worked with over the years I’ve done a lot of mentoring of students over the years, particularly students who have maybe gone through college, left college, gone into the outside world and found that it’s not this extraordinary place that is welcoming you. You really want to fight to make a living. And so maybe sort of middle 20s, they start to hit the bit of a wall. And so I think bringing my experience and showing them all the walls up, I’ve hit through my life. has helped them to reconfigure their careers. And now the kind of projects I work on, I really love working on, are big complex communication projects where I’m working with teams of designers, teams of really disparate people. So there might be a philosopher, there might be an anthropologist, there might be a couple of designers, there might be a web designer, there might be AI. people immersed in AI, coming together to try and solve real world problems. In the last years, I’ve worked on projects with IKEA, helping them to articulate their global climate change strategy through to reinventing prisons. You probably know we have a lot of problems in this country with the whole prison system, the criminal justice system. always encouraging the young designers I’m working with to look beyond their screens. You know, shut your computer down, go out into the real world, engage with real people. And don’t work with second-hand information. Always go to source, always. You know, everybody given the opportunity loves to talk about what they do. And there’s not enough of that going on. A designer will receive a brief and they will crack into the, they go immediately onto their screen. And what gets produced, it looks very good and very slick and everything, but it’s, you know, what’s really going on inside it. So, yeah, get out into the real world. Wonderful. So tell us about your teaching experience. Well, I’ve worked never one long spell in a college. I’ve just done lots and lots of odd days. And I think my teaching has been beyond college, really. it’s really been working with students on a one-to-one basis. I found working in art schools always slightly problematic. Whether it was turning art schools into universities, I think put a completely different emphasis on the course. And suddenly, certainly in my day, kind of quality of degree, the level of degree you got was just unimportant. And with the colleges becoming institutions, they had to comply with all sorts of regulations and rules and funding conditions. And the bureaucracy around them begins to grow and the management grows. And then of course, with the introduction of students having to take on loans, there’s a massively different emphasis that they have that I had in my time. And they’re quite rightly demanding, you know, that the course or whatever comes up to their expectations that is worth what they’re paying for it. But so the whole thing has got a lot tougher and a lot harder and a lot more kind of transactional. Yeah. which I think is a shame because the whole point of art school was to drift into it with no idea what you were going to do or where you were going to go. And I said to all my generations of students, you should, you know, your degree is obviously very important to you, but in the outside world, nobody cares. What is your brain like? What is your creativity like? What is your interpersonal skills like? What is your curiosity like? What is your hunger? Like that’s what really, that’s what employers are really looking for. But also the whole freelance thing has become sort of easier and more difficult at the same time. Um, I think now through social media and things like LinkedIn and all those sort of connecting things, you have so many people exposing themselves the whole time, everybody’s under constant observation and everybody’s chasing the same jobs. So when I was younger, it was much more about just getting to know people on a very personal one-to-one basis and then work grew out of your relationship. Whereas now I think, there were so many designers now, in my day when I started out, nobody even knew what a designer was. Nobody realized that anything was even designed. Yeah, I think it’s, but on the other hand, certainly with the digital technology and AI, the possibilities now for students or people leaving college to launch themselves into the world is absolutely fantastic now. And you can set up a platform and you can be talking to thousands of people and you could be influencing all sorts of things. You can launch a business with a laptop and a mobile phone. Isn’t that amazing? Absolutely. So how do you see employability for students right now, for graduates? How do you see that? You touched a little bit upon that. Yeah, I think it’s just really tough. I think you’ve got to really, the whole future of design, whereas where I come from, a lot of it was about aesthetics. The whole future now, I think, is political. And designers have got to solve, help to solve the problems the world is facing. And you can’t just go into design. producing beautiful things. You’ve got to understand the mechanics and the dynamics behind solving problems through a brief. And you should be pointing yourself almost at the problem that needs solving, first of all. So rather than thinking, oh, I’d really like to work with this. design company or that design company, because I really like the look of their work. Think about what is the most important thing or the most important things to do with the way you see the future of your life and your family and the way the world is going. And how can you bring your design skills and join those onto other groups of people? If you’re a freelancer, then you can do that through the jobs that are rolling through your door. But if you want to be employed by a design company, then you need to pick a design company that’s got a kind of moral and ethical ethos that fits with what you want to change. So if your big concern is about the climate crisis or an aspect of it, then find somebody, maybe they’re an entrepreneur starting