COMPUTERARTS.CREATIVEBLOQ.COMSPECIAL REPORT
Rosie McKie seeks out
the positives from any
mistakes made.
tucked away, rather than being openly discussed,
even internally. Attending events and conferences
can also fuel the sense that other creatives never
make mistakes.FALSE IMPRESSIONS
“In the early days of my career, I’d go to design
conferences and look forward to seeing talks
by my heroes,” recalls Black. “But everything
they said was so overwhelming positive, it felt
a little bit unrealistic and unobtainable. There
was no sense about the reality of how tough the
profession actually is.”
Now a regular on the speaker circuit himself,
Black is keen to share his own mistakes and
failures on stage. And in the same spirit, he shares
an example with us now, of a project that went
quite seriously wrong.
“Made Brave, a creative design agency in
Glasgow, had asked me to do a mural in its
studio,” he says. “Essentially, it was a plain white
wall – perfect to paint on, perfectly sound – and
I was putting on this beautiful yellow colour.”
He visited a paint specialist to get supplies in a
specific Pantone. “But the guy said: ‘You need to
put a grey primer down first to make the yellow
stand out.’ I wasn’t convinced, but he said: ‘Trust
me, trust me, it’ll make it stand out more.’”
Black went back to the studio and, as advised,
painted the full wall in grey primer... even though
his gut was telling him it was wrong. Then he putll successful creatives have a career littered with
mistakes and failures. But that’s a reason for
celebration rather than regret. Because it’s the
things that go wrong which make us who we
are; teaching us lessons we’ll never forget and
helping us to grow over time.
“Making mistakes in anything isn’t the nicest
feeling,” says Rosie McKie, associate design
director at London branding agency & SMITH.
“But without them, you don’t learn or develop as
much. If you’ve made a mistake, you make even
more effort to avoid it ever happening again; you
become more alert and attentive as a result.”
However, not everyone benefits from this
process. For some, a crippling fear of making
mistakes can lead to an avoidance of risk-taking
in favour of playing it safe, which ultimately
results in dull and uninspiring work.
Where does this fear stem from? One culprit,
inevitably, is social media. “On places like
Instagram and Behance, everything’s so polished,”
says Bristol-based illustrator Tom Redfern. “You
don’t know what went on behind the scenes of
that particular project; you don’t know the 100
million mistakes that were made during that
process. So it’s easy to imagine everyone else is
perfect, and that you need to be, too.” Scottish-
born graphic designer, lettering artist and
typographer Craig Black agrees. “The pressure
from social media nowadays is absolutely crazy,”
he says. “I feel it’s kind of crippling designers’
careers, to be honest.”
Social media’s not the only culprit, though.
When agencies share client work, it’s rarely in
anything other than the most flattering light.
When projects run into the sand, they’re quietly