Matt Baxter on What The Design Laundry Reveals About Creatives

0:06Matt Baxter:This week I'm joined by designer, writer and hat connoisseur Matt Baxter of Baxter & Bailey. Matt's been in the game for three decades. Trickett & Webb, Blast, 3 Deep Melbourne, 300 million, Together Design. Then in 2012 he co-founded Baxter & Bailey with Dom Bailey. Since then, they've built brands for people like Oxford University, Royal Mail, NSPCC, National Theatre, Royal Parks and the Roald Dahl Story Company. But the reason I wanted Matt on the show isn't just the client list. It's the design laundry, a gloriously honest project collecting our industry's mishaps and near disasters. Think typos you can't unsee, rogue email chains, pitch carnage and the lessons that make us better.

0:54Matt Baxter:We get into growing up in Burnley, moving south, why pondering still matters, and how to keep a studio human when speed rules everything. We talk Brighton's scene, building community, and why creative jealousy is avoided if you keep Instagram at arm's length. It's warm, it's real, and there are even seagulls.

1:20Matt Baxter:this season of the creative boom podcast is proudly sponsored by james cropper the last mill standing in britain for premium colored paper its new color source range puts designers first giving you direct access to 50 stunning shades in a range of weights and textures straight from the mill incredible color crafted in the lake district and delivered straight to your door discover the paper that brings your ideas to life via paper and packaging.jamescropper.com

1:56Matt Baxter:well i'm very excited to be joined today by a fellow northerner now he's like he's a traitor he's gone to london you're based in london brighton brighton traitor later on the south coast you've gone to sunny sunnier climbs I I have I've officially been a southerner for longer than I was ever a northerner wow how about that that's amazing and so where did you grow up where was your sort of hometown home place uh Burnley in Lancashire I was born lovely in 1973 uh and I still like to get back there a few times a year to see pals and family but yes I've been a southerner officially for uh since I graduated from university in the mid-90s 1995 when I moved to London.

2:44Matt Baxter:God the mid-90s was a great time to be alive wasn't it you must have had fun. Absolutely yeah the design scene was was sort of in its pomp as it were and London felt at that time less so now thankfully I think but certainly at the time like the epicentre of the design world um yeah so it was an exciting thing to enter into absolutely and you got lured to london in those early days after after uni did you go to uni yeah i went to new to newcastle um what was newcastle poly and when i started in 92 it was the first year that it had university status in that sort of 92 group of universities so it became the new university of Northumbria famous for two alumni uh Johnny Ive studied product design there and Vaughan Oliver studied graphic design there they're they're sort of probably the two most famous notable alumni and yourself yeah of course and yeah so when they're in 92 graduated 95 and I was going to say at the time it was either you went to London or you did something else for a living but that's not very much not the case actually there were pockets of design industry happening in an exciting way in lots of parts of the country so I in fact I was quite tempted by Edinburgh and a chap came to the degree show and from a place called Pure Design in Edinburgh and was interested in my work but I kind of had my heart set in London lots of my fellow graduates were heading down so that's what I did yeah and you just went down and never returned like Dick Whittington although do you know what a brighton taxi driver told me the other day that no matter how long i spend in this city i will never be a brightonian so there you go i'll always be wow that's a bit that's a bit much in it yeah i think he i think he had to be born and bred in order to qualify under his very strict criteria oh maybe it was a bit bitter that all these outsiders were coming in taking their jobs yeah yeah all these northern graphic designers and filmmakers and animators filling up the lanes brighton's a fab little spot i mean you've got you know a bit of a slow train to london i don't know why they haven't sorted that out yet but there you go but what brought you to the bright lights of brighton pier and was it the seaside was it was it love was it the love of seagulls?

5:18It was a bit of all of those things but primarily it was love. I met my wife Katie here in Brighton through some pals at Blast, a design company that I used to work for and they were having a jolly down to Brighton having just completed a project for the University of Sussex and they said and I just got back from traveling I've been working in Australia for a couple of years at Design Studio in Melbourne and I just got back and they said oh we're going for a jolly down to Brighton do you want to come and invited me down with them and I did and as a result of that trip met my wife Katie who was their client who they were taking out to celebrate the end of the project and yeah Brighton's been part of my life in an increasingly significant way ever since.

