How a comment in a meeting turned into a day designing postcards

I get a lot out of my regular meetings, but this week Louise said something that hijacked my whole afternoon. She told me she loved my artwork, and that it would look good on postcards.

That was it. That was all it took. Every other priority I had lined up for the day dissapeared, and I got to work.

Starting where I always start

I wanted the postcards to have something on them. Not just a pretty picture, but a statement. Something interesting, or inspiring, something that would make a person look twice and then keep the card rather than bin it. And working out what that something was led me straight back to my messaging, for what must be the hundred millionth time.

"Ready for a different view?" was ready and waiting. I'd made it a while ago over on the-nd.com, and I liked it because it was interesting without an agenda. It asked a question and left you to answer it. (A quick aside to self: I really must keep sending people to the-nd. The numbers are creeping up, but the target of 1,000 is still a fair way off in the distance.)

The rest of them took a bit more head scratching.

On not asking the robot

Now, I love a bit of AI. I build with it every day. But there are situations where it's almost not worth asking, and this was one of them. Wordplay, being clever, subtle, nuanced, that human bit where a caption lands sideways and makes you smile, that is not where it shines.

And if you're not careful, you can get caught in a fawnado. That's the weather system where your chosen model tells you every idea is wonderful until you genuinely believe you're the cleverest being ever to hold a pen. I've learned to counter it. I've been known to type "be more Alan Sugar" to get some honest pushback. Sadly that line lost its edge after I once accidentally asked it to be more Alan Carr, and it agreed with everything twice as hard, but I heard his accent while I read.

So I fired up my own brain cells instead.

The artwork, which is not AI, thank you

I flipped to my folder of favourite collages and worked backwards from there. My artwork might look like AI, but it isn't. It actually takes flipping ages. And even after all these years, it's still my favourite part of the job.

I like an odd mix: vintage cut-out photographs of people, dropped onto landscapes, under skies that have completely lost the plot. I've written before about why these strange images feel so nostalgic to me, and about the moment I found an old Roger Dean book while clearing out my mum's house and realised I'd found the source of that eerie childhood connection. If you want that whole story, it's over in Cosmic Nostalgia.

With the images sorted, I landed on four. "Ready for a different view?" "You're not here to fit in." "The magic is behind the mask." "Deliver it anyway." Each one earning its place, each one saying something no competitor would put their name to.

Then the backs happened

I resized and rejigged the artwork, went to upload the lot, and discovered that printing the backs cost no more than leaving them blank.

Well. In the name of efficiency, and very much not counting the time or the personal cost it would take me to actually create something for four blank backs, I decided the backs could not possibly go to waste.

So I gave each card a job. One became a "Being Brave" outreach list, ten people you want in your world and ten places you want to be seen, because reaching out to people whose work you love takes real nerve and deserves a proper page. One became a "What do you stand for?" exercise, a scatter of words to circle and then cross out until only four survive, the four that are actually you. One became a "Just Flipping Do It" flowchart, for talking yourself through the thing you're avoiding. And one became "How to be more weird," four questions that end with the only instruction that matters: now go and shout about it.

Seven hours later, I had a set. Not four pictures with slogans, but four cards that hand you something to actually do.

What it was really about

The whole thing is a small demonstration of the thing I keep banging on about. The clever-hollow captions got binned. The real ones came from sitting with my own messaging and refusing to settle. The artwork took ages because the good stuff does. And the backs exist because I couldn't bear to waste a free surface.

That's marketing for people who do things differently. It might be a slogan but It's just how I work, and I don't think I'm alone.

Thank you, Louise, for the nudge. This is entirely your fault, and I'm delighted.