NOTES FROM THE DESIGN ROOM — EDITION 04
It was late in the evening, and I was sitting in my apartment thinking about a new programme I had been asked to work on.
I wasn’t looking for a style.
I was trying to find something deeper. the visual DNA of the programme. Something simple enough to sit underneath everything else and strong enough for the rest of the identity to grow from.
For a while, nothing came.
Then I looked out of the window.
The apartment building opposite was still awake.
One window was brightly lit. People were moving around inside, and from the little I could see, it looked as though something was happening perhaps a gathering or a birthday.
The window beside it was almost dark, with only a small amount of light somewhere inside the room.
A few floors away, I could see the blue flicker of a television moving across a wall.
Another window was completely dark.
Someone had probably already gone to sleep.
I kept looking.
Every window seemed to contain a different story.
Something was happening behind each piece of glass, but from where I was sitting I could only see fragments of it: a figure crossing a room, a light switching off, the colour of a television, a shadow disappearing.
Dozens of small lives running beside one another.
Different rhythms. Different moods. Different stories.
For a moment, the whole building felt almost like a television itself.
Then the windows began to change in my mind.
They stopped looking like windows.
They became small rectangles of light.
Pixels.
Each one behaving independently, appearing, disappearing, changing colour, but together forming something much larger.
And suddenly I could see the beginning of the programme.
A city at night made from thousands of points of light. Behind each one, a story. And inside many of those stories, another glowing rectangle — a television carrying the events of the day back into the city.
The city watching the world.
And, in a strange way, watching itself.
That became the starting point of the concept.
For a while, the idea existed exactly as I had imagined it.
Then came the meeting.
I presented the concept and explained where it had come from. Not simply what it might look like, but the thinking underneath it.
Then the questions began.
Other interpretations appeared. Other possibilities were suggested. The conversation moved in directions I hadn’t originally imagined.
I defended the idea because I believed there was something strong in it.
But eventually the direction began to shift.
The concept wasn’t rejected. Parts of it remained. Other parts changed, and new thinking entered the project.
That is one of the strange things about creative work.
An idea can begin in complete privacy while you are sitting alone, looking through a window and then, the moment you bring it into a room, it enters other people’s minds.
They see something different in it.
They question it.
Add to it.
Remove from it.
Pull it somewhere else.
At some point during that process, I realised we were no longer discussing my idea.
We were deciding what our idea would become.
I continued working on the project.
I kept developing the direction we had agreed on, even though part of me still believed the original idea could have become something very strong.
And then the project stopped.
The programme never went on air.
It remained unfinished.
I remember being disappointed.
Not in a dramatic way.
It was simply the frustration of seeing a possibility clearly and never having the opportunity to find out what it might have become.
We tend to remember creative work through the things that eventually become visible.
The identity that launches.
The programme that goes on air.
The campaign that gets published.
The book that gets printed.
Those are the things that enter portfolios and archives.
But there is another body of work that sits quietly behind them.
Ideas that were developed and then changed.
Concepts that were partly used.
Projects that stopped halfway through.
Things we believed in that never reached an audience.
They are still part of creative experience, even if nobody else ever sees them.
Looking back, I don’t think the interesting question is whether my original concept would have been better.
There is no way to know.
It was never finished.
What stayed with me was something else: the experience of watching an idea move from something I could see very clearly in my own mind, into a collective process where it became something different.
And then watching it remain unfinished.
Perhaps that is one of the quieter realities of creative work.
Not every idea gets the chance to become what we first imagined.
Some become the final work.
Some become something we never expected.
And some never make it beyond the room.
But that doesn’t mean they disappear.
Sometimes they stay with us for years.
Farhad
Previous edition: The Question I Didn’t Ask — [link]