CREATIVE HENRY

The cold air shows my every breath as I cling to the steering wheel and try to see out of the half frozen windscreen. 5am. It’s still dark.  I drive over the giant steel bridge out of the city and head south of the water.

A light flickers intermittently in the distance.

I reach over into the glove compartment and grab an old cassette tape. I can only make out a few of the words on the label. ‘For ___! You’re So _____ I’d Kill ___ You. X.’ I push it into the player but don’t actually hear anything. I need to reach Joe before he disappears.

I continue along the narrow road trying to follow the path of my headlights through the nearly defrosted windscreen.  Shadows of huge skyscrapers tower over me.  My mobile rings and I screen the call. Taking my hand off the wheel I wipe my tired eyes before looking into the interior mirror at how bloodshot they appear. A stray hair fallen out of place.

A light flickers intermittently in the distance.

Brandon Flowers from the Killers once said in an interview that he wishes he had wrote hit song America by English indie band Razorlight.  I don’t know why that quote has always stuck with me but it is maybe down to the fact that in some ways I can associate myself to this quote.  As a designer you look towards other designers and their designs and you admire them from a different perspective.  You don’t just see a chair or a lamp but you see the materials used, you analyse how it was designed and made and you question whether you could have designed it better.  And if you could not of designed it better then you admit you wished you had designed it in the first instance.

A design that I have long admired is the Isokon Penguin Donkey 2 designed back in 1963 by Ernest Race.  For years I have longed to own this little bundle of fun that stores Penguin reading books and also acts as an occasional side or coffee table.  To me it is my design classic, the piece that I wished I had designed; and no I could not have designed it better.  Race though obviously believed that he could design better when he first set eyes upon the original Penguin Donkey.