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Ink Associates Featuring Tom Leamon, Andy Spain, Chisel & Mouse Studio and CLX
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CONTENTS 4 - 5 / INTRODUCTION 6 - 7 / ADIDAS MARKET NORTH 8 / FRED PERRY OSLO 9 / GC CENTRAL PATTAYA 10 - 11 / FRED PERRY WALLPAPER 12 - 13 / SALT RESORTWEAR 14 - 15 / ARCHITECTURAL PHOTGRAPHY WITH ANDY SPAIN 16 / MILES ALDRIDGE AT SOMERSET HOUSE 17 / CHISEL & MOUSE STUDIO 18 - 19 / RESEARCH 20 / INK TALK TO CLX ABOUT FUTURE RETAIL 22 / INK’S ADIDAS POP UP STORE 23 / ART IN RETAIL SPACES 24 - 26 / INK TALK TO ARTIST TOM LEAMON 27 / CONTACT
Front Cover: The Saint by Tom Leamon Back Cover: Madness by Tom Leamon
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Ink Associates
INTRODUCTION Here at Ink we would like to follow on from the theme of last quarter’s issue and remember the artistic inspirations and collaborations that have fuelled our fires, as well as give a little window into what is going on behind the scenes. As a Retail Consultancy we are always looking for new ways to inspire our clients with creative content that can be adapted or adopted in retail practice. Part of producing leading and cutting edge work is working with leading, cutting edge people. The result of the collaborations is an ever shifting line between curatorship and production: in other words an exciting place to be. Itis important to emphasise that we are a Retail Consultancy with skills across many disciplines: Strategy, Management, Design and Technical delivery. We work hard for our clients who include leading brands, and take pride in delivering solutions that work for everybody. As much as we love to push the boundaries, we know how important a strong dialogue with our partners is to getting a correct balance. In this issue we would like to explore art in retail. Working together art within the retail environment can give stores and their products greater value and cultural relevance. Art can be used to communicate brands in visual terms. In-fact, in-store art strategies have been proven to overcome language and cultural barriers. Featured here is some of this in action! Happy reading! Ink
THE TEAM STRATEGY
CREATIVE TEAM
TECHNICAL DESIGN
Simon W. / Architect Simon W.B. / Architect Luke / Furniture & Interiors Charles / Industrial Design
Ed / Branding & Graphic Design Sinead / Graphic Design Jamina / Interiors Tiff / Interiors Ryan / Interiors James / Visualisation Phil / Furniture & Interiors
Alex / Architectural Technologist Hayden / Architectural Technologist Liam / Architectural Technologist Sham / Architectural Technologist Tim / Architectural Technologist Luz / Architect Maureen / Architect
PROJECT MANAGERS Simon / Architect & PM Tom / PM & Contracts Management Richard / QS & PM Lee / PM & Contracts Management Gemma / PM & FFE Karen / QS & PM
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INK OFFICES LONDON & CHRISTCHURCH
STRATEGY
CREATIVE TEAM
We provide knowledge and experience based strategic support to our retail clients. Our focus is on the design & execution of the built environment, however our work includes the strategic application of systems and processes that address business functions in addition to the physical environments. We provide strategic insight to a number of our global brands. Our service is always bespoke and centres upon listening and understanding our clients’ challenges, needs & ambition.
Ink Creative is driven by a desire and curiosity to deliver innovative and imaginative solutions. Our creative centre of excellence is made up of a mix of multi-disciplinary specialists including interior, graphic and furniture designers, supported by animation and visualisation professionals. The cross-disciplinary approach offers a platform to deliver unique and exciting design for projects of drastically different scales from shopping centres to store windows, from brand pop-up and exhibition opportunities.
TECHNICAL DESIGN
PROJECT MANAGERS
Working closely with concept designers, clients & project managers our team of retail focused architects, technologists and materials experts apply construction industry leading skills to the design challenges. Our mission is to enable the creative ‘vision’ to be delivered on a practical, technical & statutorily compliant level. Whilst at the core our team provides technically led, drawing support we also provide expertise in materials, construction techniques, design for roll-out, value engineering, installation processes & systems, health and safety, the disability discrimination act and building regulations; this expertise is applied consistently locally, regionally & globally.
