If there is one thing that will remind me of this past year forever, it will be the smell of Subway. Every Friday, after the Creative Economy lectures, we gathered in Hannafords, the student union bar on Kingston Hill campus, and shared drinks and laughter. Thanks to a Subway right next to the bar, the distinct smell pervaded the air and, as much as it annoyed me, it will probably make me nostalgic from now on.

Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans – if those plans had worked out, I would never have sat in Hannafords or moved to London. The plan was to move to Oxford with a friend, and we had made it all the way back in early 2009, sitting in The Red Lion in Oxford. He moved to South Korea a few months later, I stayed in Cardiff another year and after I realized that the MA in Translation Studies at Cardiff University was not going anywhere and thus getting me nowhere, I considered my options. The journey to figure out what I wanted out of life eventually led me to book a single train ticket to Manchester and travel around the UK from there (eventually arriving in the Scottish seaside town Montrose), because I have always been learning most about myself when somewhere new on my own. (I highly recommend reading Alain de Botton’s “The Art of Travel” on that subject.) I didn’t have a plan when I returned from my travels but I had dots that I could start connecting: lines that eventually pointed towards London.

 
I could pretend to remember what the USER model is, which we discussed and re-visited a few times over the first weeks of the Design Thinking & Entrepreneurship in Practice module. The truth is that I don’t, just like I don’t remember some things from other modules — and that’s not only okay, it’s a good thing, because it leaves more brain capacity to consider all the things I do remember.

Something I do remember is having to go to the toilet as a mentally impaired person and the constraints this placed on how I could act, constraints I had never truly been aware of. It’s different imagining what it would be like, and actually acting it out — a lesson I learned over and over during this past year, not only in the Design Thinking module, but also in Leadership in the Creative Economy. When Professor Richard Cohen asked us to roleplay a publishing deal discussion, it was perhaps the deepest I was thrown into cold water, but ultimately it was also the one where I learned the most useful things for my future: how publishers think and act when they want to sign an author.

“While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him” wrote Dostoevski as quoted in Sam Richards‘s powerful talk on empathy. His speech is a formidable exercise in empathy, wherein the American audience is asked to put themselves in the shoes of the Iraqi people. Empathy is perhaps the most important lesson that we were taught in the Design Thinking module: there was the time when we had to go out and ask people about why they were wearing that particular pair of shoes, then we had to design a new elevator button, and finally there was my endevaour to understand the children at Kingston Market.

Another empathy-related exercise which went a step further was the storytelling and creation of a persona. Slightly different from empathy, it required an outside analysis of a system first and then the invention of a third person who might be interacting with that system. While fellow Publishing & MACE coursemate Sarah identified train ticket machines as a particularly daunting task for a first-time user (truth be told, thanks to the user-unfriendly interface the machines sometimes still confuse me after five years of living in Britain), I struggled with an ATM that decided I needed to use it in French. This is a problem I have since become aware of with many ATM machines, while some do ask what language I prefer, others simply assume it is French. Oddly enough, when I use my British card, which is registered at a Welsh branch, I never get the option of choosing Welsh (unless I am indeed in Wales) — not that I would need that option, but I do wonder what the rationale is behind building multiple language support into the interface and leaving out non-English British options.
The interface design is perhaps the most intriguing lesson I have been learning – and struggling with – this year, and it will also be an important part of my dissertation. I have long been fascinated by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and often wondered why the same concepts are not applied throughout all interactive systems, and above all the concept of staying out of the way which Sollenberger argues for.

The start-up business was undoubtedly an uphill struggle. As Paul Graham argues, “you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.” The issue of course was that there were no colleagues to start the business with, most of us hadn’t met before the course started and thus only had a few weeks to find people we could join forces with and build a company. Eventually, Janja Song, Edward Keeble, Harry Logan-Jones and I decided on working together, and launched Cloudbow, for which we came up with more ideas than we could ever have possibly managed to squeeze into the few months that we had.

