So, Britain’s got lockdown talent it would seem
Days and weeks of being confined to barracks, with just family members, has brought all the creative boys and girls to the yard. Well to Zoom at least.
It’s difficult not to feel inadequate if you haven’t performed a full recital of Handel’s Messiah with family members in twenty different Zoom locations. Or if you haven’t baked sourdough using a culture harvested from a Ming Dynasty tomb or recreated the original Star Wars Trilogy entirely in Lego.
There are clearly some experts out there, and a grateful nation of viewers salutes you.
We’ll come back to our homegrown heroes a bit later, but first I want to tell you the story of Cecilia Giminez, an 81-year old lady who lived in the small, unknown Spanish village of Borja.
Cecilia was a regular at her village church, the Misericordia Sanctuary, where as well as making peace with her Lord, she often stopped to admire a century-old painting of Christ by artist Elias Garcia Martinez.
In fact, she admired it so much, that she couldn’t bear to witness the effect Father Time was having on the piece. The paint was flaking, to the point where it wouldn’t be long before it was unrecognisable. If only there were a solution.
I know! It doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion or standing inactive as a virus makes its way round the world to your doorstep. But she did.
Cecilia muttered the immortal words of the DIY imposter: ‘Qué tan difícil puede ser?’.
Or as we say in our mother tongue: ‘How hard can it be?’
To cut a long story short Cecilia ‘restored’ the great painting. I’m not saying she botched it, but if I tell you it’s now known as ‘The Monkey Christ’, you’ll get the idea.
Cecilia was the ultimate example of another type of hero. The ‘have-a-go hero’. No mind-boggling creativity needed. Just a basin full of blind optimism.
In lockdown this is an altogether more British bunch of triers. The COVID-19 equivalent of Eddie The Eagle; The Patron Saint of Plucky Losers.
They start with the absolute best of intentions, until they realise how hard it is.
Day one of lockdown was filled with romantic ideas of learning to meditate and reading the complete works of Shakespeare.
On Day 44, they’re pouring the custard straight onto the pasta as they start the 84th episode of Mad Men. They’re not blessed with the perseverance gene.
That’s harmless. It’s when their attention turns to more substantial undertakings that things get a bit more significant, not to mention expensive.
‘Darling, I think we should take advantage of all the spare time we have in lockdown, to fit a new kitchen’
No-one wants to dampen their enthusiasm. I mean who amongst us wouldn’t jump at a new kitchen.
But it’s the memory of the kit car lying half built in the garage for a year.
‘How hard can it be’ was his approach. But you might as well have been asking a junior estate agent to do the maths behind Hadron Collider. Those kit car assembly instructions got difficult quickly, at which point he abandoned the project.
It was the same with the DIY swimming pool which never got beyond the shallow end and is now a pond.
She just knows this will end up half done and then what.
Just like with the pool and the kit car, they’ll have to find someone else to complete the job. It’s a recurring DIY anxiety dream. He starts a job, botches it, and an expert has to come and clear up the mess and finish the job.
If this has a familiar ring to it, it’s because we see it regularly in business.
‘How hard can it be to build a website?’, leads to something which renders on mobile looking like a Jackson Pollock.
And often the remedy isn’t just a question of a professional tying up a few loose ends. Sometimes you can’t get where you want to go from a starting point of a botch. Sometimes you just have to start again, and that’s expensive.
It’s the same with graphic design. Please don’t confuse my three-year master’s degree from the Royal College of Art with a YouTube video. These things are hard.
Bringing me the graphics for your corporate hospitality event in Microsoft Paint, at the point you get stuck, isn’t the answer.
We’re all for ambitious projects. I mean we brand the entire O2 for the ATP Finals each year. No-one could ever accuse us of lacking ambition. But we finish what we started on those project that are in our sweet spot. And for those that aren’t we talk to the experts.
You won’t find an unfinished kit car, a half-baked kitchen or a 19th Century reworked oil painting anywhere here.
So, say after me: ‘I’m not a graphic designer, I have other talents’. On which note, we’re open for business to help on all those lockdown projects, big or small. It seems to be a time for reinvention, and that’s what we do. But ideally, don’t bring them to us as a bunch of broken pieces to put back together.
Bring the idea and we’ll bring the magic.
Paul Emery
Owner, Junction Design