Michael Wolff is a creative designer with fifty years of experience. In 1965 he co-founded the brand consultancy Wolff Olins, which has worked with Apple Records, Volkswagen and BT.
A leader in the world of design and branding, Wolff is a former President of the D&AD (Design and Art Directors Association), a visiting Professor at the University of the Arts in London and a Senior Fellow of the RCA (Royal College of Art).
What it takes to be a designer
"If you are observant and if you are interested in people. If you're not, then don't be a designer.
"If you're really passionately interested in people, you will be endlessly saying: 'Why does it feel like that? Why does it look like that? Why does it work like that? Why does it not work like that? Why is it so difficult? Why is it so boring?'
Whatever it may be. If you have a fairly manic curiosity and demand to know why things are done, you start to get much more agile in your mind, to see other ways of doing things. I look at a shop door and it says 'Closed' and I think, 'Why doesn't it say 'Open tomorrow at 8:30'?"
The standard of current design
"Never stop thinking that you can't renew yourself, do it differently, or see another way through."
"I think today, the movie industry outstrips the design business in terms of creativity by many thousands of times.
"Design is, on the whole, enormously boring compared to most movies. We get away with ridiculously trivial solutions for which we're paid very well, so I am a critic of our business in some respects."
Advice for studying design
"Number one is your ability to be curious, to be interested. Your ability to notice things is the most important thing you have.
"Don't sit in an office with a Macintosh just thinking what you're already equipped with is enough, because it never is. I'm 75 years old, and I don't feel well enough equipped to do what I do.
"Join a firm. There are plenty of design companies who say this is the most amazing period for innovation and imagination, because those are the things that are going to get us out of recession.
"The recession, as well as being an appalling indictment of the banking business, is also an indictment on mediocrity, an indictment of complacency, and indictment of just sitting on your arse and thinking that what you do is going to be good enough.
"The thing with design really is, never stop thinking that you can't renew yourself, do it differently, see another way through, and not be frightened by doing things you don't know."
