banner-1-750pxWe have been very busy at Merrifield™ recently. So busy we haven’t had a moment to look at our blog and website. But when we have had a small break from the hectic work-life, we went across to check out the London Design Festival.
 
LDF logo_p485The London Design festival has been running for 11 years now, but this is the first time I have attended the events that dot themselves all around the city. This year the festival was based mainly at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, which is where I headed, thinking I was in for a wonderful day of really good design related exhibitions, chat and inspiration.
“I was sadly mistaken.” What I thought should have been the epitome of creative people coming together to congregate and educate the general public (and other designers) was actually a series of artsy ‘fartsy’ preposterous… nonsense! Child-like illustrations of a fetus, a Caractacus Potts like bee hive that ‘represented the population of London’ and a collaborative magazine creation project that left you thinking “what did I achieve here? Nothing happened!”

About the only thing that actually interested me was the dismantled gun that had been in the news recently, and that was mainly because it was a gun you could print in your own home from plastic.

I found nothing that resembled graphic design. No branding, posters or type. (Okay there was one thing on type, but it was type tasting, which I thought was also rather stupid).

Nothing I saw really inspired me to think that design in London was anything more special than anywhere else in the country.

One thing I didn’t get to see was the Global Design Forum talk. That is something I would have like to have seen. I’m sure there was more design related speeches and interesting items there. I am just disappointed that the V&A exhibitions were rather lack luster in what I would have liked to have thought was ‘proper’ design.

I won’t be attending next year.