6:08Matt Baxter:Wow what was her opening line or yours so I'm being really nosy now. Oh I do you know what I wish I could remember it was a long and boozy and fun-filled evening but she's originally from Wakefield in Yorkshire so I think we sort of the northern connection as is often the case in various aspects of life you sort of gravitate towards people who with whom you have some sort of shared history or geography or something don't you I think wow there'll be there'll be a movie of your life one day and it'll all be you know in the well was this in the 90s or later on this was it later on early 2000s uh yeah but who would play me harry hill probably you went straight for it you were right in there yeah but it's it's back then matt when i presume you had a bit more hair not a lot not a lot oh well there you go it's a sign of high masculinity it's fine yeah exactly yeah and i compensate by buying too many hats oh yes oh gosh i'm only just getting into all this i've neglected the way i dress for years and i'm just starting to make an effort with uh you know various nice brands and stuff and the hats is another level isn't it uh it is it's kind of a necessity for us um follically challenged individuals but uh yeah katie would my wife katie would definitely say i've taken it to a slightly obsessive level but um oh really how many hats have you got too many but i occasionally try to put them all on at once and um the the stack of hats is almost as tall as i am these days yeah do you do the do you do the threading the classic threading match the color with the socks oh yeah i um occasionally yeah i like there to be some kind of through line although today you can't see all of me but i'm sort of fairly black clad a bit like you yeah um so i decided to um go slightly brighter with my headgear today well how long have you am i allowed to ask since we've talked about being you know follically challenged and all the rest of it but how long have you been in the design industry now matt 30 years this summer right so you you've gone through the ups and downs the highs and lows you've seen the whole change yeah i think that the when i graduated in 95 and i decided straight away that i wanted to go to london and it was in an era you'll have heard this from various people you've spoken to over the years, I'm sure.

9:01You kind of wrote letters to the agencies that you wanted to work for. But I was definitely keen on heading down to London, but I think in 95, correct me if I'm wrong, but was that a recession year? It was a sort of challenging financial year. It was tough.

9:18Matt Baxter:I remember the prodigy played Glastonbury that year. Ah, good memory. Well done, yeah. I was there. Were you? Yeah. Yeah. So 95. So what was, were they in that sort of Charlie, Charlie says sort of rave era? No, it was post. It was like coming onto the stage in a big giant ball. Oh yeah, okay. And all that kind of jazz. Yeah. I'm just looking at what happened in 1995 in the United Kingdom. Quite a lot. Good grief, it was Arsenal's glory years, wasn't it? Well, I don't know. No, despite coming from a football-obsessed small town, I'm not especially football-obsessed, I'm afraid. Oh, that's fine.

10:08Matt Baxter:I do go to watch them now and again. Okay. Yeah, I had a feeling it was like a financially trepidatious year in some sort of way, actually. But I got a job at a studio called Trickett & Webb. Lynn Trickett and Brian Webb were external assessors at my course and they came up and reviewed the degree work and invited one or two people to go for interviews and I was given a placement there which which after a couple of weeks became a full-time job and I was there for four years. Wow committed. Yeah yeah I mean I think that kind of three four years is first job standard maybe uh maybe a bit maybe people move a bit faster than that these days i don't know i think they do yeah maybe at least a year and that's it yeah right but it was brilliant it was um amazing studio great clients really creative clients across lots of different sectors you know packaging for boots branding for arts and culture institutions all sorts really good and and varied and and play they placed a lot of trust in the design team um even even junior designers new starters like me i remember doing them one of my first projects was a thing for federigoni the paper company yes and it involved we were doing this sort of folded piece and i'd never done anything kind of paper engineering wise like that at that time and i spent a day trying to work this thing out and couldn't quite get there.

