CR December featuring Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media, pictured in his office, in front of a reproduction of How to Work Better (1991) by Fischli & Weiss (adapted for Tate in 2006). © the artists. Photographer: Jonathon Foster Williams

The December issue of CR sees our next Month In The Life Of special (following August's A Month In The Life Of A Graphic Designer). This time we are going client-side. Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media and in charge of all the promotional activity for Tate Modern and Tate Britain, has kept a daily journal over the course of four weeks in October. In addition, we will discuss Tate and its activities with a selection of its creative partners, including Cornel Windlin, Fallon's Richard Flintham, James Goggin and artist and Tate trustee Jeremy Deller. As a taster, here is a seven-day extract from Gompertz's journal. December issue of CR is out on the 22 November.

15.10.07
In my experience two things can happen when a designer presents after working on a brief. Version One: the design is almost perfect, an adjustment away from sign-off. Version Two: a total car-crash; nowhere near what I was hoping for, normally caused by a mixture of my poor brief, unaligned vision and bad luck. I was discussing this anomaly today with Louise who runs Tate’s Design & Print Studio. We reckon our ratio is 85:15 in favour of Version One. What’s worrying us is that we haven’t had a Version Two for a while and the gods of odds suggest we’re going to cop one over the next 12 days when we’re seeing all the designs for our spring shows, starting with James [Goggin] tomorrow.

16.10.07
A designer asked this morning if they had to use Tate font and brand toolkit. I was surprised. It showed a poor understanding of typographical identity and a lack of imagination. Later on James came in to present his designs for the Peter Doig posters [one shown above]. They are brilliant. I asked the Chief Curator to come by. She agreed. The crop of Peter’s painting and placement of type were both spot on. What made them brilliant though was James’s treatment of the word ‘Doig’. He had inserted the ‘i’ from his monoline version of Tate font into the name, leaving the rest in standard Tate font. By making this small, but very thoughtful intervention, James had immediately communicated the contemporary nature of Peter’s work. It’s the perfect example of a brand toolkit only being as limited as the designer using it.

17.10.07
There’s a fault-line running through advertising which became apparent to me while waiting to catch my train today. I was looking at a poster promoting the Isle of Man. It featured a man paddling a canoe down a swollen river with dark brooding clouds in the background. The tag line was “Set Yourself Free”. It was ok. The trouble was next to it was a poster promoting Californian wine. This had a picture of a hippy-type playing a guitar on a gloriously sun-soaked evening in the middle of a beautifully undulating vineyard. It didn’t make me want to buy their wine, but it did make the Isle of Man look like a madman’s vision of hell. And that’s the problem. It doesn’t matter how good an ad is if you can’t control the context in which it is seen.

18.10.07
We opened the Turner Prize in Liverpool today. There were lots of people from the artworld and the press. Everybody had a good time. There’s a buzz about the city at the moment inspired by the impending Capital of Culture which starts in January. I’m not sure I would have noticed the change but we are making a documentary for Channel 4 about the Turner Prize going to Liverpool. The film centres on a Liverpudlian taxi driver called Brian who asks his passengers what they think of the Turner Prize. I’ve seen some of the early rushes, the quality of the comments are good and often very funny. In a way Brian acts as a metaphor for the city; clever, entertaining and charmingly self-deprecating. Liverpool is a great city.

19.10.07
The recent postal strike has meant my mail has come in large batches instead of a steady flow, which in turn has made me realise the huge amount of wastage caused by designers looking for work. Today alone I received six separate packages from design companies. I put all the paper elements into the recycling bin. The plastic, metal and gimmicks will sadly end up in landfill, and we ate the sweets. I assume this tactic must work sufficiently well to make it worth doing, but the only impact it has on me is negative. It’s unsolicited, unwanted, lazy and thoughtless. We choose designers because we admire their work and they have a genuine interest in art. And they tend to choose us for the same reasons. There’s no need for mailshots.

20.10.07
I sat down to watch the rugby final with my wife and four children. The younger two didn’t make it past the pre-match punditry because they were being silly. They said they preferred the adverts. The rest of us watched a mediocre England team do ok. At the end we too chose to watch the adverts. They were good. One was for Honda, the other for Guinness. I felt bad about sending the little ones to bed. The ads seemed to strike a chord with the England rugby team. Neither Honda nor Guinness is very sexy, but some creative thinking has brought the best out of them. They say in advertising that you ‘can’t polish a turd’. But creativity, whether in advertising or rugby, can always bring the mundane alive.

21.10.07
It happened twice today. It happened four times yesterday and will it happen again tomorrow. When people discover I work for Tate the response always includes the phrase, “I don’t know anything about art”. That’s like saying you don’t know anything about trees or houses or people. It’s all around you. People are intimidated by art because they don’t have encyclopaedic knowledge of every artist, movement and masterpiece. But nobody has. I think going to a gallery is like going to a bookshop. When you go to Borders you see thousands of books and eventually chose just one or two. Then you spend some time reading them before forming an opinion. Art is just the same. When I go to a gallery, I choose one work and spend some time with it, read the notes, do a little research. An artwork is like a book, not the cover.

22.10.07
We expect a great deal from our press and poster advertising. We expect it to get across, in a fleeting moment, the theme and ideas behind a show and drive thousands of people to the gallery. This strategy only works because the ads are placed to coincide with all the reviews so that the interested public is at least aware of the exhibition. I saw the designers today for our two spring shows. Simon Elliot from Rose came in for Duchamp, May Ray, Picabia and our Creative Review new talent commission, Europa, came in with Modern Painters [selection of treatment ideas shown above]. The designs are nearly there so we should be ok. But if the press reviews for either of the shows are bad it won’t matter if it’s the best design in the world.