I've been thinking about the moment in a project when something goes wrong in exactly the right way.
It happened most clearly with the Lune campaign. We had prepared forty layouts — precise, beautiful, exactly what the brief asked for. Then the printer called to say the foiling machine had jammed and the test sheets had come through with irregular ink coverage. Blotchy. Uneven. Wrong.
I asked them to send me the test sheets.
They were extraordinary. The irregular ink had done something the perfect foiling never would: it made the gold look like it had been applied by a living thing, not a machine. It made the packaging look ancient and handmade simultaneously. It looked, in a word, real.
We didn't use those test sheets in the final production — they weren't repeatable at scale, and luxury demands consistency. But they taught me something I've been applying ever since: designed imperfection, when it's precise and intentional, carries more emotional weight than designed perfection.
The trick is knowing which kind of wrong is right.
Wrongness that emerges from material honesty — a typeface that admits it was drawn, not rendered; a photograph that admits the light was what it was — creates trust. Wrongness that emerges from carelessness destroys it.
The brutalist buildings I keep returning to aren't beautiful in the conventional sense. They're honest. The béton brut — the raw concrete — doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: aggregate, water, time, pressure. That honesty is what makes them feel permanent in a way that polished facades never quite manage.
I've started keeping a folder of things that are wrong in the right way. Misprinted books. Stamps with inverted vignettes. A photograph where the developer wasn't quite fixed and the image has begun, very slightly, to migrate across the paper.
The question I ask now at the start of every project isn't 'what should this look like?' It's 'what is this allowed to be?'