HEAD BLOG

The worst piece of advice, professionally at least, was to throw out the rule book. As a student studying creative writing it seemed a strange sort of direction, especially coming off a module where we’d discussed how Auden was estimated to have tried almost every form of poetic structure going.

To me, rules aren’t there to be broken, not really. I like the way structure (whilst we are on the subject) channels ideas and even informs their exposition. Yep, when it comes to the rule book I’m there chapter and verse.

So it’s always strange when the way you crack a design job wide open is by ignoring rules altogether. Recently we had to think differently for an online job and the best way, we found, was to throw out the rule book.

Sort of.

What we did was to ignore convention by asking ourselves what if this wasn’t an online job. What if it were in a different medium altogether.

It got us thinking.

Differently.

So we still followed rules. Just not the ones we were meant to.

I was seventeen years old, sat in an eighteenth century manor house and receiving the sort of English lesson normally reserved for twelve year olds.

The first day of an A-level English literature course ought to have been a baptism of fire. At least the way they used to teach it. Shakespeare was a given but Pope, Eliot (T S not George) and Bronte would demand close reading and F R Leavis would show us how.

That wasn’t how it started.

After a brief appraisal of literary terms our teacher decided to start again. This time at the very beginning. Read more…