Ben Tallon – Design Week

What to do if you lose your creative mojo?

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:29:11 +0000

When I gained a clear sense of the two main types of creativity, a lot of things suddenly made sense. Peleg Top, who describes himself as a coach for accomplished creatives at a crossroads, told me about them on The Creative Condition podcast. He’d hit a wall, and went through the process most of us will be familiar with – unidentified lack of motivation. Despair. Malaise. A spiritual crisis…

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Ben Tallon: What can designers and creatives learn from gardening?

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 15:48:53 +0000

“Where did that come from?” is a question I’ve had to answer for as long as I can remember. On occasion, I am able to backtrack and offer some form of tenuous recap of my thought process. Dots joined in a brain which bolts like a startled horse, galloping and lunging at an array of references before skidding to a halt back at the starting topic. Usually, I cannot answer. In Sensitive: The Power of…

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Vulnerability isn’t a “pity party”: it might find you new work

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 11:51:42 +0000

It was a lesson learned before but catastrophically forgotten. This time it ambushed me next to the cake table after a christening. Small talk with a friend of the family who I’d not seen in the flesh for several years drifted onto how work was. I let him have all of it – full disclosure – work’s not been good, six months and counting of only scraps, the savings dangerously underweight.

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In 2023 are designers social animals or not and does it matter?

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 16:47:24 +0000

Until the age of 37, when twin-parenthood and the COVID-19 pandemic changed my life twice in close succession, I was a social creature. Some weeks I spent four or five nights as a face on the scene at creative industry get-togethers in whichever city I lived. After all, no matter to what extent, we all need social relationships to maintain good health. Ever since walking through the door of…

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Designers can find their place in an AI future

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 15:24:02 +0000

The jury is still out when it comes to AI’s impact on our future career prospects. Debates have raged aplenty. I’m not sure how I feel at this fledgling stage in the – admittedly impressive – technology’s evolution. Replications of specific art styles, from naïve drawings to detailed oil paintings have been held up as terrifying harbingers of mass redundancy for us mere mortals, with our pens…

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Ben Tallon: “Designers must embrace idiosyncrasies to reach their potential”

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 09:36:10 +0000

People can spend an entire life without much of an understanding about why they are the way they are. ‘Be yourself’ is something of a paradox, isn’t it? Simultaneously delightfully simple and head-splittingly complex advice. Even those of us who stride confidently ahead, dripping with an envy-inducing identity cannot always explain how they do it. That’s fine. I have a print on my kitchen wall…

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Exploring the “critical role” of creativity in offsetting bad news

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 10:38:59 +0000

Sometimes seeing the wrong Tweet brings my mood crashing down so hard that I don’t even get as far as posting the artwork I logged on to share. Entire days can be spent achieving the bare minimum in the aftermath of another skirmish with the news and it’s been getting worse. The climate crisis. War. More political deceit. Each time a world problem wipes me out, it takes me a little longer to…

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Ben Tallon: “How wrestling shaped my career as an illustrator”

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 14:00:40 +0000

ITV’s World Of Sport British wrestling TV show was in its twilight years by the time I’d discovered sports entertainment. Yet, framed on the wall of my home today is a glorious original typeset poster featuring a towering Giant Haystacks, a deviant legend of the golden era of professional grappling in the UK. A new book, Grunts & Grapples, by Kerry William Purcell is currently being crowdfunded.

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Ben Tallon: Football crests are a minefield – but don’t attack the designer

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 17:10:07 +0000

As I wind down my recent podcast interview with Mark Richardson – known in the design industry as Superfried – he touches on his personal distaste for vitriol, and over-the-top lambasting of other people’s work. In particular, he highlights the recent furore over the new Science Museum visual identity and talks about the need to consider all the factors that go into a project like this before…

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