There have been severable valuable lessons I have learned from running a company:

1) Early failure is not an option, it is a necessity.
This has already been argued by other entrepreneurs: fail early, fail often, writes Mitchell Ashley. The amount of work that went into concepts and ideas that were never made reality is a significant percentage of the overall work that went into the company. I designed a website which never went online, and we created a completely different one in January. I also designed several flyers which were never printed, because the events they were for were never organised.

2) Organising an event is not easy.
This is perhaps where we had the biggest illusions. As can be seen in the video above, we were initially running with a one-month preparation phase for an event, when we did not even have a venue yet. We invested a lot of time into discussing terms and conditions with the Student Union to try and get one of their venues for free, but more and more constraints were placed on us than we were willing to accept. Organising an event takes a lot of time, a lot of negotiating and also a lot of marketing and advertising, the latter of which we fell short of because we didn’t have any more time left.

3) Communication breakdowns need to be handled well.
This was, by far, the biggest issue we ran into, and because initially we were hoping that help from outside would save us, that help never came. Things fell apart dramatically, and time pressure only added to the communication breakdown. I am aware that I didn’t handle the issue well (two of us wrote an ultimatum to the other two, and had it signed by the course leader), but ultimately I am glad that it happened. Because it allowed me to understand how communication breakdowns occur in the first place, and how I may address this better in the future. As some teams last year also encountered communication issues, I can only hope that future students will be warned about that possible stage in the process and perhaps given an adequate skillset to respond to the situation better than we did.

I still strongly believe in the business idea that we had. We identified a market demand and, with more time, we could have turned it into a profitable company. But I am also happy that the company will be shut down soon, and take all those lessons away with me.

Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans — after two primary schools, three high schools and four universities I am more than aware of the truth this saying holds. In a way I am reluctant to make any plans for the future, but on the other hand I also can’t prevent myself from considering what will happen from here on out.

There are not many people who I truly admire. Some fascinate me, some I have a lot of respect for, but admiration is reserved for a very select few. One of these is Merlin Mann, who, if you know me in real life, I’ve probably mentioned a few times to you already. When I went to Brighton last September, it was to hear talks by John Gruber who spoke about his auteur theory of design and to see Merlin Mann give his first talk outside the US, ever. Some days it still hits me and I realize anew that I have actually seen one of my heroes. I wonder how many people can say that.

Mann’s latest project, in a very long line of projects, is my favourite one yet: Back to Work, a podcast on the 5by5 network where he talks for about an hour (almost) every week about how to make your dreams come true. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I have been struggling to come up with a plan for after I finish this MA. I am 25, and I’d like to start paying off that huge debt I’ve acquired at some point soon, and actually get a regular paycheck. It’s been an adventurous journey through education and I’ve made mistakes along the way (Cardiff University being by far the biggest one), but I’m mostly happy about how it all turned out. One of the things that Mann is very adamant about is that you need to find out what makes you happy. Stefan Sagmeister once gave a talk about how good design makes him happy.

What really makes me happy is getting into the flow. I learned this year that, while entrepreneurship is fun and while I enjoy learning about managing creativity and the publishing industry, it’s not at all what I want to do. I want to write. This year has been a big success in that regard: together with fellow young writers I have written and recorded an audiobook at the Luxembourgish publisher Op der Lay, the first edition of which is almost sold out and about which the national press has been writing great reviews. The dream, ultimately, is to write radio plays for BBC Radio 4, and, yes, maybe even my very own drama.

The lessons in entrepreneurship I have learned this year may be able to help me with the pursuing of this dream. I have been considering to become a freelance writer, a tough gig as writing initially has no tangible value, and hone my writing skills until I have something good enough to submit to the BBC.

