Jonathan Zawada is a graphic designer and creative director who works across the music, publishing, fashion and corporate industries from his home in Sydney, Australia. He has become best known for his varied approach to the discipline of design, his personal ventures (including the mathematical style guide, Fashematics and TRU$T FUN!) and running parallel to Jonathan’s career as a graphic designer is his work as a practicing visual artist. Working across oil painting, drawing, sculpture and installation he participates in exhibitions regularly in galleries around the world.
Tell me a little about your background – what path led you to what you’re doing now? I’ve always enjoyed drawing since I was a little kid and through my teenage years I got interested more in the digital side of illustration, things like 3d modeling, photoshop and interactive design. Throughout my later years of high school I was doing the odd freelance job building websites, working for a small traditional animation studio and selling the occasional tshirt that I would screen print in my bathroom. As a result of getting started working quite early on I only lasted about 6 months into my design degree before I was offered a job at a very low end web development company which I took even though it wasn’t even really design but rather straight programming for online. As luck would have it a couple of guys ran a little design company out of a tiny office out the back of the place I worked and I ended up quitting my job to work with them. One of them was George Gorrow who soon started up Ksubi with some other guys and as a result a whole assortment of doors into fashion, illustration and design opened up for me. It still took a number of years for me to really get away from working with designers on building websites to getting design work on my own though.
Jonathan
who?
How did you begin your career as a graphic artist? I think the first thing I ever did was selling t-shirts that I’d screen-printed to my friends in high school. The design was something like 7 colours, I didn’t have proper screens, just hand
cut plastic stencils that I’d have to wash off in the bath after each and every print. designing things for local businesses as a result. At about the same time though, I also worked
an after school job for a traditional animation studio doing in-betweening and clean-ups which was just about the best after school job I could have ever asked for.
Would you describe yourself as a graphic artist? Graphic artist is probably a pretty good term. I have a bit of trouble explaining what I do to people that I meet professionally for the first time. I think lots of people know of one or two parts of the work I do, like
say illustration and web design, and its tough explaining the breadth of things I work on without sounding like a total jack-of-all trades. Like telling people I make hand dyed silk scarves and jewellery out of minerals and
solder, and then having to convince them they can still trust me to design their corporate logo or direct a photoshoot. That’s all ignoring the gallery based art side of things too
What are you most proud of professionally? That’s a really tough one and would probably depend entirely on my mood, right now I’d say maybe the Magazine I put together for Modular a couple of years ago. Essentially my role was creative director/ co-editor as well as art director so it was a rare opportunity to have more control over the content, as a result I think I ended up with a more mature degree of design where the content and its presentation were intrinsically tied together, rather than simply being just a superficial sheen. It was also a great opportunity to play with a wide variety of visual approaches including photographic art direction, illustration, typography and book
Do you think graphic design is more trend based than art?
YEAH, which is a SHAME
That’s why I stopped doing t-shirt prints. The only one’s I did were those for S2A and a few others. I got really worried at the idea that my pencil drawings would maybe be popular for a few years and then they would go out of favour because the trend passes and then I’m fucked basically *laughs*, where I could’ve had a career. Instead you’re left as this little blip of a trend. Being tied to product and fashion, it’s inherently going to have a time limit attached to it. Just how music becomes representative of a time.
“Learning about personalities is the fundamental underpinning of my design practice and by far the most enjoyable part. “
Th e re s e e ms to be a l o t o f c art oon re fe r e n c e s i n y o u r work . H o w d o y o u t h i n k t he con t e x t o f c a r to o n s ha s d e ve lo p e d an d w h a t sign i f i ca n ce d o th e y p l ay i n y o ur a r tw o r k ?
I think the language of cartoons has become a great sort of short hand for constructing certain messages. Cartoons are great representations of the everyman without being specific to any particular demographic, and in that sense they’re a good way to empathise with a broad audience. Graphically they’re inherently effective as they’re high contrast and read well over long distances. Because cartoons are two-dimensional they easily lend themselves to abstraction and combination
with other graphic elements. I think they’re really the ultimate in modernist figurative representation. For a lot of us, cartoons constitute an extremely significant part of the representation of the characters that we empathise with in our early years. As kids most of the stories we watch and listen to come packaged in cartoon and I think that has a really lasting effect on the way we see ourselves as people. I think it’s healthy not to take yourself too seriously.
What themes are threaded through your imagery? That seems to change a bit with time and with each client I think. Maybe there’s a kind of tough femininity to it all though? Lots of blacks and rainbow colours…I like combinations of nature and machinery. I think all design revolves around re-contextualising, or taking advantage of inherent meanings in imagery that can be counted on to communicate the same things to a broad audience. That’s really the challenge of it all – finding the right visual, or combination of visuals, to match your message, that will still say that same thing to a broad range of people, no matter what their visual understanding is whilst making it unique
in some way...
Y o u’ ve wor k e d f o r s o m e fan t a s t i c c o m p a n i e s bo t h he re a n d o v e r s e a s. W h o ha ve b e e n so m e o f y o u r favouri t e c l i e n ts an d / o r co lla b o r ato r s ? I think design is always about
good communication, so my favourite clients tend to be those I’ve known the longest. People like Modular and in particular The Presets have been fantastic to work with for that reason and I think liking the product really helps make the experience a good one. I’m always excited about working with fashion designer Tina Kalivas too – her skill as a designer is absolutely incredible
and I always feel privileged to work with somebody of that calibre. There are photographers like Ben Sullivan and Lyn Balzer and Anthony Perkins who I love getting to work with too – they’re all good friends and you don’t need to do so much talking to communicate your thoughts.
“The work I create is no reflection of the work I like.”
What artists influence your a bunch of artists I love like Koons, Ed Ruscha and this work? There’s amazing Japanese artist called Minoro Namata. A lot of my new landscape work is weirdly connected to this video game called Red Dead Redemption. None of the work looks like it, but it’s in there somewhere. Otherwise, a good thing about being in L.A is just being free of old influences. I don’t have any of my books with me and I haven’t really been looking at the Internet much. So i’m completely free of that, which is nice
What does a typical day at work involve for I work from home with my wife Annie so my time, weekdays and you?
weekends is generally pretty structureless. I tend to chop and change between several different projects in a day, mostly dictated by impending deadlines, so often I’ll spend a morning working on an illustration for something like a tshirt print and then the afternoon maybe designing something like a website or a cd cover. Hopefully I manage to get out of the house at some point for a coffee or to have lunch in the park but that doesn’t always happen and on occasion I’ve spent 3 or 4 days in the house without stepping outside once.
“The most effective way I have found to think about a design solution is not to think about it at all.�
Sydney based artist Jonathan Zawada is famed for his work with The Presets, Ksubi and Modular Records, and has worked with some of the biggest brand names around the world, from Coca-Cola to BMW. He works within numerous different mediums; illustration, animation, programming, and design, and is one of the worlds best respected designers. Erin Forsyth caught up with Jonathan just after his involvement in the high profile group show entitled ‘Batteries Not Included’. To contact Jonathan Zawada please e-mail him to jonathan@zawada.com.au
All rights reserved.