“The trouble with most of us is that we’d rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism,” Norman Vincent Peale

Last year’s D&AD annual arrived a few months ago. To be honest, I dreaded opening it. The harder the covers try to be original, the more disinclined I feel to open the books – and so I didn’t, until today, when I actually looked through it.

To my mind, compared with some of the extraordinary work that I can easily trawl from my memory, there was little in the annual that stirred either jaw-dropping admiration or shameful envy.

Seeing so much sameness made me wonder whether winning awards, being published or being exhibited – all of which have long been markers of the quality of a designer’s work – are now the cause of so much conformity.