Failures #1 – Tana Mitchell
In search of perfection, the immaculate design concept often falls victim to compromise, to rejection, abandonment, crippling deadlines, infinitesimal or non-existent budgets… the list of hazards is endless. And like any history, design favours the victor, recording the successes and ignoring the marginal and the unpopular. Design has a concealed archive — external hard-drives laden with alternate options and rejected artwork. Behind every designer’s coup lies a concealed wilderness of near misses. Here we celebrate the failures, the flawed, the misunderstood, the not-quite-theres, the rejected and the ignored. We share our stories of designer heartbreak, of memorable disappointment.
Rm103 Mailer: Nicholas Spratt
For the rm103’s Dear Reader mail-art project we had come up with a sticker that would be attached to each envelope being sent with the name of the participating artist — details about the project etc. When the sticker was applied it divided the envelope into three panels, alluding to the original Penguin books. As with much of rm103’s printed material though, the stickers were laser printed and handcut — not the most attractive outcome, but it was in-keeping with the rest of the office-stationery materials in the mail-art piece, flexible enough production-wise to accommodate the copy was guaranteed to arrive at the 11th hour, and well suited to the tiny budget. Plus I’m a sucker for long repetitive jobs, and I found myself once again guillotining a big stack of paper to turn A4 sheets into small strips that would match those Penguin proportions. The cutting alone took an entire evening, but I’d managed to turn a stack of paper into a big mess of off-cuts and a tidy collection of Dear Reader stickers. Arm still aching from the cutting, I packaged up the stickers with the address labels and postage stamps and left them on the gallery bar, ready for the artist to pick up the next day. By the time I had tidied up and sorted out the package it was about 2am, and I was off home feeling weary but happy that another job had been done.
The gallery opened the next day, but before the artist arrived to pick up the package a thief managed to saunter in and steal the package, hot-footing it out of the building with an envelope full of my blood, sweat and tears. I don’t think that the rm103 mailing list would have been worth peanuts on the black market, and can only guess that those stickers I’d been busting a gut over must have ended up in a bin some place. I half hoped the thief might have taken the initiative and used the package to send out their own mail-art project. But in the meantime we had no choice but to repeat the entire job.