What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?
Tales of woe including unpaid cheques, sweary file names and wedding-invitation typos.
‘A wedding invite (I hear a few shudders). This one, particularly inexcusably was my own. Lovingly designed letterpress type, big, bold and beautifully set, with our first names front and centre. After hours of naval-gazing over the exact tint, choosing a nice stock etc they arrived looking glorious and off they popped in the post. About three weeks later I received a call from a very amused mother-in-law.
I had spelt my own name wrong.
In big capital letters.
In the middle.
Sigh… singlehandedly keeping proofreading valued!’
Bronwen Edwards, creative director, Brandhouse
‘As someone who built up my business from scratch out of uni, I’ve definitely made some clangers along the way. I guess up there would be swearing in meetings with clients or taking on projects that I knew straight away would be an absolute nightmare. But I think the clincher here would be giving jpegs on my website from a particularly nightmarish illustration job some bad (or hilarious) names, leaving a certain Design Week reporter to discover the file names in an interview I did a couple of years ago. I’d like to think I’ve learned from most of these “mistakes”.’
Gordon Reid, aka MiddleBoop, illustrator
‘Other than agreeing to write this Voxpop, the most serious blunder I have made is not to trust my instinct. But aren’t mistakes how you “grow as a person”? (Groan). There really isn’t much positivity even a die-hard optimist like myself can muster with a list of errors like mine! But whether it’s trusting a client who promised a cheque will be forthcoming when a niggle inside told me otherwise, a recruitment decision that my stomach wasn’t 100 per cent happy with, or a design that I intuitively knew wasn’t going to win the award, my know-it-all gut is always worth listening to… if only I always would.’
Dan Einzig, founder, Mystery
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Spent far too long trying to do the right thing and working to make change for a (low rent, so called) ‘Brand Design’ company.
They talked BIG, but demonstrated little.
Offered the WORLD to clients but hacked together the mediocre.
Having left, I look back to think I wasted soo much time trying to make a difference… but then it did teach me everything I needed to know about how NOT to run a business!! 🙂