up a new startup. Maybe they’re a design company that’s been working for that for years. Or somebody like Google who’s been… environment aware for decades now. So rather than getting a job that will enable you to produce beautiful work, see if you could find a job that really through which you can help to solve the problems that society’s got. And that way you’re building in a lifetime career for yourself. I see so many designers who work on job to job to job to job. And something comes into the studio, they’ll work on it for three weeks, then it disappears and a year later they can hardly remember what the job was. Whereas if you are plugging into things where you’re incrementally evolving with every job that you do. then that will be incredibly satisfying to you. And it will also push you and really develop you. Again, I see lots of designers, even very well-known design companies, where the partners will develop a particular way of working and they know exactly, they sort of develop a formula for working with clients. And you can see it, they’re sort of doing the same job over and over again. And then you see the… alternative companies where maybe it’s driven by two or three people and every job they do adds to the kind of gravitas of the company and the reason why it exists. wonderful. How can design education change to facilitate what you’re saying? Well, I think it… I think it needs to be much broader. I would love to see them, students going on, secondments maybe, working with industry, working with government, working with, you know, NHS, working with lots of students. think there is more of that kind of quality of… of introducing those kind of projects into art schools. But in a sense, I get the impression that so many art schools are internalized and so concentrated on producing the product of the student and the art school gaining a reputation where it will attract more students because colleges, of course, have got to keep their numbers up and of course, with… recent things happening numbers are going down and some colleges are absolutely desperate to get students to go there. So there’s a feeling they’re sort of panicking. But I’d love to see art schools being much more sort of extrapolated places where you have the central unit where people meet and come together and talk about stuff. But maybe students go off to work in other countries for six months or three months or… go to a completely different part of wherever you live that is not concentrated with young people with all the same sort of ambitions, the same generation. But I would love to, I think there’s not enough diversity. In which sense? Well, in terms of the way that they’re teaching, the kind of people who are teaching there, the sort of terms of reference that the college is working under, I think they tend to be quite close, self-congratulatory organizations. and I would love to see them become much more dissipated. And I’ve just been on a really interesting weekend away with the Royal Society of Arts. And they have a group within them called the Royal Designers for Industry. Made up of the great and the good of the design world, really. And we took away, I think it was about 40, not students, but they were about 25, 26 year olds. to a big house in the country for three days. And what was fascinating about it was half these students were engineers. So they’re working on the very latest technology to do with engineering, a lot of bioengineering, digital engineering. They’re building the kind of interfaces that we’re using increasingly in every single thing we do every single day. We are working with systems that these people have produced. The other half were product designers and there were philosophers and poets and there were some musicians there. So people who evolved in the really kind of softer side of design. What was wonderful was the product designers, there was a lot of talk about materials, about tactile, about the whole visceral feeling of taking a thing and manipulating it. turning it and really expressing yourself through this medium was absolutely wonderful. People coming out with, you know, fistfuls of plasticine and bits of wood and bits of plastic and the engineers more or less talking about spreadsheets and all their work is done on computers. And what was really great was we came together in groups of different people, completely randomized. we were given a task to achieve that we had to perform back to the rest of the group. And what was really interesting was the negotiation that happened between maybe seven or eight people in this in any one group. We all knew we wanted to produce something at the end that would be some kind of performance, but how would we get there faced with the problem that we’ve been set? And we all had to learn to first of all, put forward suggestions. But when our suggestion wasn’t received as well as we thought it might be by the rest of the group, we had to put it to one side and start listening to someone else. And there was a wonderful kind of negotiation, sometimes went on for an hour and a half, of gradually putting things aside, adding things to it, and gradually this thing, this performance built and built and built. It was almost like a wonderful pyramid coming together. with a whole load of wastage all around the edge and nobody was getting precious at all. Oh, that’s my idea and why aren’t you following my idea? There was a wonderful consensus and we reached the top. And also we talked a lot about audiences. We were going to perform this thing to the other people who were staying on this weekend. So what should we be considering about the audiences? And of course, design is all about, you know, producing things for audiences. So would the performance that we produce compromise people in any way, or would it be unfair to people, or would it discriminate against people? Yeah. And introducing all the, we built our own terms and conditions really into each performance. And then the actual doing of it. So one of the performances we did was like