Michael William Lester Creative Report by Ethan Earle
Michael William Lester Originally from a small coastal town in the east of England, I graduated from the University of Westminster in summer ‘13 and moved to Paris shortly after where I interned at Ogilvy & Mather before being offered a working position. After living off bread, cheese and five hours of sleep for a year I grabbed a D&AD New Blood Nomination and left agency life behind me to follow my dream of building my own design practice as a freelancer. Designer / Illustrator / Animator Clients: IBM Quickbooks Computer Arts Ogilvy New York T3 Mag Heineken Orange County Transportation Authority RPA Advertising Ogilvy Paris Nurture Digital LA Intern Mag Orlebar Brown
See all projects featured in this report at — http://michaelwilliamlester.com
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During your final year of university, were you aware of what role you wanted to play in the industry? I didn’t really have a clue to be honest. It was not until the very last semester of the third year that a way of working started to click. Up until that point I was all over the place, but that’s kind of how I wanted it. I didn’t want to stick to one thing too early, even if things were working, and that’s how university should be. I always say to students that you’re never going to get this much freedom again for such a long time, so you’ve got to spend the majority of time trying as many things as you can. I definitely didn’t exhaust the resources of our campus as much as I should have but I definitely came away knowing that I’d tried my hand at a whole heap of different ways of working. I didn’t really touch Adobe Illustrator until the third year and I like to think that those two years of getting my hands dirty with physical processes gave me a better understanding and discipline when I finally started exploring digital processes. Coming from a more fine-art based course at college, my transition from art to design wasn’t a forced jolt like it could have been but a natural turn over the course of a few years. The first semester of the third year I went in a very philosophical direction and wasn’t really happy at all with what I made, but in the second semester I found it helped to have a foot into that side of things when working on design briefs. I found this nice mid point where I could pull in a bit of my personal work and way of thinking and use it to solve briefs. When I left uni my plan was to get a job in a graphic design studio in London... I ended up being shipped off to an ad agency in Paris. I’ve never been a strong decision maker anyway when it comes to big things in life and after that happened I vowed to take care of the small things (making work I’m happy with) and let the big things (job, career) take care of themselves.
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Did you enter competitions during your time at university? If so, did they help with gaining employers attention? Student competitions played a big part in my journey through university. I first entered the D&AD awards in my second year, taking on an HP animation brief. This project marked the first real turning point that I remember. I animated for the first time and also learnt the real breadth of the design industry—I wrote a script, briefed a friend of mine with a deeper voice than me to read it, wrote and recorded a score on guitar and for the first time had a ’tag line’ that the whole thing sat under. This way of working changed how I worked from then onwards. Giving something a title, a little roof to live under can greatly help you make sense of what you’re doing and also get you instantly excited about what you’re doing. For anyone interested in responding to real briefs or wanting to give advertising a taste, the D&AD competitions are the perfect place to start. Again, coming from fine art I would often struggle with the ‘why’ question—why are you making this, why are you doing it that way, etc. Working with briefs gave me a few barriers and I realised it was exactly what I needed. Then, when I want to go back to making personal work the competition briefs were invaluable in learning how to set my own briefs and become a lot more focussed and productive with the outcome. The best bit of advice regarding awards that I have is always do them for the work, not the award! A good example is one for YCN I entered (some posters for Marriott Hotels). I didn’t win anything and when choosing which work to show during D&AD New Blood
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festival I felt obliged to put the HTC Zoe piece that had won a competition. However I really believed in my Marriott posters and showed them instead, and this is what would catch the attention of an art director from Paris and land me a 6 month internship. The HTC Zoe project was really great for my portfolio but I would say I think there’s this tendency to think it will do all the work for you. How many referrals did I get from the actual billboards and people seeing them at the time? 1. And I didn’t get a response after his first email! However when it came to the interview with Ogilvy Paris I could show this work and really impress them, same thing when other people approached me or looked at my online portfolio after the billboards came down. It was a lesson in how much we have to play in our own success, just having these huge bus-size billboards up with my name on wasn’t enough, you’ve always got to keep pushing.