11:47And Lynn came back from a meeting towards the end of the day and she said, are you getting on with that Federigoni piece? I said, well, I can't quite work out how to do it. And she said, yeah, you'll get there. And that left me to it. And I did get there, but that was the kind of approach, was lots of creative trust in the team. It's also where I met Heidi Lightfoot and Katja Thielen, who I ended up working with at Together Design. um you know half as london's design industry because i moved to london at the same time as pals from university and there was just a very rich orbit ecosystem call it what you will of people working in the industry young people and a great place to start yeah amazing times

12:33Matt Baxter:yeah sounds like amazing times i uh i think the contrast now when all the clients want everything quicker faster um do you still get that kind of breathing space to be creative and or is everything just speeded up now and in in work in work now i suppose we we do our best to factor that in to allow time for that but there's definitely an expectation that things move quickly things happen fast and i suppose we have the tools to make that happen digital tools to make that happen to a degree so things that might have previously taken a few days 30 years ago now are instantaneous which uh which is quite useful in many ways technology can help us but i think as long as we try hard to carve a bit of time for thinking and pondering and cogitating the things that are a required part of the design process, aren't they?

13:39Particularly if you're a conceptual thinker, you need that time.

13:43Matt Baxter:How do we justify it to ourselves, though, when we're just sort of pondering? I mean, I always kind of forget to ponder, and pondering's an underrated enterprise, I would say. Yeah, I think so as well. It's an important part of the process, surely. Yeah, yeah. And it's nice to ponder over a cup of tea, stuck by the kettle with your hands on your hips. Exactly. Pondering, yeah. Yeah. What's next? How do I fight the next fight? Exactly. Yeah, we've got, as most design studios do here at Baxter & Bailey, we've got several books on the shelf and in the library shelves about idea generation and where do ideas come from.

14:22And almost all of them talk about exactly that, Katie, that go and do something else for a bit, forget the problem, forget the thing that's immediately in front of you, put the kettle on or go for a walk or have a swim or some variation on do something different and the the pondering bit is an important part of the process forgetting and thinking about something

14:44Matt Baxter:else yeah i think it's important it is now you've um as you've said you've had a lot of experience you've been around the the old design block a few times and you came up with this concept which was very quirky and lovely called the design laundry what what's that all about shall i give you the kind of the full biog of design laundry and where it came from okay i will so it's all started let's go back in time a little bit first i wrote a note because i couldn't remember what year so let's go back to 2014 so i'm going in fact i'm going to go back a little bit further very briefly so Baxter & Bailey were founded in 2012.

15:27Dom and I knew one another from having been partners in a business together before, and we'd gone off and done separate things and then decided to get back together and form a business. And we kind of designed our business. We thought about what we wanted to do and the kind of clients we wanted to work with and who we didn't want to work with and the kind of sectors we were interested in. And so we created a business that would suit us and our strengths and avoid our weaknesses as much as possible. Anyway, so we did that in 2012, founded Backstrom Bailey, first office in Hoxton Square in London.

16:03And a couple of years after that, 2014, we were invited to take part in a talk at a design festival that no longer exists called Design Evil. And it was in Liverpool at a venue called Camp and Furnace. like amazing ex-industrial building, multi-use. And we were invited because Harry Pearce had dropped out. So Harry Pearce from Pentagram was the Saturday night speaker after Morag Mayaskoff. So, you know, what a line-up. And Harry Pearce, for whatever reason, had had to step away. So two weeks ahead of time, we were invited to step into his not inconsiderable shoes. and we're dom and i both very keen on if we're invited to do things like that we're lucky enough to be invited to do things like that we kind of like to to give ourselves a challenge to talk about something that's of interest to us and the audience it's we kind of we're keen to avoid the portfolio show and tell approach which has its place and it's and it can be done brilliantly by lots of brilliant people but we like to give ourselves a challenge sometimes anyway so we thought let's talk about we were two years into our business let's talk about the decisions that we made uh in order to design the business that we wanted to run we called the talk skeletons and it was about how past events over the previous uh 15 years of being designers had shaped Baxter and Bailey so the mistakes we've made the errors that we'd made the cock-ups that we'd encountered the thing that the horrible clients that we'd grappled with all all elements that went into the mix of designing Baxter and Bailey and we called this talk Skeletons and we talked about how these mistakes had shaped how we kind of set our stall out and he went pretty well it was a good talk we enjoyed it and and there it ended but then this idea of Skeletons um just kept sort of bobbing back up to the surface that we thought there was something else in it and it sat in a folder on our server of embryonic ideas that might go somewhere we kept coming back to it and then eventually eventually this is quite a few years later so back 2022 maybe 23 even we thought let's try and do something with this idea because there's there's at the very least a talk in it a talk series, maybe a book, a website, who knows, but there's something about this idea of skeletons.