 
What are the steps towards that stage? What I know is that I need to get out of London and that August cannot come soon enough in that regard. While it is often listed as one of the world’s creative hubs (even though there is an argument that it is jeopardising that position), London has killed my creativity, and I long for the days when I could look out of my window and see mountains instead of an ugly tower. I miss the Welsh people that are so different from Londoners who I will never identify with, and I miss sitting by the sea and scribbling more ideas down than I will ever be able to expand on. Cardiff is also where my network is — and I’ve learned this year how important a network is. Nobody at networking events cares whether you’re a student who wants to get an insight into the industry, and it is only through my personal network that I managed to find people who were willing to offer some of their time to me and share some of their experiences and knowledge. Sometimes directly, such as Daniel Grosvenor, sub-editor of theSprout, sometimes indirectly, such as Mark Chatterley, whose company I found out about thanks to a friend, author Jaque Thay, who is writing for the show Supermarket Matters.

So the first step will be moving back to Cardiff this summer, and start writing as much as I can. I need to show more initiative and entrepreneurship, send articles around and turn this blog into a place where I can advertise my writing. I need to use my network as a starting point to make lasting connections with people, and I need to apply for an internship at the BBC to get a foot in the door. I need to observe and emphathise with everyone I meet. And I need to make as many mistakes as I can as early on in the process as possible.

I am already making some money from the audiobook (a tiny, almost insignificant amount, but it’s a start) and I have been paid to read at literary festivals back in Luxembourg that I got to participate at thanks to the young writers platform I launched in 2007 (I engaged in entrepreneurship and didn’t even realise it at the time!). I’ve done radio and newspaper interviews. I know I can get there. And now that I have a thorough understanding of the publishing indstry and learned all these invaluable lessons about how to communicate effectively, how to market something and how important time is in evolving an idea, I feel that I am well equipped to reach my goal.

I may be leaving London and the Creative Economy course behind soon, but I’ll carry the countless great memories and the invaluable lessons with me wherever I’ll go. So listen out for an Afternoon Play by yours truly, sometime in the next few years. Determination and boldness are everything.

Last month, I wrote a post about my favourite adverts. That list has just gotten longer. If you’re anything like me, you could not possibly care any less about that whole royal wedding shindig (and it’s a shame the Republican Street Party in Camden got banned by the council). T-Mobile has been delivering quirky and unusual ads for a while now, but this one goes beyond everything they’ve done so far. They’ve selected look-alikes and created their version of the royal wedding which is so ridiculous, I can’t help but wonder how long it will take before it gets banned. It’ll surely upset some royalists, but that makes it even funnier.

LBF, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, was quite the experience. I have been to many fairs in my life, but none have been anything like this one. From the first morning when I arrived, I was in awe. Earls Court was filled with books to the last corner, and people who make their livelihood writing, publishing, selling or distributing them: heaven. While even after three days I am still not entirely sure what deals were being struck at all those tables, I have come across many people whom I’ve had the utmost respect for for a long time. I ended up buying a cup of coffee next to Richard Charkin, CEO of Bloomsbury, Cory Doctorow rushed past me in the Digital Zone, and I met a lot of new, interesting people.

I went to talks by Richard Charkin, Cory Doctorow, James Bridle, the winners of the International Young Publishing Entrepreneur Award, I saw interviews with Kazuo Ishiguro and Boris Anukin. I went to a seminar with David Rowan, Frank Rose and Matt Locke, and to one with Tom Hall, Joe Pickering, Davina Quarterman and Angus Phillips. I saw presentations by companies such as Sideways and iPublishCentral. And I spent £1.95 on a tea that I had to drink black because they were out of milk.

To tell the truth, my brain is still trying to catch up with the massive amount of information that got dumped on it these past few days. I got a real buzz from learning from these people – I took more notes at the LBF than during most lectures. I could hardly keep up with scribbling down all the knowledge that got thrown at me, and it felt absolutely amazing!

I also loved the fact that I had so many languages around me constantly. French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish… This is my world (and multilingualism is about the only thing I really miss about my home country). Constantly switching languages and being surrounded by books, while learning from the very best in the industry: there cannot possibly be anything better. I cannot wait for LBF 2012.

Tibor Fischer interviewed Boris Anukin.

