COP Workshop//Manifesto

Cloud Manifesto

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned

and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry, 

and the most egalitarian of her displays, since 

everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. 

Life would be dull if we had to look up at 

cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the 

atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of 

a person’s countenance.

Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked. 

They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul. 

Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save 

on psychoanalysis bills.

And so we say to all who’ll listen:

Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

Altermodern manifesto - tate britain

A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture

Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live 

Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe

Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture

This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing

Today's art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves

Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain presents a collective discussion around this premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity.

The Chap Manifesto

1. THOU SHALT ALWAYS WEAR TWEED. No other fabric says so defiantly: I am a man of panache, savoir-faire and devil-may-care, and I will not be served Continental lager beer under any circumstances.

2 THOU SHALT NEVER NOT SMOKE. Health and Safety "executives" and jobsworth medical practitioners keep trying to convince us that smoking is bad for the lungs/heart/skin/eyebrows, but we all know that smoking a bent apple billiard full of rich Cavendish tobacco raises one's general sense of well-being to levels unimaginable by the aforementioned spoilsports.
3 THOU SHALT ALWAYS BE COURTEOUS TO THE LADIES. A gentleman is never truly seated on an omnibus or railway carriage: he is merely keeping the seat warm for when a lady might need it. Those who take offence at being offered a seat are not really Ladies.
4 THOU SHALT NEVER, EVER, WEAR PANTALOONS DE NIMES. When you have progressed beyond fondling girls in the back seats of cinemas, you can stop wearing jeans. Wear fabrics appropriate to your age, and, who knows, you might even get a quick fumble in your box at the opera.
5 THOU SHALT ALWAYS DOFF ONE'S HAT. Alright, so you own a couple of trilbies. Good for you - but it's hardly going to change the world. Once you start actually lifting them off your head when greeting, departing or simply saluting passers-by, then the revolution will really begin.
6 THOU SHALT NEVER FASTEN THE LOWEST BUTTON ON THY WESKIT. Look, we don't make the rules, we simply try to keep them going. This one dates back to Edward VII, sufficient reason in itself to observe it.
7 THOU SHALT ALWAYS SPEAK PROPERLY. It's quite simple really. Instead of saying "Yo, wassup?", say "How do you do?"
8 THOU SHALT NEVER WEAR PLIMSOLLS WHEN NOT DOING SPORT. Nor even when doing sport. Which you shouldn't be doing anyway. Except cricket.
9 THOU SHALT ALWAYS WORSHIP AT THE TROUSER PRESS. At the end of each day, your trousers should be placed in one of Mr. Corby's magical contraptions, and by the next morning your creases will be so sharp that they will start a riot on the high street.
10 THOU SHALT ALWAYS CULTIVATE INTERESTING FACIAL HAIR. By interesting we mean moustaches, not beards.


Kids in Museums Manifesto

1. Tell tales together with children and families. Share each other’s stories. Listen. Families and museums each have their own expertise.

2. Be welcoming and greet each visitor. Tell visitors what they can do at the door, don’t pin up a list of things they can’t. Curators, volunteers, front of house and those who work in the café should all be involved.

3. Play the generation game. Grandparents are increasingly important, and many families are more than two generations. Conversations between generations should be at the heart of what you do.

‘Mums dressed as frogs and grandads dressed up as Daddy Bear while their grandaughters stole their porridge!’

4. Invite teenagers into your gang. Provide a place for them to hang out. Set up youth panels. Ask them how they want to be involved. Museums can lead the way in letting people know the contribution teenagers make.

5.  Be flexible in your activities, events and family tickets. Families come in all shapes and sizes. Design your pricing and programmes with all sorts of families in mind.

6. Reach beyond your four walls. Ask families how you can help make a visit possible. Take responsibility for the hurdles outside, even if they’re not put up by you.

7. Create a safe place for children and families. Museums can be havens and provide an opportunity for families to talk.

‘One of the pieces displayed said how a girl felt alone and my stepson opened up about all the bullying he had been through.’

8. Be the core of your community, with spaces where families can meet.

 ‘It’s one of my son’s favourite places to go, partly because he likes to run round finding all the rats, partly because that’s where we learnt how to make bread and butter, and partly because that’s where we made lots of friends that we see all over town.’

9. Don’t say ssshhhush! If kids are being noisy, ask yourself ‘Why?’ is it because they’re excited? Great! Then capture this excitement. Is it because they’re bored? then give them something meaningful to do.

10. Say ‘Please touch!’ as often as you can. Everyone finds real objects awesome. Direct kids to things that can be handled. Teach respect by explaining why others can’t.