18:41And I found the email that we wrote in order to sort of try and clarify this idea, this sort of elevator pitch for skeletons. And this is what I wrote. It says, despite what agency websites and shiny social media accounts might suggest, every, yes, every successful design career is littered with creative missteps, aesthetic cock-ups, bad decisions, terrible clients, ugly work and downright disasters. Fortunately, these are peppered with the odd lucky break and moment of serendipity along the way. And then we said, our aim is simple. We believe that creative people at all stages of their life, but especially those new to the industry, so we're thinking about young designers really, as our audience, will be reassured and encouraged to hear that every perfect project has a roller coaster backstory and that all great creatives occasionally make mistakes and uh what we concluded by saying and in fact it is these mistakes and lucky breaks that help to shape every great creative career our skeletons shape us after all so at that point it was called skeletons and it was about how you skeletons kind of inform who you are shape who you are so rather than being embarrassed and dismayed by your mistakes it was about sharing them talking about them your career mistakes specifically creative career mistakes and we sent that email out and we got one or two really great stories back from the people we sent them to just people that we knew other designers people in our orbit our design pals let's call them and we thought okay well we've got we've got some great stories back here um but we need to get this out to more people if we're going to generate more more stories more content we need to reach more people and uh we decided to contact linda elf knight who's the ex editor of design week she knew sort of everybody in the industry uh we said could you help us share this story with everybody that you you know and she did and eventually it took a while but eventually one by one and then over the weeks faster and faster we got loads and loads of brilliant stories mistakes people that people have made disasters cock-ups things that that at the moment felt excruciating cataclysmic kind of career ending but on reflection made them better at their job better creatives more resilient all of that that was the principle really so we had all this stuff and we thought okay we need to do something with it we need a kind of framing device uh and for whatever reason we pondered some pondering definitely happened and some cogitating happened yeah and we decided that we would like to present it as a sort of collection a museum and we called it the Museum of Mishaps and we went through this whole design phase wrote a design brief internal project got the design team involved get create a brand identity and started to build a digital home a kind of online museum called the Museum of Mishaps where you would walk around and encounter these stories in different rooms different wings of the museum that were dedicated to different kinds of mistakes and as lots of self-initiated projects do it sort of stalled at that point didn't go any further ran out of steam ran out of steam ran out of time ran out of the ability to dedicate lots of time to it because we were busy um so there it's there it stopped and then probably a year after that we came back to it again and we thought we've got these brilliant stories

22:39Matt Baxter:we really have to do something with this so what did we do then so we thought the museum of mishaps is a nice framing idea but is it clear enough is it or is it obscuring the nature of this project which is about reassuring an audience that everybody makes mistakes particularly you rebranded it you rebranded the museum of mishaps that's exactly what we did we re-branded it we renamed it we actually brought in a friend of ours hazel gold who's a dramatist if that's how you say it and she helps her clients to turn ideas into on stage presentations of whatever sort she quite often works interestingly with musicians members of orchestra who need to present something to an audience so she helps people who aren't necessarily natural performers to perform you're not a natural performer Matt I don't believe it for a second come on my um origins in Amdram coming through and Hazel came in and we sort of workshopped it we did a drama workshop and it was brilliant and we we thought of a variety of framing devices uh and how and how we could turn these framing devices into an on-stage presentation.

