We’ve just delivered what was hopefully an interesting lecture at Bradford College. The major topics covered included collaboration, tools of the trade and embracing failure.

Throughout our design education we’ve been left bewildered by many a guest lecturers speech, in most cases this is because the person talking was completely out of touch with the audience. An hour of hearing about the unbridled success of an individual can be inspiring, if delivered with a good dose of humour. But on most occasions we’ve been unable to fill in the gaps between the good times and the more good times. So Grant Midwinter took the opportunity to reverse years of pent up heckling and took the stage to talk about the not so good times.

Failure is always more interesting than success (this is how newspapers survive!) so the lecture allowed Grant Midwinter to dig out those college projects that didn’t quite make it into a portfolio, highlight the wrong turns in our decision making and warn tomorrows creative workforce about the perils of recruitment consultants. As designers, should we be more open about the projects that helped define us for better or worse?

Well the art world is not so shy and if you’re wondering where do all those unloved projects go? One of our favourite artist Michael Landy’s ‘art bin’ installation at the South London Gallery is the place to see those polished turds shine.

There may well be a need for a digital art bin and it would be an interesting experiment to see if designers would be brave enough to put their name next to their failures. Would you?

Here is a peek at the Wonderwall brochure we created for Leeds Museums and Galleries. More photos soon!

After a pretty rigorous pitch at Sony HQ in Liverpool. We’ve been named as one the winners of Get In the Game 2009 – 2010! We have won funding to have our idea for a computer game turned into a prototype and pitched to Sony in March for full development.

It’s been manic here at Grant Midwinter as we’ve entered the biggest pitch of our short history. Since September this year we’ve been working on a top secret PSN game with the aim of pitching it to Sony and Game Republic in December. After weeks of hard work, professional pitch training and agile project management lessons we learnt that our idea has won backing from Game Republic and Sony and we’re now developing a prototype game to illustrate our idea.

Over the next few months were going to be developing the game and posting our progress right here. We also have one of the worlds best emerging illustration talents on board helping us to create the vision for our game and for what we hope will be a future Sony franchise.