Michael Wolff: Don’t Trust Your Experience

At Design Indaba, Michael Wolff spoke about how to exercise your idea-creating capacity by first getting rid of your ideas. He also told great stories from his time with Wolff Olins and after, about the importance of language in design and some of the “little creatures” that have made their way into much of his work. Here are some of our favorite lines, though we encourage you to watch and choose your own.

On editorial design:

“When I hear the word ‘copy’ I always shudder, because it has implicit in it that language is just something you have to make a shape of. But language is a critical part of what we do.”

On simplicity in language:

In one scenario, there were “thousands of forms that were like the top one: ‘GIVE DETAILS OF ALL OTHER PERSONS RESIDING IN THE RENTED ACCOMMODATION WHICH YOU ACTUALLY OCCUPY OTHER THAN YOURSELF AND YOUR HUSBAND’ we asked 10 people ‘What does it mean?’ and they said ‘they’re trying to get us out of our accommodation.’ So, we changed it to ‘Who else lives with you?’

On the Shell logo:

“The colors had drifted off into bloodclot red and lemon orange and so we just warmed the colors up. Sometimes that’s all you have to do. Leave something alone. Then I started the conversation with the chairman of Shell saying ‘why do you say Shell on shell?’ and he said ‘You’re right, do you know how long it’s going to take me to get the word Shell off the shell?’ I said ‘no’ and he said ‘five years.’”

On other things:

“The wheel has existed for 8,000 years. How come we only put it on a suitcase 30 years ago?”

“What you must do with a great idea is immediately throw it away because otherwise you won’t exercise your idea-creating capacity. Just keep throwing them away because you’re going to get more and more of them.”

“I mistrust my experience in terms of using my imagination; it’s going to miscolor it, try to dominate it.”