“Just had a a look at the website and it looks amazing…I love it!”
Sarah Jay Hawley, songwriter
They killed my darlings
You can download this PDF for free.
Tiny zine about unused design work by Engine Head Studio
There’s no AI used in this and please note the copyright symbol.
I was looking at my digital pile of old, unused (and rejected) design work and wondering what to do with it. When you produce design work and illustration for other people, it’s inevitable that swathes of it (sometimes all of it) will end up in the pile labelled No, We Don’t Want This Thanks while the successful work goes on to become a printed illustration, a website header, a poster or, if you’re lucky, somebody else’s inspiration.
Its tough to throw stuff from that pile away – a lot of work went into it and a lot of thought – and to simply pretend it didn’t and move on can be difficult for the person who brought it into the world. Particularly if you brought it into the world with a view to giving it life somewhere in the mental stream our media thinks is an ecosystem: it’s demoralising to see brightly coloured and well-formed things you made vanish from view and sink forever in endless, tiny tides.
I’ve been reading a lot of Pynchon (again) and while that’s happening, I’m often enthused about making tighter, stranger, longer, coiling sentences that can be read in more than one way and because I write in my spare time anyway (I write a running zine called Between 6 & 16 Miles and I’ve written for magazines such as Like The Wind) it seemed like a good idea to mix it all up into this.
See what you think.