Ink Management provides the necessary level of control required to successfully deliver projects on behalf of our clients; locally, regionally and globally. On all projects we establish clear & unambiguous communication routes, we determine from the outset the client objectives and then seek to manage and balance the three drivers; cost, quality & time. Within this context our professional team provides the following services; Lead Consultant, Project Manager, Cost Control, Programme Management, Contract Administration, Construction Management & ‘Design & Build’ solutions.
Ink Associates
ADIDAS MARKET NORTH BRAND CENTRE
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FRED PERRY - NORWAY, OSLO
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GC - THAILAND, PATTAYA
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FRED PERRY BILLBOARD WALLPAPER PROCESS Billboard effect created for Fred Perry stores. Boards are created by layering brand related memorabilia, sticking ripping and rubbing the posters to create an authentic street wall effect.
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SALT RESORTWEAR Instore branding, signage and artwork proposals for beach resortwear brand Salt.
Avia Avia is a display typeface Used for expressive forms of information. It has high contrasts of black and white which gives it a fashionable feeling. lt is elegant and edgy.
Avia — Regular
Brown A more standardized typeface used for subheadings or body copy. It is a modern geomtric typeface making it well proportioned. The Brown font family also contains a backslanted typeface which could be used in a playful manner
Brown — Regular
Brown — Regular Backslanted
Signage Examples
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Wallpaper Creative Direction
Photography Direction
Wallpaper Design
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INK INTERVIEW ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHER ANDY SPAIN What do you do? I’m a photographer who works in architecture, interiors and construction. How do you approach each job you work on? When shooting for different clients and different sectors I mentally amend my brief to suit whoever I’m shooting for. I ask myself ‘Is this project for an architect who is keen to show the formal design elements of the building, is it a developer who is interested in demonstrating size and the buildings positioning in relation to key buildings or an interior company who wants to foreground the bespoke fittings that the client has chosen?’ Every client has a different brief depending on the project and what they want my images to be used for. How do you adapt your work for retail? When shooting retail the considerations are the same, namely, who is the client and what do they want from the images? I have shot retail for lighting designers and the imperative for these clients might be the need to demonstrate spot lights on specific products or a record of the overall project. Clients in the retail sector often want to demonstrate a feel for the project with specific shots to provide a story to tell prospective clients about the way this project was completed. You have done a lot of work for Ink Associates, could you talk us through a recent shoot? I recently did a shoot the new Christian Dior store in Sloane Street. I had to be there at 6am and leave before staff arrive at 8:30am one week day morning. It was important to capture all aspects of the store especially the feature lights, the video wall, main staircase, and each point of sale. I also wanted to highlight the height of the space and the relationship between the two floors. It was important to emphasise the design and to make a record for the client of the completed works. It is a big space so I needed to break it down into sections as well as having wider shots that showed how those sections related to each other. I generally work methodically around a building shooting wide in each space and then go for the closer details. I try to avoid capturing the whole thing or go too wide as retail spaces can start
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looking at bit too much like a warehouse . The images are seen as a set so a mix or shots is required. I keep a good depth of field and steady tripod and cable release with long exposures and without additional lighting which would ruin the feel intended by Ink. I avoid converging verticals to produce an objective looking set of architectural shot. How do you see the future of retail photography developing? Timelapse and moving imagery is proving progressively popular. Especially when a moving element of the retail interior is involved, you want to see your TV wall / lighting scheme or whatever it might be in action rather than a static image. This also provides additional content for making additional PR from the project via social media and improves your chances of getting the project on Dezeen or one of the online blogs (or iPad and online addition of the journals).