24:09And as we were doing this, there was a kind of moment of external pressure came in because we had the opportunity, amazingly, to take part in OFF in Barcelona, O-F-F-F, the annual event in Barcelona, to do something on stage, which we said, yes please we'll do that and we pitched this idea to them and they said that sounds brilliant come and do it so that added some pressure all right we've really got to do this now we've got to turn it into a viable on-screen production of some kind and we thought if we're going to do it we're going to do it right so with hazel's help we evolved the museum of mishaps into the design laundry nice and i've just dug out actually some of the sketches that we drew with hazel in the workshops so forgive the scrattiness of some of these but we kind of designed our outfits for the love it to look like laundry workers we thought about the fact that we should have kind of dot cotton style

25:18Matt Baxter:laundry bags as stage props it's like playing again yeah we and crucially with hazel this is a particularly scratchy drawing but we thought on stage we need a washing line and we need to be able to hang items off as we tell some of these stories so through this process the design laundry was born we had a framing device we had the idea of uniforms props how it could be a next a fun on stage thing um and the final thing that we did to kind of wrap the whole thing up into a 40 minute presentation was we asked four or five of our contributors so people who sent stories to us to record themselves telling their story.

26:08And we milked those into the talk.

26:11Matt Baxter:So it was on a big screen or did they come along? Well, it's on a big screen, so off a particularly big screen. We also did it at D &AD Festival earlier this year at Queen Elizabeth Hall, which had an even bigger screen. So the people who told their stories were on screen, but we also have a section where we go out to the audience and speak to them. If time allows, we could do that off because we had 40 minutes, a bit tighter at D &AD, so we didn't have time to do that. We did it for the typo circle at St. Brides a couple of months ago. Slightly smaller screen there, but we did have the opportunity to actually bring one of our contributors, Ryan Hughes, the typographer, illustrator, author, up and he told his story.

26:57So it's good. It's a really good, flexible thing. and we're now in the process of I suppose thinking about what what to do with it next

27:07Matt Baxter:that's great and the response has been really positive I guess because it's so refreshing yes I think that's it I mean do you know what it's funny we've done talks a few times the design evil one and certainly now this design laundry where when we're building them it just feels like the natural thing to do kind of natural subject matter why would we not want to talk about this stuff and afterwards people say oh that's really refreshing thanks so much for bringing this stuff to our attention and it's quite often pleasingly surprising that that there are so few people taking this kind of approach to design industry or more broadly creative industry talks so it's it's good fun but yes you're right it has been really well received people enjoy it They enjoy the unusual approach and the fact that it's got a sort of sense of theatre to it, maybe, and the props and the outfits.

28:08Matt Baxter:Is it because, Matt, that the design industry can sometimes take itself a little bit too seriously? Can it? Do you think it can? Oh, come on. You with your orange hats and your matching bloody socks. Come on. I think you're probably right. I think it's probably got a lot to do with that. Yeah, definitely the case. Like Off, for example, which was brilliant, a brilliant experience. And I would, if you can afford the airfare and the time to spend a few days in Barcelona, I would very much, and this is to your audience, recommend going. But there's a lot of people seriously presenting serious work.

28:52Seriously good work, but seriously presenting serious work. So you're right, there is a lot of that stuff going on.

29:02Matt Baxter:This season is brought to you by James Cropper, a mill that's been shaping colour and creativity from the heart of the Lake District since 1845. Their new colour source range lets you choose from 50 shades in different weights and textures straight from the source. Stunning paper made by craftspeople who live among the mountains but inspire their colours. explore the full range at paperandpackaging.jamescropper.com also have you had people say oh gosh you're so brave you're so brave because I've taken on a kind of slant with creative boom I mean we've always been warm and cuddly but I've taken on a sort of I'm putting my face behind everything a bit more and I'm bringing a bit of cheekiness yeah I've noticed that it's great I think it's great oh thanks love yeah well I kind of I've ease myself in gently.

