Client: The Design Council
Project: Do Disturb
Date: 2001

What would be the best way of distilling into a single publication the collected wisdom from an afternoon of multiple, simultaneous workshop sessions, each with its own speakers and angles on the theme of innovation?

The Design Council is the UK’s authority on promoting design to business. Its project team, which included a copywriter and design company (Atelier Works), developed the idea of a pocket book of short feature articles that told ‘stories’ from the afternoon, illustrating ‘how to have good ideas’.

Taking its axiomatic title from one of the presentations, the book disturbed expectations by running its page numbers from back to front, and by its non-standard shape. With it came a set of 25 cards offering related pearls of wisdom, checklists and useful contacts.

Do Disturb proved hugely popular with the Design Council’s business audience. Copies were still being requested two years after publication. 

"IDEA + PROCESS = SUCCESS
Some might claim that having a big idea is really where the hard work begins; others, such as the man behind First Direct, would say that hard work is where big ideas come from. So how does one arrive at a 'big idea'? Does there have to be a Eureka moment?"