a huge dance, and we were dancing all over these wonderful gardeners. And none of us have really danced before. None of us have really done any kind of activity like this before. And it was just amazing. It jumped us out of all our little silos that we’re in. So I would encourage anybody, any student, if you ever get the chance to go on any one of these kind of existential away weekends or something like that, just dive into it. Go to every single thing you possibly can. because you will feel yourself growing as the days go on and it will improve your articulation, it will improve your presentation to a group of people. Many of the designers there were actually quite shy, they were quite reticent. So if you talk to them one-to-one, they were absolutely brilliant in talking about what they do. But talking to a room of 40 or 60 people, they sort of froze. So the way you present yourself to the world is absolutely critical to the way that you’re received by the world. So yeah, I’m just back from that and I’m just bubbling with excitement about it. It was so, so thrilling. Sounds excellent. Tell us about Michael Wolff and your latest book. Yeah, so for those who don’t know, Michael Wolff is a kind of titan of the design industry. He started working in the 1960s. Michael is 91 years old next month. And Michael was, from the very start, he was an immigrant into this country from Russia. His parents were fleeing Soviet Russia, so he was already a bit of an outsider when he was born here. And he just had some kind of some kind of thing in him to question everything he saw. Why does this exist? Why is this not different? Why is this not working better? Why are people behaving in this way? And he gradually moved into working with brand and he set up a partnership with a partner called Wolf-Olins in the 1960s. And Wolf-Olins became one of the top design consultancies in the world. In fact, they became the kind of model. for pretty much every design consultancy today. And they worked with a huge range of clients, really big global clients in a way that we take for granted now that brands are global. But in those days, they were just little pockets in their own countries. And what’s really interesting about Wolf Ohlins, who is the partnership that Michael had with his partner who was called Wally Ohlins. So Michael and Wally were two completely contrasting characters and this is really interesting for students as you’re going on to form your own creative partnerships. What kind of a mix do you need in that partnership to really make the thing zing? So Wally, Michael’s partner, was an academic, an incredibly good salesman and… It said of him that he knew more about his clients than the clients did about themselves. So you need a really hard-nosed person in your partnership who manages the money. And that’s not just making sure you get paid, it’s understanding how money works. Understanding how you can use money as a tool to help the business grow. Now the other side of it was Michael. Michael hasn’t got a clue about money. He never did. He knew how to spend it, but not how to earn it really. And Michael was this kind of, had this infectious enthusiasm and imagination and curiosity. He’s kind of jumbled that. The way that Michael describes his relationship with Wally in the book is that Wally was a duck. Quack, quack, quack. It flies like this, a duck flies in straight lines, yeah. And ducks also fly in formation, they fly in chevrons. And so the duck at the back gets extra lift from the duck at the front. But Wally was the duck, he was out front and everybody was following Wally. So there was a strict kind of order and configuration to the way he thought, to the way his mind worked. And interestingly, Wally ended up working for Volkswagen. He ran… Volkswagen’s global strategy. And this was, Volkswagen in those days was a very, very structured formal kind of company. So the other side was Michael. And in contrast to what his duck, Michael was the seagull. And you know if you’ve seen seagulls, they just fly around on the thermals. They’re really lazy. So they don’t flap really to get anywhere. They find a thermal that just lifts them without them having to do anything. So that was Michael. Also, seagulls are really opportunistic. You’re standing there with your bag of crisps, but the bag of chips at the seaside, and the seagull is watching you the whole time. And as soon as you look away, it’s come down. And so, really the contrast of those two, and sometimes they were at war with each other. They were absolutely threatening to walk out, you know, abandon the business. And other times they were so close, they were almost, you know, deeply connected on every level. And Michael said the thing that drove the whole relationship was their sense of humour. They were just always laughing about something or always finding the funny side of something. And I’ve seen so many creative partnerships where that sense of humour just sort of disappeared and it just became a job of work. And you’re wondering why on earth you’re still doing this. But eventually, As the business grows, and particularly for students watching this now who go into partnerships, your business will go from the start-up phase into a kind of getting established phase, then into a well established phase, and then you start to think about succession and what happens after this. And all the partnerships I’ve ever worked with got to a point where the partners decided they were gonna sell the business. Can we sell the business to a bigger organization like a big media group? And we can retire with loads of money in the bank. And at that point, the business is intellectually finished because the whole way it’s moving forward is just to accrue capital for the partners. And this is what happened to Wolfholins. So Wally and the other partners wanted to sell the business, which they eventually did. And Michael didn’t want to, it was Michael’s life. It was an expression of everything about Michael. And so they fired him, they got rid of him. And