"Design went wrong when people made that connection between design and business. I don't think this business is about selling time. It's about personal trust, empathy and creativity. We're dressing it up like lawyers and paying the price for it."

Michael Wolff, co-founder of iconic brand consultants Wolff Olins and the designer behind identities ranging from Bovis to BOC, gave a sell-out talk at September 2007’s Designer Breakfast.

The main thrust was bemoaning the trend towards what he described as “vacuous design” and he said some work done by major consultancies was “indefensible”. Wolff described vacuous design as design by process and demographics at the expense of creativity. “Dreadful derivative work is like curdled mayonnaise,” he suggested. “You know it’s going to taste like crap but you keep adding to it because you haven’t got the heart to throw it away. Go for honesty. Once you're in 'getting it through' mode, you're getting very wobbly."

Essentially, he argued that designers should have the courage to be push themselves to be creative and develop the confidence to trust themselves, or as he put it, “to be authentic” and seek the judgement of their peers. Small agencies, he argued, have nothing to fear from bigger groups.

“I crave awful moments,” he said, those times when he shows clients new work and they don’t know what to say, “because I know I’m doing something that hasn’t been done before. When you hear unfamiliar music you don’t know whether you like it.”

Another revelation was the ‘house of creativity’. “In the top right”, he told the audience, “is the room of great work. In the top left is the room of reason, or process. The bottom right is the room of precedent or repetition, while the bottom left is the room of not knowing”. This, he argued, is the most important, because from this room comes the most creative work of all.