One of my most firmly held beliefs is that everyone, everyone, has the capacity for original thought and expression and that it certainly isn’t  designers, artists and writers alone who are capable of being “creative”. Look at kids. Children are infinitely imaginative, in what they say, what they make and how they display their feelings. Kids are brilliant at it, but adults I think suppress their innate creativity. Children are still inhibited enough to express themselves, even if that means they get all the food out of the cupboards and the fridge and mix them all together on the kitchen floor.

People express their creativity in different ways. They might not be painting a masterpiece, but they experiment with a new outfit, remodel their bathroom or change the background of their PC desktop. Creativity is the driving force behind mankind’s evolution, it’s problem-solving, it’s investigating a fresh approach, it’s gathering together to exchange stories, to gossip and laugh.

So I simply don’t believe you when you claim, “I’m not creative.” You are, you just don’t realise how.

Today I was in a meeting with a man from the start-up Blippar. Blippar is a new London based company elbowing their way into the field of Augmented Reality, and their app is an innovative product in a very competitive market. They may be small but they’ve got global plans and they’ve already produced campaigns for big players including Waitrose, Cadburys and Heinz.

My problem with AR in the past has been that it’s very cool but very difficult to convince clients of the tangible gains they’ll get from it. At the moment it’s all focused on the social, on raising brand awareness and this mostly seems to consist of getting Likes on Facebook.

What Blippar are offering is a new advertising platform, and trying to get brands to run campaigns through their app, or as they put it, to be the Facebook or Twitter equivalent for AR. Once a user has downloaded the Blippar app they can interact with all the campaigns run through Blippar, creating a growing user base with every new advert run. This, to me, is a much stronger idea than creating bespoke apps for every client which always suffer from the step of convincing people to download the app in the first place.

I was impressed by the ambition the Blippar team seem to have, and their willingness to work with other agencies to push forward new ideas. They’ve also put a lot of thought into that most useful of digital traits, data-capture, with full analytics as part of any campaign run through their app. I’m very excited to see what happens for them in the next year.

Maybe I’m being too negative. Maybe all this blogging shows there’s hope for the written word yet. One of my favourite twitterers, @asburyandasbury a well known copywriter, ran the fantastic Mr. Blog site, a wonderful, irreverent collection of all the shops in England (and abroad) with Mr. in the name. Although sadly discontinued, it’s still available for perusal in all it’s whimsical, pun-laden glory.

But while I can think of this, and a dozen other, charming, witty and distracting examples of excellent writing, there seems to be very little critical design thinking. Where, in this age of instant access to limitless information, is the debate, the discussion and the reasoning?

Rick Poynor, in a CR Things to Look Forward to from a couple of years back, professed a hope that Design Criticism would be on the rise, thanks to new courses in MA Design Writing. Well I’m still waiting for the next wave of verbose and eloquent and other poncy adjective-armed designers to emerge, but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon.

I want to make a last ditch stand for the art of language, for the power of words, one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Written words may lack the visual, immediate impact of a stunning photograph or the intrigue of a beautiful painting, but in my, nerdy opinion, they possess a quiet power. Letters on the page, on the screen, are unequivocal, they are ultimate tool for the delivering of information in the clearest form we have ever devised. Word’s speak straight to the brain, the medium pretty much doesn’t matter, and so they allow the mind to create it’s own images, it’s own interpretations, expressions and creativity. I am proud to say that I can express myself so vividly using words.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a thousand words, well, they say so much more than a picture can convey.

Because it’s true that when are not good at dealing with personal health issues, whether it’s admitting that they are feeling depressed or arranging a normal check-up, men, me, you (if you’re a man) probably even Tom Selleck, don’t take looking after themselves seriously enough. Movember is a movement that began a few years ago in Australia to get men talking about prostate cancer, a disease that will affect 1 in 9 men. Now the charity has grown worldwide, with over 100,000 participants in the UK and over 1 million around the globe.

So to the crunch; on the 1st November I will be shaving off my beard, which I’ve lovingly tended for over 2 years, and starting afresh. As bonus fun I’m asking people who donate to the charity through my Movember page to vote on what kind of moustache I should grow.

Vote 1. Jason Lee

Vote 2. Hulk Hogan

Vote 3. Ming the Merciless

Vote 4. Monkey Tail Beard

So if you fancy dipping into your pocket to support a very worthy cause please check out my Movember page, I’ll also be bombarding my social media channels with moustache related goodness. Onward MoBros!

It was also a breakfast awards ceremony, an hour long ceremony held at the IMAX in Waterloo, and luckily there was a cracking buffet laid on. I won’t list all the details, but in summary there was one award with a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, given for concepts visualised by agency heavy weights including Glue Isobar and Leo Burnett. The winners got a wedge towards turning the idea into a full campaign.