of course for Michael, that was absolutely devastating, but he’s sort of seen it coming for years. And he went on after that to have a very successful career as an independent consultant. So I’ve worked with Michael on lots of jobs. And about 10 years ago, we started a conversation with a studio called NB Studio, graphic designers. Somebody should write a book about Michael’s life. And so we umbed and armed and laughed about this for another five years. And then about three years ago, Michael called me up and said, Tom, we have got to do this book. So we had lunch together and we started to talk about the possibilities. And then it was a very interesting process. So I started meeting up with Michael on a regular basis and him, Michael just telling me stories, anecdote after anecdote after anecdote. And what came to me was the book should just be almost like as if you were sitting next to Michael and he was telling you these stories. I wanted the book not to be an academic monograph. So many of these monographs you see they’re completely unreadable and they’re just full of stuff about theory and strategy. And Michael’s not like that at all. Michael is all about building the relationship with the client through your conversation with the client. So I thought the book should have tiny little anecdotes which just tell a little story of how Michael met a client. They had a conversation. the client explained the problem they wanted solving. Michael then solved the problem, again, working with Wally, and then Michael and Wolf-O-Lyns delivered the solution to the problem. And there’s a very nice kind of dramatic arc in storytelling, we talk about a dramatic arc. So you start at the beginning and it rises, and as it rises, it gets more and more exciting, and then it hits a peak, and then it comes down the other side and you end up with a conclusion. all films, all stories, all theatre works, all novels work with dramatic art. And so it should have those stories in it, but they should contrast it with some really deep thinking of Michael. So he talks in the book about his Again, he talks in metaphors the whole time. So instead of a literal description of a case study, and particularly for students, if you are writing about a job or you’re communicating with people about a job, to really get into metaphors, they’re really amazing things. A metaphor is when you take something that you see in a certain way and you move it to a different context and you see it in a completely different way. So in the description before about the duck and the seagull, having moved those two characters into those two metaphors, we understand those characters in a much richer way. So the other part of the book is really very detailed stuff about how Michael used metaphors to help their express what their clients were trying to do. And then we’ve made the book a physical experience as well. Most books you pick up and you feel pretty much nothing, but this book had to be really special. So it’s not quite a brick, but it’s sort of getting on that way to be a brick. But you pick up the book, and this is where NB Studio was so brilliant. They understood about the sort of activity of a book. What does it feel like to turn the pages? What does it feel like? Every spread is another amazing reveal and the quality of the paper. and the way the book sits. So all that kind of side of it was incredibly important. So anyway, we got the book to a point where we were ready to show it to publishers. And we thought, naively, we would just go off to these publishers. They would look at it and they’d say, oh, this is wonderful. Yes, we’ll publish it. Thank you very much. Talk to us in six months’ time. Not a bit of it. We talked to four publishers and they all loved the book. but they all wanted to change it. So one publisher in particular, who’s a very well known publisher, whose name I can’t possibly mention said, we want to make it an academic book. We want to get it into every academic institution. We want to fill it with other designers and brand people putting in pages. And we just walked out of that, Michael and I walked out meeting almost in tears. And we sat down and had a cup of coffee afterwards and said, this is not where we want to go. So we sat down with NB, who are an incredible team of people there, and we talked about the problem. We thought, what if we publish it ourselves? And that’s how we’ve never published anything, but we’ve been involved in lots of publishing. And the other thing, it was going to cost a fortune to do because this is a high quality book. The publishers weren’t going to pay for anything. They all wanted money upfront. So we thought, well, we’ve done all the writing. We’ve done all the designing, we’ve done all the specification of the book. What do we need a publisher for? So we got together other people into the team was growing and growing and growing, and we got a brilliant person in who knows all about Kickstarter, you know, fundraising, crowdfunding. And so we went through that terrible process of selling your book. to lots of people who probably don’t know anything about it. But we were helped because Michael has such an extraordinary network of friends and people he’d worked with. Everybody wanted to contribute to the book. And on Kickstarter, you have a month to achieve your target, which I think was about 45,000 pounds. And if you don’t meet your target, you get nothing. And you can’t go back to them and say, oh, can we try this again? Or I don’t think so anyway. So we had this nail biting run up to the day that was gonna be the cutoff day. And I think about three or four days before the cutoff, we just tipped the 45,000 mark. And that meant we could go ahead with the full production. And then we just went into crazy workload of, from my point of view, it was proofreading. So. I love writing and I love the whole expression and getting words on the page and everything, but I’m not the best proofreader at all. And of course, I’ve been looking at these words for years. So finding a