I believe you had an internship at Ogilvy & Mather in Paris, how did this come about? I was at the D&AD New Blood Festival, it was the second day and I’d just got back from attending a talk. My classmate handed me a little note and said someone was interested in my work and they left their number. I thought it might be a prank but I called the number anyway and arranged to meet at a nearby café. I luckily had my tablet with a digital portfolio on so I took that over, we chatted for about half hour and I took him through my work. Within a few weeks we had another short interview on Skype, he shared my work around his office and I accepted a six month internship in Paris. A month or so later, I was sitting at my new desk 10 seconds off the Champs Elysees! It all happened very quickly and I still feel incredibly lucky. The lesson I learnt was after talking to people at New Blood I had 3 or 4 offers for internships. Previous to that I’d sent out about 20 or so impersonal emails to job listings I’d found online and hadn’t got a single reply. Face to face networking is so important to landing that first opportunity as a graduate. A great bit of advice I’ve heard over the years is don’t contact people for a job—ask for a portfolio review. That way there’ll be more of a chance of getting to talk to them and making a memorable impression. If nothing comes of it you’ve had some free advice from the industry. The Worlds Smallest Portfolio — (2015)
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Did your time at Ogilvy have a large impact on your choice to go freelance? “Sure, you might spend 3 days retouching a family photo for a sausage brand (I did) but it’s a fast track to developing skills at lightning speed” I think I always knew I wanted to go it alone, however I decided to take the plunge into the ad world without really knowing what I got myself into. Looking back I would say to everyone wanting to go it alone straight out of uni to go and spend a year at an advertising agency. These places are crying out for visual talent that can bring their art directors and copywriters ideas to life. Sure, you might spend 3 days retouching a family photo for a sausage brand (I did) but it’s a fast track to developing skills at lightning speed (I can now shoot and retouch photos of my work thanks to all the Ogilvy photoshopping). It also opens your contact book up to a vast number of powerful, talented people (who, chances are, are going to all split up and move onto another agency, another country, creating a nice worldwide network to start your freelance career off). Since leaving Paris I got a weekly freelance job with the IBM team I worked with in Paris, worked with Ogilvy New York and have currently been working with an agency in LA which came directly from a creative team I worked with in Paris who moved there and thought of me.
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What would you say your favourite response to a brief has been in your career so far? The HTC Zoe billboard design was one of my favourites, and how it came about. The brief was to advertise the new feature of the phone, this thing called HTC Zoe which at the time was quite a new thing (when you take a picture it would record some footage as well so when you scroll through your gallery feed photos start to move, it’s pretty standard now). I struggled for maybe 2 weeks with ideas before completely scrapping everything I did about a week before the deadline when I had a brain wave, which was this little sketch of the Tate Modern. It stemmed from this tagline I thought up— ‘a gallery that’s alive’. I wrote this first and thought what if I used a play on words and built this scene around this personified art gallery. It sounded a bit cheesy but as soon as I sketched out the Tate with eyes and hands I knew I’d cracked it.
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My advice here would be to think more if you’re not satisfied with what you are doing. Have patience and take some risks, had I continued with the route I wasn’t satisfied with I never would have had that breakthrough. It was then an intense week of turning it from a sketch into something that worked as a billboard, but it felt natural—if you can make it work on a post it note it’s going to work everywhere else.
What is the most vital stage of your creative process? The ideas stage is by far the most vital part of my process. If you get that bit right, the rest will follow. Having said that, it’s always a balance game and I’ve been known to sit and ’think’ for way too long when I need to get something visual down as this too can lead to a breakthrough thought. I usually try to separate these two processes—thinking and doing—as much as I can. Setting aside time to think, when you know there’s not the pressure of getting any work actually done, can work wonders. I try to also separate it with location too, opting to go and spend my thinking time out in a café, on a walk, on a train journey etc. as cliché as it sounds, it works.
You seem to be delving quite a bit into animation, what sparked this decision? Ever since I was very young I’ve always dreamt of working at Pixar, I think there’s still that bit of me that wants to make it come true. I’m obsessed with traditional story-telling, super clear and simple but flawlessly executed. I’m trying to pull in as much animation work as possible so I can learn quickly while on the job as I’m too busy to spend hours learning these skills outside of work. Little by little I’m starting to improve, starting to get a better grasp of pacing and how to add life into objects. It’s all a very slow journey to one day making an animated short. I have this idea for a short that I have been tinkering with since the last year of university. I know that if I jumped into it right now I wouldn’t have the skills to pull it off as best as it could be so it’s quite nice holding onto something for a change and developing it at a snail’s pace, waiting for that time when I feel ready (and have the time to make it).
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What advice would you give to an undergraduate considering a career in the creative industry? Never stop learning and welcome failure. When someone tells you a quicker way of doing something, listen and learn it. It’s easy to say “I like to do it this way because I’m used to it” but embrace that help and you’ll become better. If you find your self in a position where you’re uncomfortable (e.g. a new job where you don’t have the skills, or find yourself with more responsibilities) see it through and you’ll come out on top. I heard this lecture from The School of Life and the speaker asked a question - ‘do you avoid challenges so you can stay the best or do you embrace them and love to fail?’ It speaks for itself—be a small fish at every opportunity, you’ll grow a lot faster.
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