‘It was really fun wearing the white gloves so we could pick things up.’

11. Give a hand to grown-ups as well as children. Sometimes it isn’t the kids who are shy – parents need your support too. Produce guides, trails and activities for families to enjoy together.

12. Be height and language aware. Display things low enough for a small child to see. Use your imagination with signs, symbols and words understood by all ages.

‘Even the lift was fun.’

13. Make the most of your different spaces, outside as well as inside. Cafés, gardens, stairways and reception areas are valuable parts of the museum too.

14. Consider different families’ needs, with automatic doors, decent sized lifts, wheelchair-user friendly activities and Braille descriptions. Design your activities and events for everyone.

15. Keep an eye on visitors’ comfort. Make sure the toilets are always pleasant, with room for pushchairs and baby changing facilities. It’s the one place every family will visit. Provide somewhere to leave coats, bags, pushchairs, scooters and skateboards. 

16. Provide healthy, good-value food, high chairs and unlimited tap water. Your café should work to the same family friendly values as the rest of the museum.

17. Sell items in the shop that aren’t too expensive and not just junk, but things kids will treasure and will remind them of their visit.

18. Look after your website – keep it up to date. Be honest. Let families know what’s available (and what isn’t) so they can prepare for their visit.

19. Use social media to chat to families. Don’t just post messages about what you’re doing – have a conversation.

20. Make the visit live on. Build relationships with your family visitors and let them know you want to keep in touch. involve them in long-term decision making at the museum, not just on the day. invite them back.

‘Everyone was so nice to us I would LOVE to come again. I am sure that my sister will love it too.’

Manifesto for simple scribe

1. When you sit down to write, there is only one important person in your life. This is someone you will never meet, called a reader.

2. You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson's Green and Putney, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second, given a chance.

3. So the first sentence you write will be the most important sentence in your life, and so will the second, and the third. This is because, although you – an employee, an apostle or an apologist – may feel obliged to write, nobody has ever felt obliged to read.

4. Journalism is important. It must never, however, be full of its own self-importance. Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. Therefore simple words, clear ideas and short sentences are vital in all storytelling. So is a sense of irreverence.

5. Here is a thing to carve in pokerwork and hang over your typewriter. "No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand."

6. And here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says "Nobody has to read this crap."

7. If in doubt, assume the reader knows nothing. However, never make the mistake of assuming that the reader is stupid. The classic error in journalism is to overestimate what the reader knows and underestimate the reader's intelligence.

8. Life is complicated, but journalism cannot be complicated. It is precisely because issues – medicine, politics, accountancy, the rules ofMornington Crescent – are complicated that readers turn to the Guardian, or the BBC, or the Lancet, or my old papers Fish Selling and Self Service Times, expecting to have them made simple.

9. So if an issue is tangled like a plate of spaghetti, then regard your story as just one strand of spaghetti, carefully drawn from the whole. Ideally with the oil, garlic and tomato sauce adhering to it. The reader will be grateful for being given the simple part, not the complicated whole. That is because (a) the reader knows life is complicated, but is grateful to have at least one strand explained clearly, and (b) because nobody ever reads stories that say "What follows is inexplicably complicated ..."

10. So here is a rule. A story will only ever say one big thing. If (for example, and you are feeling very brave) you have to deal with four strands of a tale, make the intertwining of those four strands the one big thing you have to say. You may put twiddly bits into your story, but only if you can do so without departing from the one linear narrative you have chosen.

11. Here is an observation. Don't even start writing till you have decided what the one big thing is going to be, and then say it to yourself in just one sentence. Then ask yourself whether you could imagine your mother listening to this sentence for longer than a microsecond before she reaches for the ironing. Should you try to sell an editor an idea for an article, you will get about the same level of attention, so pay attention to this sentence. It is often – not always, but often – the first sentence of your article anyway.

12. There is always an ideal first sentence – an intro, a way in – for any article. It really helps to think of this one before you start writing, because you will discover that the subsequent sentences write themselves, very quickly. This is not evidence that you are glib, facile, shallow or slick. Or even gifted. It merely means you hit the right first sentence.

13. Words like shallow, facile, glib and slick are not insults to a journalist. The whole point of paying for a newspaper is that you want information that slides down easily and quickly, without footnotes, obscure references and footnotes to footnotes.

14. Words like "sensational" and "trivial" are not insults to a journalist. You read what you read – Elizabethan plays, Russian novels, French comic strips, American thrillers – because something in them appeals to your sense of excitement, humour, romance or irony. Good journalism should give you the sensation of humour, excitement, poignancy or piquancy. Trivial is a favourite insult administered by scholars. But even they became interested in their subject in the first place because they were attracted by something gleaming, flashy and – yes, trivial.

