Wake up…

Ever had one of those jobs that you ask yourself, ‘Why am I still here?’

The years 2000–2005 at my first agency were great, but the next ten were way too long. A toxic environment where narcissus is playing off all sides, is too eager to prove people wrong and has an ego that’s way too big for me to want to handle.

There are different goals, different priorities. Work is only as creative as it needs to be; nothing to be proud of. Trying to sound like ’a proper agency’. It’s stagnant. It’s factory work. It’s selling boxes.

What do you do? A decade as a designer, and none of it has any meaning. There’s no enjoyment, no fulfilment. It’s Sunday night, dreading the next day, dreading the people, dreading the work, dreading the bullshit.

Time to call it a day

Start Searching

Finding work and ideas I’d be happy to share was hard. I started looking back through the work from the past ten years; I pored over the tiniest scraps, notebooks, scribbles, roughs, trying to find something to show.

There had been some value to the time, but it was buried deep in a line, a sketch, a concept that got no further than a notebook. Those were the most precious parts, the marks that pushed away from the egos and buzzwords.

Get noticed on a larger scale and move forward in the way you want.

The process led to TenYrsLtr, a hard-backed, 100-page book full of references to work and events from that decade. There are no descriptions or labels; it’s just for looking at, and only the synopsis on the back cover explains what it’s all about.