29:51Matt Baxter:I've been doing the podcast for five years and now I've gone, oh, flipping heck, I've got to get on video, haven't I? Just as my face starts to sag. I mean, I'm, you know, the female equivalent of losing your hair. I was like watching a vlog back the other day and I said to my sister-in-law, I've got jowls. I've never noticed that before. I was like perfectly happy before I saw myself on the big screen. She's like, don't you dare. Don't you dare. it's a privilege to be alive i'm like flipping heck she's quite younger than me she's of that generation where they're all like you know positive thinking and all that jazz yeah i think it's a brilliant thing and um and it sort of brings a different flavor to to how things are presented as well doesn't it i think if you're like it it's good yeah but why does it have to be brave that's what i find interesting matt i think maybe it's people who say that because i don't think design laundry is brave from our point of view we're not really revealing much of ourselves you know we do dom and i do tell a kind of personal disaster story within the format of the talk but we're mostly revealing other people's stories so i think if people say I couldn't do that I'm really brave maybe it's just about the very fact that you are willing to be straightforwardly yourself on screen or on stage or and lots of people aren't comfortable doing that and I think certainly for me it's taken however many years I've been working what did I say 30 30 years to get to a point where I'm quite happy to be a bit daft on a stage and wear a design laundry outfit and um whole laundry bags around because and why is that the gift of getting older isn't it it's the gift of getting older yeah it's hopefully that yeah yeah you know you know you're not here on a dress rehearsal you've probably had at this point some loss some suffering maybe some health problems we don't have to go there that's certainly the case in for me and i'm just like what am i worried about just crack on have a laugh yeah what are you worried about i mean this is uh yeah exactly that but it is quite tricky isn't it if you think back to when you were 17 18 somebody saying don't worry about what other people are thinking it's very hard to take on isn't it i'm giving this type of advice to my son's just started university this year he's in leeds just that they've got to the end of his second week now and that's the kind of thing i say to him and i can see him thinking what are you talking about everybody's thinking um yeah so i think there's definitely a a point at which you are happier to be less self-conscious maybe but i think in terms of the design laundry when people share their mishaps the industry can have a very polished veneer and there's this perception perhaps that to be successful you have to be seen to be you know perfect nothing ever goes wrong lots of polish and obviously we're in a kind of new era aren't we where we're ai slop and over kind of influences and all this that's happening is changing things that people want the kind of real and i think you've just dropped on something you've been doing it for a while definitely but you've the design laundry the rebranded project it feels like it's just landed at the right time i think that's interesting yeah i haven't really felt about it like that but mate yeah yeah i think that's a good a nice observations i think that's the sort of thing that from inside running the thing trying to make the thing work it's maybe harder to see that but yeah i think that's an interesting observation yeah yeah in the era of design perfection let's share some imperfections yeah there is there is there is within the talk within the sort of premise of the thing there is a little bit of background reading that we did trying to bring in some i suppose academic rigor to it all uh and there's a there is a quote that we read from a professor he's actually a professor in barcelona writing for the harvard business review and uh it sort of just frames it really well and and it kind of concludes it really well and he says essentially um mistakes are going to happen there's no getting around that we're human but what he also says is and he's talking about leadership in this piece but so he says the best leaders take a balanced approach by neither romanticizing mistakes nor scorning them he says that growth can't happen without going through the pain of exposing and acknowledging your weak spots and shortcomings i.e it's better for you and better for everybody to talk about this kind of stuff it will generate respect build on your resilience and character it's good for everybody so I think it's it's quite useful for us to bring a bit of that otherwise it's just me and Dom on stage sharing horror stories so to have a little bit of an academic backbone to it is useful as well it's very human isn't it it's They're like, oh, thank God, it's not just me.