Boris Anukin spoke about he doesn’t read fiction anymore, and about the origins of the Russian crime genre.

Kazuo Ishiguro spoke about his next book and how authors may be able to survive in a world where books are pirated.

I was tempted to listen in on some of the talks at these tables, but the space was too open to do it inconspicuously.

Lost? There were close to 1700 different companies at the fair.

This, quite frankly, shocked me a lot, and I could never work for such a publisher.

I feel increasingly privileged to be on the publishing course at Kingston University. The amount of knowledge thrown at me and the amount of highly respectable people I have met is extraordinary. Richard Duguid, editorial manager of Penguin, was one of my lecturers last term, and I heard talks by the likes of Patrick Keogh, creator of Faber Academy and Head of Guardian Masterclasses. To me, this is (almost) up there with having seen talks by Merlin Mann of Inbox Zero and 43Folders fame, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, arguably the two biggest stars in nerdworld.

As every week since the beginning of the course, yesterday we had another inspiring speaker come in to give a two hour lecture. This time it was bestselling author RJ Ellory, a man who wrote twenty-two novels before he ever got published. I admit that I have not yet read any of his books, although I do remember seeing A Quiet Belief in Angels piled up in bookshops (of which I have now bought a copy). Ellory is an incredibly captivating speaker, to say the least. His determination and inspirational tale did something to me I hadn’t really felt since my last creative writing classes of my BA: I couldn’t wait to get out of there and start writing, and at the same time I wanted to just sit there and listen to him talk for the rest of my life. I learned quite a bit about the publishing world from his lecture, yes, but that wasn’t what I carried away with me: here was a man who has had many dark hours (he lost his mother aged seven and doesn’t know anything about his father apart from a first name), but he showed this incredible get-up-and-go attitude. The sheer willpower and belief in himself to write twenty-two novels that kept being turned down by over a hundred publishers, and then getting back to writing after an eight year break is almost unimaginable to me.

Where were you when 9/11 happened? I was at a football game. I remember my dad telling me about two planes having flown into the Twin Towers – buildings I had never even heard of. It was the end of a summer that I’d spent celebrating for having made it through the most horrible year in school I ever had. I’d almost failed maths and thus the year (a part of me still dies every time I think about factorising polynomials, particularly perfect square trinomials), I was about to switch schools for the second time (out of what would eventually be three) to get out of doing advanced maths and it had ruined my dreams of studying quantum mechanics. Oddly enough, I would turn up to exams the years after that without even having looked at what we were being tested on, because I had understood everything during lessons and sat outside the classroom explaining e.g. Euclidean vectors (which I love to this day) to classmates who were panicking. And then I walked away with the highest possible mark. Long story short: 9/11 didn’t have an impact on my life other than marking the end of a summer which was pivotal to me anyway. I was shocked and emotionally shaken, but fifteen year-old me ultimately had more pressing thoughts.

I think I lost the goal in my life ever since I had to give up on studying quantum mechanics. When other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I still remember observing a supernova through a telescope at a gathering of astronomers my dad took me to, a breathtaking and devastatingly beautiful picture I will never forget. Over time, that fascination turned from an obsession with the uninamginably big to the unimaginably small – from protons and neutrons to quarks and strings.

When 9/11 happened, RJ Ellory was at work, watching the events as they unfolded on television. And he realized that thousands of lives had stopped right that moment. People went to work one morning, and suddenly all those lives hung in limbo. Relationships, hopes, dreams, everything unfinished. Never look back on your life and ask yourself “what if I had…?” is one of the lessons he learned early on in his life, and so he sat down and began writing again. Two years later, Orion put his novel into bookshops.

The last couple of weeks have been incredible for me. I am now a published author myself, I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday in the place that I have been calling home for five years now, and in the census question on national identity I made a tick next to Welsh. For most of my life I didn’t even have a national identity! Yet still there are so many what ifs. The difference is that I finally feel like I am ready to tackle them. Thanks to one man I will probably never meet again.

