Welcome to the Escape Blog

We did one of the best pitches of our careers this week and it looks like we won it - we’ve had a call and an e-mail but never count your chickens I always say.

It was for an internal staff magazine for a large housing organisation and found us asking questions about the very essence of magazines before we even hit our sketch pads.

It’s great when you have the freedom and budget to explore the ‘questions behind the questions’ for a new project and the creative work had some real backbone by the time it was ready to go.

Chunking Up (for all those familiar with Milton Model Patterns) is a great way of exploring creative projects and understanding the very purpose of a design piece. Some would argue that going into such great depth is potentially out of our remit but the more you know, the better the solution and that’s what great design is all about - delivering a solution or opportunity.

In it’s very basic form it’s basically acting like a three year old, but instead of just asking Why? all the time to everything, you ascertain what the purpose is?

EG. What’s the purpose of a staff magazine… To engage and enthuse the workforce… to deliver a corporate strategic message in an empathetic way. And, what’s the purpose of those two things?

Rinse and repeat… You find yourself asking questions that seem irrelevant but end up being totally relevant.

One of the most interesting things about the initial stages was about how people actually read magazines. I, for instance, read them in the bath or on the toilet and 9/10 buy a magazine at Waterloo for a train ride back to Basingstoke. Ask that one round the office… it may make you think… and “what’s the purpose behind that?”