Further to my last post, here I show you my another illustration which is the one I have at the end sent off to publish. That means my last illustration is actually "the rejected", and will forever be "hidden".
"umool umool" is a magazine-formed project by Na Kim. It has posed an interesting question to our industry and let us see the hidden destiny of some denied proposals and rejected projects. "Ghost projects" is what they call.
What is the destiny of a failed communication? If a project was denied by commissioner or initiator or client or (even, in this case, by myself), for any reasons, can you refer to it as a failure? Anyone could have this experience - especially if you are a designer - but the actual reasons, processes and causes of refusal and diverse. This each unfertilised egg has its own behind story. Although rejection is largely caused by external factors, the situation concerns your own creation and the lost chance for the work to be shown in public and realised. Faced with this outcome, do you apply the unrealised project to other situations and allow the egg to finally hatch in another context? Or do you transform the body into a clever and aesthetic Frankenstein?
Again when we keep reading it we find it applies to a lot of greatest stories in our human history. The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand. It was Rand's first major literary success. More than 6.5 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. The manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers before Archibald Ogden at the Bobbs-Merrill Company risked his job to get it published. Despite mixed reviews from the contemporary media, the book gained a following by word of mouth and became a bestseller. A 1991 poll rated her another book Atlas Shrugged the second most influential book after the Bible. Rand have had a lot of followers since then and one among them is Alan Greenspan, long-time head of the Federal Reserve System (1987-2006). How many manifestations of Rand's ideas we see in Greenspan's influential and powerful work sometimes reflects how important "the rejected" could be.
What is the destiny of a failed communication? Would you refer to it as a failure?
My column illustration titled "An impression about Berlin" | March 2013