15. Words have meanings. Respect those meanings. Get radical and look them up in the dictionary, find out where they have been. Then use them properly. Don't flaunt authority by flouting your ignorance. Don't whatever you do go down a hard road to hoe, without asking yourself how you would hoe a road. Or for that matter, a roe.

16. Clichés are, in the newspaper classic instruction, to be avoided like the plague. Except when they are the right cliché. You'd be surprised how useful a cliché can be, used judiciously. This is because the thing about journalism is that you don't have to be ever so clever but you do have to be ever so quick.

17. Metaphors are great. Just don't choose loopy metaphors, and never, never mix them. Subs on the Guardian used to have a special Muzzled Piranha Award, a kind of Oscar of incompetence, handed to an industrial relations reporter who warned the world that the Trades Union Congress wildcats were lurking in the undergrowth, ready to dart out like piranhas, unless they were muzzled. George Orwell reports on the case of an MP who claimed that the jackbooted fascist octopus had sung its swansong.

18. Beware of street cred. When Moses ordered his commanders to slay the Midianites he wasn't doing it to show that he was well hard. When he warned Pharaoh to let his people go he wasn't saying "give us room to breathe, man, and Pharaoh's, like, no way feller!" The language of the pub or the café has its own rhythms, its own body language, its own signalling devices. The language of the page has no accent, no helpful signalling tone of irony or comedy or self-mockery. It must be straight, clear and vivid. And to be straight and vivid, it must follow the received grammar.

19. Beware of long and preposterous words. Beware of jargon. If you are a science writer this is doubly important. If you are a science writer, you occasionally have to bandy words that no ordinary human ever uses, like phenotype, mitochondrion, cosmic inflation, Gaussian distribution and isostasy. So you really don't want to be effulgent or felicitous as well. You could just try being bright and happy.

20. English is better than Latin. You don't exterminate, you kill. You don't salivate, you drool. You don't conflagrate, you burn. Moses did not say to Pharaoh: "The consequence of non-release of one particular subject ethnic population could result ultimately in some kind of algal manifestation in the main river basin, with unforeseen outcomes for flora and fauna, not excluding consumer services." He said "the waters which are in the river ... shall be turned to blood, and the fish that is in the river shall die, and the river shall stink."

21. Remember that people will always respond to something close to them. Concerned citizens of south London should care more about economic reform in Surinam than about Millwall's fate on Saturday, but mostly they don't. Accept it. On 24 November 1963, the Hull Daily Mail sent me in search of a Hull angle on the assassination of President Kennedy. Once I had found a line that began "Hull citizens were in mourning today as …" we could get on with reporting what happened in Dallas.

22. Read. Read lots of different things. Read the King James Bible, and Dickens, and poems by Shelley, and Marvel Comics and thrillers by Chester Himes and Dashiell Hammett. Look at the astonishing things you can do with words. Note the way they can conjure up whole worlds in the space of half a page.

23. Beware of all definitives. The last horse trough in Surrey will turn out not even to be the last horse trough in Godalming. There will almost always be someone who turns out to be bigger, faster, older, earlier, richer or more nauseating than the candidate to whom you have just awarded a superlative. Save yourself the bother: "One of the first ..." will usually save the moment. If not, then at least qualify it: "According to the Guinness Book of Records ..." "The Sunday Times Rich List ..." and so on.

24. There are things that good taste and the law will simply not let you say in print. My current favourites are "Murderer acquitted" and (in a report of an Easter religious play) "Paul Myers, who played Jesus Christ, emerged as the star of the show." Try and work out which one has the taste problem, and which one will cost you approximately half a million per word.

25. Writers have a responsibility, not just in law. So aim for the truth. If that's elusive, and it often is, at least aim for fairness, the awareness that there is always another side to the story. Beware of all claims to objectivity. This one is the dodgiest of all. You may report that the Royal Society says that genetic modification is a good thing, and that depleted uranium is mostly harmless. But you should remember that genetic modification was invented by people who were immediately elected to the Royal Society for their cleverness, by people already in there because they knew how to enrich uranium fuel rods and deplete the rest. So to paraphrase Miss Mandy Rice-Davies (1963) "They would say that, wouldn't they?"






My own manifesto:
I will:
1. develop my understanding of the grid and how to use it within layouts to create effective design.
2. constantly evaluate and develop my own practise of work.
3. explore the different styles of design work, to find the one that suits me best.
4. explore the world of publishing and the design of that nature.
5. use my effectively to get the best out of my design work be it uni or personal work.