That’s the true greatness of this publishing course: it doesn’t just challenge me, it inspires me.

I am crap at large timeframes. I mean really crap. I need deadlines. Over the past couple of weeks, we have often spoken about creativity only being possible when there are constraints. That’s the problem I find myself having with my novel, that’s been half-done and gathering dust now for longer than I have actually worked on it: there are no constraints anymore since I finished my BA and didn’t have to work on it. I need deadlines. I need imminent deadlines even more. Some people can’t cope with pressure, and while on some level I can understand that, I must feel pressure to deliver. I don’t need someone to watch over me (indeed the more you watch over me, the more I will refuse to do any work), I need someone to give me a deadline. Not a deadline that’s six months away, but a deadline that’s one week from now, with just enough work that I can humanly manage to do. A deadline that’s six months away has no significance to my mind (unless it is one big deadline with smaller ones on the way), a deadline that’s right in front of my face has my brain firing neurons and come up with ideas that would otherwise have stayed dormant for the rest of my life.

I have spent the last couple of months racking my brain about what to do for my dissertation. When I say racking, I mean I thought about it, more or less vaguely, because, you know, there was still sooo much time left. When Catherine, our course director, today mentioned that we needed to tell her by next Friday what we wanted to do for our dissertation, there was a short moment of panic. The most viable idea I had come up with so far, and that I had spoken to her about already last term, was to do research about Creative Commons and Copyleft. While that is a subject which really intrigues me it has one major problem: it won’t have any value whatsoever to me when I try to get a job, because I don’t actually want to work in that sort of legal environment. I am a creative. I love writing, I love art, I love video-editing, I love technology. I also toyed around with the idea of doing something with children’s publishing, but all the ideas I kept having would have involved the nightmare of parental permission slips. Too time-consuming, too much hassle for a dissertation that I have only four months to do.

It is ironic that in Catherine’s class this morning, Managing Creativity and Innovation, we were talking about how the mythical Eureka! moment does not actually exist. Ideas don’t come out of nowhere, the brain is constantly making (un)conscious connections, and eventually all the different components fall into place. And for this to happen, I need a deadline. (Hiking does it as well, but I haven’t done that since I left Wales. I do miss the Taff Trail!) The short moment of panic did it for me. Even though Catherine told us not to panic, it was exactly what I had needed all this time. Something clicked, and finally all the different ideas that I’d been playing around with the last couple of months – more with the objective of a plan B in case I didn’t find a job and needed to go self-employed – fell into place. What if I could do it as my dissertation, as it is, in my opinion, very relevant to publishing and the creative economy in general… I drew a mindmap right that moment and wrote a whole page about what I would have to do (yes, it was a lecture, but it was either do it right there and then, or lose it all). It’s a practical project; I think I have finally come to realise that I am not an academic researcher. As much as I romanticise the idea of being one, I’m just not and I need to accept that before I make a mistake. (Incidentally, today I also learned that there is a practice-based PhD, so maybe, someday, people won’t have to call me Dr Heles as a joke anymore.) Within that practical project, I would be able to make use of all those passions mentioned in the previous paragraph. And that makes me incredibly excited!

I need to talk to my course director first, of course. And, who knows, maybe I will still end up doing something completely different. But, damn, it feels so good to finally have a very precise idea and a rough outline of what I need to do to achieve that. The proposal is due on April 15, so I feel I am still mostly on track. And if I am allowed to do that project, I could still turn it into a business after I graduate, having everything in place right when I get out of university.

Watch this space.

Last Friday, we looked at what makes a successful advert. This got me thinking which advert I could actually recall and knew what they were about. The first of my top three is the Groupon advert with the great Timothy Hutton, broadcast during the Super Bowl 2011. If you know me in real life, you know that I have quite an offensive humour myself, so this one is right up my alley.

The next one goes in a completely different direction and is beyond stunning. Created by the Parisian based agency Ogilvy, it’s a piece of visual poetry for a company that, let’s face it, I would normally never be interested in: Louis Vuitton.

