A Thing a Day
2009 – present
I keep setting myself the same daft challenge: make one of something, every single day, for a year. Posters, photos, record sleeves, podcasts, doodles. Here's the running tally.
✓ The Not Shit PromiseWritten by me. No AI.In my first year of being a designer, I decided I needed to get better. The way I chose to get better was rather unusual: to design a poster every day for 365 days. I did it, roped my boss in, and Novl Cuisine was born.
After the first time, I became hooked on the idea. I’d take a photo every day, design a record sleeve every day, record a podcast every day, even briefly do a video every day. The last one was Unobvious, where I doodled every day.
All of them taught me more than any course ever has. I wrote the whole method down in a book, Extreme Production, but the short version is: turn up and make the thing, even when it’s shit.
Especially when it’s shit.
The ones so far, in order:
- 2009 — Novl Cuisine — a poster a day for 365 days, me and Dave Pannell going head to head. The first one, and the only one I actually finished.
- 2010 — Nice Smile Sir — a photo a day, opened up to about 22 people daft enough to join in.
- 2010 — Gramophoney — a 12-inch record sleeve, designed and published every day, with James Sheriff.
- 2016 — 100 Days of Logos — a logo a day for 100 days, with Aaron Linley. Daft fictional brands, until 2016’s death toll turned half of them into tributes.
- 2017 — Ask a Designer Anything — a podcast a day. The first one that wasn’t design, and my first ever go at podcasting. Truly shit, fondly remembered.
- 2018 — Write every day, forever — a daily blog, after Seth Godin convinced me. “Forever” didn’t last, but it left behind a whole blog’s worth of writing.
- 2020 — Unobvious — a doodle a day, built on visual puns. The one that stuck.