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MILES ALDRIDGE AT SOMERSET HOUSE Fashion photography is deeply entwined with the retail world. Photography is used to communicate brands in visual terms and overcomes language and cultural barriers. It connects with diverse and large numbers of consumers from all around the world. Miles Aldridge’s impact on fashion photography has been huge. Aldridge was born in London in 1964 and studied illustration at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. This was followed by a brief career directing music videos before he quickly discovered his passion towards still photography hence becoming a fashion photographer from the mid 1990’s onwards. Over the last two decades Aldridge was famous for his photographic work and has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers including Vogue Italia, American Vogue, Numéro, Ponystep, The New York Times and The New Yorker. His recent exhibition at Somerset House featured over 50 large-scale photographic prints, showing works produced throughout Aldridge’s career, which include both published and unpublished work. What was truly captivating about the exhibition was that it gave a deep insight into Aldridge’s creative mind and his method of working. His sketches, hand drawn storyboards and polaroid’s were presented to show this process. Knowing that Aldridge has always worked with film doesn’t come as a surprise as his meticulous approach is evident in his polaroid’s, which becomes clear that the preplanning and staging is done in the camera and not in postproduction. In my opinion his work defines utter perfection: the immaculate make-up of his models with every strand of hair in place, the carefully placed props and positioning and the tight composition in the frame is meticulously planned.
Cabaret
Red Marks
Aldridge’s dreamy world has always focused on beautiful flawless women who are portrayed like the robot-like women in the feature film called Stepford Wives. Aldridge’s women pose without emotion, surreal and too perfect for reality, yet his work still evokes a sense of emotion as it makes one admire and aspire to the materialistic and sexualized world these figures live in. In addition, the perfectly balanced composition vitalized by the super-vibrant colours he uses makes his work a piece of art, which is extremely inspiring. Article: Jamina Davidson
First Impression
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CHISEL & MOUSE
Brothers Gavin and Robert Paisley, based in Sussex England, employ a modern twist on traditional architectural model making. They combine CAD and 3D printing with traditional moulding and casting to produce highly detailed models of iconic buildings. Their models are finished in crisp white plaster, the windows and doors are metal etched and many of the models have 3D printed parts such as balustrades and pillars. Pushing the boundaries of architectural model making, their use of technology enables them to reproduce buildings in exacting detail. Chisel & Mouse’s portfolio is diverse, they have created facades of department stores, galleries and museums both new and old, if the building has architectural merit they want to model it. www.chiselandmouse.com
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RESEARCH
We are using private Pinterest boards as a way of sharing ideas to our clients. We have boards for lighting, fixtures, furniture, detailing, architecture, fabric, exhibition design, branding, wayfinding, illustration and much more! To look at our personal research visit: pinterest.com/pinink
Window Display
Furniture Rooms
Window Display London Store PRe Opening
Lighting NUD Lighting
Speed photography shinichi-maruyama
Architecture Bas Princen
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Materials Oxidisation
Future Retail Topshop
Wayfinding Kalmer Konst Museum
Fixtures Camilla Lowe
Pop Up VMX Architects
Environmental Design Fabio Ongarato
Ink Associates
INK TALK TO CLX ABOUT FUTURE RETAIL The Internet has changed the world. This is true and nobody will dispute it. The debate might begin when discussing which Industry has been affected more. Is it Publishing? Or Retail? Or Luxury? Despite the massive research data available on the matter, we don’t have a definitive answer. But in truth it doesn’t really matter... Who has been affected more is us as Consumers and the way we shop. And the transformation started by the Internet has been accelerated by the introduction of new mobile devices such as tablet and smartphones, which are still growing according the Moore law (double capacity, half price) and finally the availability of affordable large bandwidth. All of this has changed our shopping experience expectations and the way we choose one product versus another. In the end, we live in a multi-channel world and every piece of information coming from every channel has a certain level of influence on our decision making process. But in order to simplify our task here, we will focus on the three main channels, those being: print (with catalogues), the Point Of Sale and Digital (with mobile and ecommerce). Printed catalogues where mid quality huge books with thousands of pages, issued multiple times per year and distributed capillary. Nowadays, catalogues are higher quality booklets comprising a much lower number of pages, issued once a year and distributed in remote locations where the Internet connectivity is not so good or in areas where age groups are Gen X and before. The content of catalogues has changed as well, being more focused on branding and emotions than on product information, which everybody would expect to find, always up to date, on the Retailer’s or Product’s web site. So, printed catalogues are not dead but have dramatically changed and might have got a new life span thanks to the introduction of Augmented Reality (AR). Last year, the introduction by IKEA of an AR enabled catalogue and mobile App has started a new era for printed products such as if the dinosaurs were resurrected. Nonetheless, catalogues must be Digital but they have changed a lot as well in the recent past. When first introduced, Digital Catalogues where a mere replica of the printed version, while today they are separate products focused on providing product information and experience. But again, what has
