Projects
- This Aussie Label's Concept Stores are Breathtaking // EditorialSet foot inside any one of Aussie brand Assembly Label’s stores and you’ll notice one thing: there’s a complete and utter lack of fuss. It’s that modern effortlessness you want your own place to emulate and suddenly dousing your walls in white paint, sanding back your bookshelves and lovingly investing in a family of pot plants seems like a fabulous weekend project. It takes a good eye to mould a retail space this cool, and here that eye belongs to the label’s creative director, Damien Horan. Co
- How to Plan a Launch Event (That's Not Like All the Others) // EditorialAllow us to propose a theory; that the best events are the ones you don’t remember as an “event” at all. You probably just remember feeling like you were having a pretty great time (or maybe a really great time, if an open bar was involved). As a brand, a launch event can be the perfect means to get your product in the hands and minds of the right people. But there’s a knack to making sure your guests leave feeling all warm and fuzzy instead of feeling like, well, they’ve just left another produ
- This Piece of Tech Lets Cyclists Choose Their Own Adventure // EditorialWhen you ask an entrepreneur what triggered their start-up idea, they’ll usually recall a pivotal moment of frustration. For London mates Tom Putnam and Mark Jenner, that moment was when the pair had a lunch date at the pub and Mark showed up late. “One day we met up for lunch and Mark got lost on his bike on the way there,” Tom recalls. “We talked about how frustrating that was and that it would be helpful to just have a compass on your bike. Then we got onto (naively!) how it couldn’t be that hard to make a compass point to somewhere you’d searched on your phone. That was the start.” Tom and Mark’s idea was to help get urban cyclists where they needed to go without taking away their freedom to explore. While navigation devices are nothing new, most direct you with turn-by-turn instructions, which can amount to uncomfortable and unimaginative rides. Not to mention it kind of sucks the fun out of the whole thing. The pair began developing a piece of tech, aptly named Beeline, that works on a concept of “fuzzy navigation”. Once you plug in a destination into the app, Beeline’s screen displays an arrow that constantly points you to your destination and tells you how far you have to go. That’s it. It’s a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure tool that lets you try out new shortcuts, cut through your favourite park or zip down an alley way to avoid traffic. Armed with their idea and enough enthusiastic feedback from friends to know they were onto something, the pair launched a Kickstarter campaign, meeting their goal of $103,000 in all of two days, and raising $229,000 in total. Their Seedrs campaign that followed raised a further $850,000, giving Tom and Mark the financial backing they needed to officially launch Beeline in January this year. “The best is when we hear of people using it for completely different things than what we intended,” Tom says. “Someone sent us a video of backcountry skiing out in the mountains – a far cry from the urban cycling we thought they’d be using it for.” The start-up now has a London office and a team of seven, including a CTO who happened to be one of the company’s original backers. And while they haven’t faced any “catastrophic cock-ups” until now, Tom admits they’re reminded daily of how much they still don’t know. “Every day, we’re stepping into new territory, which we don’t necessarily have experience of, whether it’s working out how to solder circuit boards or how to negotiate our first retail partnership. We’ve found the best way [to learn] is just to ask for help as much as possible and it’s amazing how much people are prepared to offer.” As for what advice he’d give to budding entrepreneurs who are yet to take the leap, Tom’s advice is simple: don’t. “Don’t take a leap, just take a small step. Then another, then another. Leaving your job and putting all your savings into something is terrifying. But staying up late a few nights to make some mock-ups and show some friends to see if they like it isn’t. If that works, take it from there and before you know it you’ll be leaping.”
- Is 'Wrong Theory' the key to Groundbreaking Design? // EditorialScott Dadich, former editor-in-chief of iconic tech magazine Wired, believes that to create something truly interesting you have to ruin it. He credits his unusual approach to a single painting by Edgar Degas. Entitled Jockeys Before The Race, it’s a seemingly innocuous painting now but was one of the most radical paintings of its time. The artwork depicts three beautifully painted, and perfectly composed, jockeys warming up their horses in a field. But Degas added a jarring element that effectively destroyed the painting’s technical perfection – a straight, grey pole that ran vertically through the scene and right through one of the horses’ heads. It’s this painting that Scott, a trailblazer in global design, credits with his most disruptive design idea: do the wrong thing. Speaking at this year’s Semi-Permanent conference in Sydney on the WIREDxDESIGN panel, Scott shared why that pole made such a difference. “Degas wasn’t just “thinking outside of the box,” he said. “He wasn’t trying to overturn convention to find a more perfect solution. He was purposely creating something that wasn’t pleasing; intentionally doing the wrong thing.” This concept of purposefully ruining something that is technically perfect is, what Scott calls, ‘Wrong Theory’. By using this approach Scott ensures the Wired team push the boundaries of design. The steps are simple; first you experiment with the design, fine tune it until it’s perfect and then you purposely ruin it. Scott says it’s this approach that has led to some of the most engaging and aesthetically interesting pages in the magazine. One common method used at Wired is to give one designer’s “perfected” work to another with instructions to mess it up. Once, one designer, who had meticulously placed leaves on each and every branch of an illustrated tree, gave her design to a colleague who, much to the first designer’s horror, selected all the leaves and dragged them to the side. Her work was “ruined” in all of two seconds, but the page itself suddenly became intriguing. Wrong Theory is an idea that can stretch across industries with Scott joined on the WIREDxDESIGN panel by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who agrees that stepping away from what “makes sense” is what makes design interesting. Bjarke is no stranger to disrupting ideas with his architecture agency Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) known for creating proposals that, at first, seem ridiculous (the agency recently put forward a proposal for a waste-to-energy power plant in Copenhagen, topped with a mountain that people can ski and hike on). Bjarke says that BIG, in a sense, have adopted a type of “wrong theory” in that their architects often approach projects as if they’re telling a joke. “You start off setting the scene, laying the groundwork,” explains Bjarke. “Then you hit them with the punch line, which suddenly changes everything but at the same time it all makes perfect sense.”
- You Need to See This Iconic Hong Kong Hotel's Bold Makeover // EditorialIf you find yourself meandering through Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, chances are you’ll meet eyes with a painting of a huge, Renaissance-style woman. Two stories high and peering out from the building’s charcoal exterior, she marks the entrance of J Plus by YOO, a design hotel that has been given a new lease of life. The bold makeover was orchestrated by YOO Studio, who set out to unveil a hotel that would appeal to design lovers. The hotel was originally created by acclaimed designer Philippe Starck, and while the redesign was meant to reinvigorate the space, the design team made sure to be sympathetic to his original cutting-edge design. It’s been a process of taking the old, adding a unique twist, and making it fresh again.
+ View all
Work history
Content Manager & EditorSmythson
London, United KingdomFull Time
C
C
Digital Content & Social MediaCollective Hub
- Sydney, AustraliaFull Time
+ Show more
Skills
- Content Editing
- Social Media Advertising
- Social Media Management
- Writing
- SEO
- Community Management
- Digital Analytics
- Photography
- Image Editing
- Illustration
Education
B
B
Adobe CC Basics (Short Course)Billy Blue College of Design
- Sydney, Australia