Observatory CCO Linda Knight discusses why people won’t tolerate annoying ads anymore, and how a content-led approach can help brands of all shapes and sizes resonate in popular culture “People hate ads,” says Linda Knight. They’re the words that everyone who works in advertising dreads hearing, but Observatory’s chief creative officer is a firm believer […]

Previously a footwear designer, Williams made the shift into illustration four years ago and is now working for clients including Nike and Vogue. He talks about the challenges he’s faced and the changes he’d like to see in the industry For Matt Williams being a footwear designer in the fashion industry was a creative yet […]

Do you sometimes feel like you’ll never succeed as a writer? Do you read other books and worry you’re not talented enough? Or question if talent is enough? Comparison is almost never an effective strategy for finding writing success, and who gets to decide what defines talent? The truth is talent alone won’t make you […]

Three illustrators were commissioned to reimagine works ranging from a set of thousand-year-old Japanese love poems through to Shakespeare’s heartbreaking sonnets. We look at how the series came to life As the bleakness of January subsides and the days gradually begin to get longer, the advent of February brings with it one of the most […]

Campaigning around cancer has taken many forms, though most advertising tends to focus on the impact that a diagnosis and treatment can have on an individual or on family life. This new spot treads a different path by looking at the way that cancer can affect working life. It is part of a new initiative, […]

How many of you have been writing for a while? Have a story that you just can’t seem to finish? This article is for you—though if you’re brand-new, this will eventually apply to you, too. Ahem. There will come a day when it’s time to start that story over from scratch. Let me explain. How I Learned […]

As a new retrospective opens at the MEP in Paris, the photographer and visual activist discusses their life’s work amplifying South Africa’s Black LGBTQIA communities Zanele Muholi has long defined themself as a ‘visual activist’. The South African photographer, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, has spent the last two decades documenting and […]

Drawing endless doodles while your attention should be elsewhere is a compulsion usually associated with distracted school students. Yet, all the while Mark Denton was climbing the ranks of adland, he couldn’t stop doodling away in meetings. With a dozen filing cabinets overflowing with his experiments on paper, some of Denton’s works are being pulled […]

“When I say that people can be fired or arrested or abused or whipped or banished for trifles, I am not describing the exceptional case for the sake of being inflammatory. What I say is true – and most white South Africans would acknowledge it freely,” Ernest Cole wrote in House of Bondage, his seminal […]

If you’ve opened a novel and seen a quote on the opening pages then you’ve seen a literary epigraph. But what are they really? Why do authors use them? And how do you know if you need one for your own work in progress? What is an Epigraph? The word epigraph means to “inscribe” or […]