proofreader, finding an indexer to do the whole, we didn’t even realize we needed an index. But somebody told us, if you haven’t got an index, you can’t get it into a library. So we did all that. And it added about another year onto the book. And all the time, Michael was Is this book ever going to get published? Am I even going to be alive by the time this book is published? But we did it. And on the day the books came into NB Studio, it was just incredible. We were all sort of wandering around in the daze, holding these books and sort of looking inside it. And then we did a big launch three weeks ago at D&AD here in London. who were absolutely fantastic. They gave us the whole evening and their amazing premises. And we’ve sold the entire production of books. And now we are beginning to talk to publishers about maybe doing a softback edition, which we’d love to do that could sell really cheap. And hopefully lots of students will be reading for the rest of their lives. That’s excellent. That’s excellent. So how, how would Could you tell us a little bit more about the content in terms of design education? Yeah, well, any student reading through this book, every single story is a kind of blueprint for how to solve problems with clients. You will spend the rest of your life working with clients, and I know that colleges now are bringing more and more clients into work directly on projects if keep your eye out in college and spot those projects coming in and really if you could get your hands on a copy of the original book or you can when the paperback comes out, when you’re reading through one of the stories about the project that Michael worked on, don’t leave that story directly in the book. Don’t think it only relates to that job that Michael did. So use each story like a mirror. Look into the story, what is happening in the story, what did the client want to achieve, what was the dynamics between you, the designer, and the client, and what was the result. And I think also follow up Michael online. He’s done a lot of talks online. He’s done a lot of presentations. Go and try and get inside the way his brain works because it’s not normal. There are kind of degrees of autism in all creative people are slightly autistic. That’s why we end up being designers. We will obsess over tiny, tiny little details, but also we have a huge, great sort of vision as well. So I think from Michael’s book, really what I got that I think helped me, I’m still a student now at my grand old age, I’m still learning every single job is that you don’t leave college and stop learning or you don’t do all your learning at college. Just generate this kind of obsessive curiosity about everything you can possibly, just don’t stop finding out, don’t stop talking to people. And I think another really good thing to do. There’s a lovely story about Michael when I first met him. So I’d seen him around. I’d been to talks he’d given. I’d seen videos he’d done. And I’d kept on thinking I would really like to work for this guy. And so I discovered where his office was. And I went along there one day and I knocked on the door of this very imposing building, fully expecting maybe like a… a PA or a security person to come to the door. And Michael opened the door. And I stood there slightly stunned for a minute and said, oh, hello, my name’s Tom and I’m a writer and I’d really like to work with you. And Michael smiled at me and he said, hello, Tom, my name’s Michael and I’d like to make you a cup of tea. And that was the beginning of our relationship. So don’t be afraid of approaching people designers you really admire and asking if you could buy them a cup of coffee or buy them a lunch or just have half an hour of their time. Another thing I did years ago, I went to New York, I saved up, went to New York for a week and on every single day I was in New York I went to visit my most revered designer and managed to get some time with them just sitting with them really quietly just listening to them talk about their life. So even though you’re a student at a certain level now, people are always really pleased to hear from you. People love to talk about themselves. So take advantage of that and just start to acquire huge amounts of wisdom. And afterwards, just make little notes and just jot things down that were relevant to you. And that way you start to build this almost, this wonderful human zoo of people. that become a part of your life and part of your creativity. This is wonderful. So how can our viewers and listeners find you? Well, I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best way to get to me. You can also get the connection through to my website, which has got 20 years of work on it. And you can find on there… the extraordinary range of work. That’s another thing for students to think about. Like I was saying earlier, find things that you feel passionate about. So some of my work has been for philanthropic foundations, some has been for established brands, some has been for colleges. I’ve worked with countries, I’ve worked with governments. So yeah, LinkedIn, have a look at my website. Feel free to contact me, particularly through LinkedIn. And… Yeah, on LinkedIn you can see almost like an archive of things I’ve been working on over the years. And I do one little thing on there, which is yellow boxes. And it’s called Thoughts About Words. And in my little kind of essays, they’re very short, I look at all sorts of aspects of design and creativity, and how language and design and image and film and strategy can all become absolutely intermeshed with each other and I think that will really help to introduce you to a much wider vision that you can incorporate into your creative thinking. That’s wonderful. What advice would you like to leave us with?
I think I’ll go to Socrates, the great Greek philosopher who said the only thing that I know is that I know nothing.
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Tom. Thank you. Keep it up for the podcast and see you soon. Thank you so much!
The New Art School 