35:37Oh, thank God. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it's been a good, fun thing to do. I know we've done versions of the talk, as I say, three times this year. We're doing it once more at an event called Podge in December. And then I'm hoping to take it a little bit further north, perhaps, next year. so I'm having some interesting early conversations about how we might make that happen so watch this

36:09Matt Baxter:space oh yes without mentioning any names I hope it's who I think it is we'll ask you that after the recording has finished okay um what was your big mishap then or are you not allowed to are we going to be spoiling your talk or can you share one that you didn't include in your talk I can I've actually, what I've done is I've printed out all of them and I've stuck a couple of post-it notes in. How long is it? So for the 24-hour version of this podcast, I can do them all. But I can read a couple because I think they're particularly good. And these, whilst both of these featuring the talk, crucially, they, certainly in the case of the second one, the storyteller himself appears on screen reading it and does it brilliantly.

37:00So I'm sure he won't mind me paraphrasing a bit. But I've got two for you. And these really kind of illustrate the kind of stories that we got. One, they kind of fit broadly into categories, these stories. So the first one is, I would say, technical error, a kind of error of process, design process. And then the second one is more of a kind of everyday, admin error and you'll see what I mean when I when I get into them so the first one was from Francis Jackson and Francis was a founder of OPX brilliant design business called OPX and has since left that business left design entirely and gone on to do something entirely different maybe because of this story not quite sure and she sent us this story she says we worked for some time for the Prince's Trust for the Built Environment.

37:58One particular project involved designing a book, the title of which was Art in the Public Realm. We designed the book and it was printed in its thousands, delivered and distributed across the country. Sometime after this, HRH King Charles himself, Prince Charles at the time, visited the Prince's Trust to see the work that they were doing. On being handed the book on this visit, he returned it immediately as he had spotted what no one else had seen, that the title printed on the cover of the book actually read Art in the Pubic Realm.

38:44Nobody in the design agency, nobody at the printer, Not a single client spotted it. It was designed, printed, distributed, and then several months later, spotted by none other than King Actual Charles.

39:00Matt Baxter:Oh, I bet he thought that was funny. Who knows? Is he known for his sense of humour? Maybe he is, I don't know. I hope so. Yeah. So that was one particularly good one. And then the next one is from our friend Jamie Ellul, who runs Supple Studio in Bath. Oh, yes. And he tells this story in the production of Design Laundry and does it brilliantly. So I hope you won't mind me doing my own version, but this is what Jamie sent in. He says, I once took on a project for a friend's dad. It wasn't very exciting. Sorry, it wasn't very exciting, but I needed the work. This was in the early days of Supple Studio.

39:43The project was going fine. I had to just apply the existing style of a website to a brochure. The client asked me to change a few things which made it look even worse but I made the changes anyway. He goes on to say a couple of days later I emailed the design to a printer to get a costing. The costing came back via email and as I was rushing at the time to catch a train and too much of a technical dimwit to work out how to send the client just the estimate, I forwarded the whole email chain from my phone to the client. One week later, I hadn't heard back, so I politely chased. Two days later, I received an email from the client, which said, sorry for the delay, I've been trying to figure out how to respond after reading the note you sent to your printer.

40:40heart sank i then scrolled down to my initial email to said printer which read please see design attached don't judge me this is the shittest thing i've ever designed

40:55Matt Baxter:oh that's brilliant oh you just need the money sometimes don't you but as i say both of those until francis moved on into another um industry and Entirely, both successful, happy, creative people doing what they do. So ultimately, at the moment when those things happened, disastrous. Yes. Earth-shattering, career-shaking, but they got through it and now they're funny stories in a design talk that emboldened them ultimately and hopefully can embolden an audience when they hear it. There's nothing like a bit of time to heal. Exactly. You've obviously gone through a lot of these stories and you've reflected yourselves, I'm sure.

41:50Matt Baxter:What have you learned the most out of all of this? Have there been any kind of moments of clarity? I think we've learned that there are common types of mistake. creative ones i suppose broadly technical ones but there are also we've kind of these are category of their own really mistakes that are not made by the designer or the creative they're made by the client but they reflect in a disastrous way on the designer in the moment so decisions by clients comments by clients uh so we've got a whole category of those but what we so what i'm saying is what we observed was there are shared mistakes that we all make email fails technical cock-ups bad design decisions they're quite often uh presentation based so lots of kind of embarrassing presentation type stories so they're kind of common themes that that everybody encounters at some point.