1st place was awarded to Grey London for their Augmented Reality Hedgerow concept for Jordans Cereal, a deserving winner I think, although DKLW’s idea for a fund-raiser for The Micro-Loan Foundation was a very strong contender. You can see all the winners and nominees if you’re so inclined at artofoutdoor.com

As I was in a team of people I’d never met before I was a little apprehensive, but with a few drinks we were all soon getting to know each other before the charity client and brief was revealed to us, the Worldwide Association of Girl Guides and their mission to tackle violence against women in communities across the globe. With such a massive task and just two hours to come up with a solution and present it to our peers, this was a much more daunting task than I had anticipated for a Wednesday evening.

But adversity often brings out the best in people and so it proved, with the busy scribbling of pens and noisy debate, fueled by plenty of beer, everyone bent to the task. After arguing for too long over which angle to approach such a complex, global problem, we came up with the idea of setting a date to effectively declare an end to violence against women in all it’s forms and work backwards with a world-wide campaign to encourage people to sign-up. We’d use the Girl Guides grass-roots organisation to spread the word and a website as a central international hub. Not a bad idea, but before we could further flesh out the idea further our time was up and we had to present to the judges.

Well long story short we didn’t win the competition, the judges went with the very impressive @saathcixgrads, but in truth pretty much all the teams came up with practical and smart ideas. What I learnt was not only is the combination of a tight deadline, a good cause and free beer powerful motivators, but that presenting an idea is just as important as coming up with the idea itself. The two top teams on the night not only had a strong creative execution, but they put their ideas to the judges and client in a succinct and engaging way. An idea is as good as wasted if it can’t be communicated properly and this is the essence of graphic design, although in this case witty banter and visual aids won the day.

All in all I had a brilliant night and much thanks is due to the organisers. In a way we were all winners, the Girl Guides Association got a bunch of creative ideas and the rest of us got a brain work-out and a buffet. I call that a great result all round. Sign-up me up for the next Brainy Hacks event!

Now, two of the Green Team have so impressed the people of Groundwork that they are helping them to set up their own business, a landscaping company, and I met with them to brainstorm some ideas for a brand. The session, for me at least, was brilliant fun, chatting through things that seem so important to me, like font choices, shapes and colours, with guys who have come from a completely different background. I think it’s fair to say that I learnt more from them, than they learnt from me.

Anyways, I’ve been working up these original scamps into more finished marks, which you can have a looksee below. The name we came up with, by a process of discussion, argument and finally a democratic vote involving as many Groundwork staff as we could pull together, is Planet Earth, a touch grandiose maybe but it has a very nice ring to it I think. The logos are now back with the guys for their thoughts then I’ll be working up revisions for a final logo.

Got some thoughts? I’d love to hear them in the comments. By the way, feel free to take inspiration from these ideas, ill-formed as they are, but remember where you saw them first.

The Remastered idea itself is very cool, a project that invited 12 current artists and designers to come up with a new take on classic works of art, including works by Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, William Turner and Edvard Munch. The website is definitely worth checking out and I really hope they bring the exhibition back to London as some of the work looks awesome.

Anyways, on to the day itself…

The workshop itself was good fun if slightly underwhelming. It promised that’d we “remaster type for the digital age” and I’m pretty sure we didn’t achieve anything like that, but we get to muck about with conductive paint, drawing letterforms and hooking them up to 9v batteries. I also learnt a few typographic facts that I didn’t know before, like that Steve Jobs designed the font Georgia, but the most interesting thing was the demonstration of an Arduino board, a very cool, open-source powered, mini-computer that can be programmed with C++ to do basic commands and interact with circuits.

All in all I had a great afternoon getting my hands dirty doing something I’d never normally try so for that it was worth the totally FREE entry fee! I also got a bit high off the fumes from the conductive paint. Thanks jotta, hope you keep putting on stuff like this.

Enough talk you want photos right?

I’m going to London, a long held ambition of mine, to a new job and new opportunities, to live in Hackney, the obvious destination for all trendy young hipsters, with full beards and fixed gear bikes.

When I first graduated from uni I tried to move to the big smoke, to find my fame and fortune or some such bollocks, but I couldn’t find any place to work, the recession being shiny and new at that time. So I ended up in Norwich landing a job at Soak Digital, for which I am entirely indebted to Mr Mattie Lynn who put me forward (take note graduates, it’s really not what you know but who).

But now I find myself about to start work at an ad production agency in Clerkenwell, something that I’ve always said I wouldn’t do. At uni I read a lot about ethics in design, and formed a sort of moral code of my own, based partly on the First Things First manifesto and partly on Bill Hicks famous line “if you work in advertising, kill yourself”. But this personal hypocrisy aside I’m pretty damn excited about the future.

More tales from the country-boy in the big smoke soon.

Please be nice, as I’m no developer and for coding help I’ve been relying heavily on my good pal Daniel Sturman, who actually does know what he’s doing.

Let me know what you think of the new style and stay tuned for more Alan-related exploits and exciting new features like a new portfolio section. Oh la la!