The Cartoon Museum — learning when 25 ideas are worse than one
A live design brief about focus, feasibility and the difference between imagination and relevance.
For a UAL live brief with The Cartoon Museum, my first instinct was to generate an enormous field of possibilities. The critique was useful and brutal: several were interesting dreams, but they did not solve the brief. The project became an exercise in subtraction — identifying the one proposition strong enough to survive the client, the constraints and the final presentation in January 2025.
- Role
- Design student — live brief
- Organisation
- The Cartoon Museum × UAL
- Dates
- 2024-10 — 2025-01 (approximate)
- Location
- London, UK
- Type
- Academic
- Status
- Completed
- Record
- Flagship
- Evidence
- B — first-hand account
- Disciplines
- Design, Strategy, Research
Still being verified
The brief
A live brief with a small, much-loved museum: real constraints, a real audience and a real client in the room at the end.
The 25 ideas
I generated far too many concepts, and enjoyed it. Breadth felt like rigour. It was not — it was a way of avoiding the moment where you have to defend one thing.
The critique
Several of these are interesting dreams. None of them solve the brief.
That was the useful sentence. It separated imagination from relevance and made the rest of the project a subtraction exercise.
Selection criteria and the final proposition
The surviving idea had to be feasible for the museum's actual resources, legible to a visitor in seconds, and defensible in front of a client in January 2025. The final concept and the 25-idea artefact publish here once permission is confirmed.
What changed in my practice
I still generate widely. I now spend at least as long deciding what to kill, and I write down the criterion before I choose.