New ways in

Allow some room to let new ways in.

If I went away from Birmingham Design Festival with anything — with the many practitioners sharing their ways of working (combined with posts going viral on here stating the complete opposite is best practice) — it’s that there's a hundred views on processes, methodologies and frameworks out there that promise to guide us on the path to groundbreaking work.

Truth is, just like Christopher Doyle said, we’re all just making things up as we go. We land on a process or a method or a framework we’re convinced by, sell it into a client, and just go for it. We tweak it, blow certain bits up, and remove the bits that didn't quite work as we thought they might. You go to the next place or read the next book or listen to the next keynote, and we sprinkle a bit of that on top too. Then over and again, new people we encounter add their perspective into the mix, and there’s suddenly a completely new way of going at it.

And you know what, it’s great. It allows us to be in constant state of change.

Because really, there's no right or wrong way to build a brand, to communicate a story, design a website or launch an experience. Every problem is different for every client and every project, and so is every team working across all of those things. Which means each of the hundred ways work in their own right depending on what’s in front of you.

There's huge merit in unlearning what we’re convinced we know.