The cold air shows my every breath as I cling to the steering wheel and try to see out of the half frozen windscreen. 5am. It’s still dark. I drive over the giant steel bridge out of the city and head south of the water.
A light flickers intermittently in the distance.
I reach over into the glove compartment and grab an old cassette tape. I can only make out a few of the words on the label. ‘For ___! You’re So _____ I’d Kill ___ You. X.’ I push it into the player but don’t actually hear anything. I need to reach Joe before he disappears.
I continue along the narrow road trying to follow the path of my headlights through the nearly defrosted windscreen. Shadows of huge skyscrapers tower over me. My mobile rings and I screen the call. Taking my hand off the wheel I wipe my tired eyes before looking into the interior mirror at how bloodshot they appear. A stray hair fallen out of place.
A light flickers intermittently in the distance.
My left indicator doesn’t work as I turn onto what appears to be a deserted side street. I turn off the car headlights so as to not draw any attention to myself – just in case. A dustbin falls over and spills rubbish into the road whilst making a clanging sound. I swerve slowly round the dustbin and see two cats exploring its content. Flashing blue lights and sirens start in the distance and I stop the car to assess which direction they are heading. The lights and sirens move closer. I wipe my clammy brow and place a hand on the door handle. The lights turn off and head in another direction. I start the car again and notice my phone flashing. 45 missed calls.
Brandon Flowers from the Killers once said in an interview that he wishes he had wrote hit song America by English indie band Razorlight. I don’t know why that quote has always stuck with me but it is maybe down to the fact that in some ways I can associate myself to this quote. As a designer you look towards other designers and their designs and you admire them from a different perspective. You don’t just see a chair or a lamp but you see the materials used, you analyse how it was designed and made and you question whether you could have designed it better. And if you could not of designed it better then you admit you wished you had designed it in the first instance.
A design that I have long admired is the Isokon Penguin Donkey 2 designed back in 1963 by Ernest Race. For years I have longed to own this little bundle of fun that stores Penguin reading books and also acts as an occasional side or coffee table. To me it is my design classic, the piece that I wished I had designed; and no I could not have designed it better. Race though obviously believed that he could design better when he first set eyes upon the original Penguin Donkey.
The original Donkey was designed in the late 1930’s by Egon Riss and looked set to become a bigger best seller than those destined to be stored upon it’s shelves. Unfortunately the Second World War broke and only one hundred Donkey bookcases were produced, selling instantly and making it a rare design classic. Just before this launch Allen Lane, who published the Penguin paperback books, also fell in love with the Donkey, as it was then known due to its four legs and two panniers and spotted a great marketing ploy. Noticing that his Penguin classics were perfectly sized to occupy the shelving space of the Donkey, Lane promoted the bookcase by inserting leaflets into 100,000 Penguin books prompting the new name Penguin Donkey.
Since the second edition there has also been a third Penguin Donkey added to the range by Azumi in 2003 but in my opinion it fails in comparison due to it losing its playful ‘donkey look’. The first Donkey is perhaps the most recognisable of the three and is rightly known as the
design classic due to its rarity and showcasing of bent plywood but to me it will always be the Penguin Donkey 2 that is my design classic. I feel that it totally captures what the first Donkey was all about and then sells itself as a stand alone design all on its own with its sleeker quirkier look.
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