Last but not least, here’s an advert with international superstar Conan O’Brien, who exploded on the global market when NBC decided they could do without him and millions of people gathered to get him back on screen (he now of course has a show on TBS, over which he has complete creative control). So it’s obvious why, during the mega-hype surrounding the launch of his new talk show Conan, American Express decided to use him for their latest campaign. And what an advert it is!

Which adverts would you select as your favourites?

Our company website has been live for a couple of weeks now, ever since the Trade Fair on 10 February, to be exact, and we are already featuring three inspriring artists and one great musician. So it is time to take a look back at the conceptualisation and the design issues encountered along the way.

I started work on the website a while ago, and came up with a somewhat minimalist mockup, that I envisioned to be rounded off by a few subtle UI enhancements. It was based on the 960 grid system.

You may have noticed that Cloudbow.co.uk today looks nothing like this initial design (apart from the social network links at the top). After playing around with this same design, Christmas eventually came and went, and on 11 January, Janja, Edward and I sat down over lunch and scribbled down ideas, drew up possible layouts, and eventually settled on something that became the basis for what you can see now. Personally, I found the experience of sitting down and using pen and paper for a website completely counterintuitive – I don’t ever work with paper for these things. It’s always felt like an unnecessary additional step, as I have to do a mock up on the screen either way, to get a specific idea about the dimensions that will work best. You might have noticed that the website is still loosely based on the 960.gs.

I had decided early on in the process that I would be using WordPress as a back end. I know the platform really well, administrate several sites running it already, from a somewhat shortlived podcast (that we’ve been trying to revive) to the wonderful Mind Vault, and it can be extended just far enough to serve as CMS for our needs without becoming too big to handle. Also, instead of having to write a basic CMS from scratch (which I have done before and was fully aware that I wouldn’t have time to do in this case) it saved me a lot of hassle (unfortunately it also created some). The initial design was close to a typical blog layout: header, content, blog navigation (including the ever-annoying meta navigation, because I copied the code from the default theme).

The navigation eventually got put under the header (notice that at this stage, we still had the old logo). The main navigation at this point is plain without any text-decoration in each of :link, :hover, :visited, and :active. Thanks to the magic of WordPress categories and a bit of PHP code, the sidebar content has completely changed and now gets generated dynamically – updates are automatically put under Latest News, artists are automatically listed under Featured Artists. A problem I encountered at this stage was with the CSS structure: despite using different classes, I couldn’t figure out why the social network links at the top behaved the same way as the links in the articles (i.e. the images had a border on :hover). As always, it came down to tracking down a line of code typed earlier, which controlled the behaviour of links across the site. The amount of time I have wasted in my life tracking down these silly mistakes!

The landing page was the toughest nut to crack. I had planned to integrate the slider into WordPress – that proved to be an impossibility. I even tried to use a WordPress plugin for this, and installed and tested several different sliders – none of them would work. To this day, I don’t know why. Annoyed by WordPress, saved by WordPress: I eventually decided to change the settings, and put in a different Site URL, so that despite being installed in the root directory, WordPress would behave as if it was in the subdirectory /site, freeing up the root directory for an old-fashioned, simple index.html. Here, I could get the slider to work. Not really knowing what I should do with the navigation (the mock-up we did in January just had huge boxes, which looked really bad on screen), I played with opacity in CSS (thank you, browser developers, for each of you having stupidly come up with a different code to achieve this) and tried to make the buttons a bit more appealing. In the end, I also decided against using a huge logo (which we’d agreed on during our lunch meeting) and changed the header on the main pages to look like the landing page, and thus make the site more consistent throughout.

And there we go. At about 6am on 10 February, the coding was all done, and after a few hours of sleep, two hours before the trade fair, the content had been put in as well and the site went live (a close call, but, hey, done’s done). Complete with new logo, done in-house this time by our very own Janja Song. The feedback about the website so far has been largely positive, so I am pleased.

Now stop reading and go check out the site, at Cloudbow.co.uk.