changed more is the content: still product images have been replaced by multiple or even 360 degrees views of the product and by CGI movies of product’s features... and we all expect sofas to turn when sliding our finger on them. One interesting consideration can be made on the fact that the Internet has removed the constraints of traditional media. Indeed, The number of products included in printed catalogues is limited by the size and number of pages that it comprises, the number of products displayed in a Store is limited by the available square footage, the number of products displayed in an Ecommerce site is limited by the capacity of the Retailer, or its supplier, to create the content and the availability of bandwidth to deliver it to Consumers. This leads into product configurators and the expectation we have to be able to see one product in all of the existing size / material / colour and texture existing combinations. Now, as this might sound easy it is truly not. The reason for it being the good old combinatorics according to which in order to show all the possible combinations of one product in two sizes, three materials and ten colours requires the Retailer to generate 360 images. If he then wishes to match the Consumer expectation of “tilt and swill” the sofa, that number multiplies by at least 24, for a stunning total of 8640 individual images for one product range! Fortunately, CGI - another area that has dramatically improved over the last few years - allows all of those images to be produced at a Computer Workstation long before the sofa even starts to be produced. CGI makes it possible to create a digital model of the product and then through the use of specialized applications to “wrap it” with material / colour combinations generating either still images, even of very high quality for printed products, digital images with different angles to be used in 360 degrees visualization or lower quality models to be used in interactive applications, such as room configurators. In the area of room configuration, CGI can be used to create fully furnished virtual rooms (e.g. kitchens) where not only the material of the furniture can be chosen but decorative items such as wall painting and flooring can be personalized as well. CGI gives endless possibility in terms of creativity, kills time to market and even allows to do market testing of new products to-be and use the
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information collected in order to decide whether or not the product is valid or how it should be changed before going into production. All of the retailers are facing the challenges of producing high quality content in high volumes but thanks to Digital they have the relief of being able to reuse the same content of multiple channels with very limited, if any, adaptations. In fact, if created according to real multichannel guidelines, the same sofa model can be displayed on a web site, on a tablet, on a smartphone and even on a large interactive screen at the Store. Such investment in content does as well strengthen the Product’s brand which is the one thing that Consumers follow more through their shopping process, whether it begins on a printed catalogue to finish at a pick-up store or starts on a flagship store to complete with an ecommerce transaction. In the end, we don’t know which media will win over the other, and perhaps all of them will coexist in a certain shape and form, but we know for sure that providing the right content at the right time via the right channel is the only successful way to communicate with the Consumer 3.0 and that this takes all of us back to the roots of high quality content production that the initial steps of the Digital Era seemed to have pushed in a corner. One image sells more than a thousand words, a nicer image sells more!
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INK’S ADIDAS POP UP CONCEPT STORE A pop up concept for adidas Originals at Fouberts Place London. It is an adaptable space that offers an engaging platform to host events, retail or an exciting alternative venue for PR and photoshoots. Inspired by the familiar back drop to our towns & cities. Inspired by urban social hubs the idea unites music, fashion & art under one roof. Embracing alternative venues used by adidas Originals consumer.
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ART IN RETAIL SPACES
Jason Hackenwerth
Yayoi Kusama
Frank Sidebottom
Yayoi Kusama
Kyle Bean
Pamen Pereira
Ink Associates
INK TALK TO ARTIST TOM LEAMON
Artist, illustrator and poet Tom Leamon is no stranger to the hard work and dedication it takes to set up a successful and well-functioning creative space. In the ten years that Tom has been pursuing his artistic practise he has transformed some very dilapidated buildings into truly beautiful exhibition and studio spaces, both for himself and others. His first venture, ‘Us So Far...’ took seemingly destitute buildings - a manor house in Rutland, an old barn in Essex and a maze-like wine cellar in Camden and transformed them into unique and alluring exhibition spaces. Then came an art collective called ‘The Lip Man Virus’. Formed by Tom; two designers, Bob Lorimer and Jack Alexander, painter Pedro Leitao and sculptor Rowan Mersh, the collective was an energetic hub of artistic enterprise, setting up shows and running studios and workshops out of numerous exciting spaces in both central and east London. After deciding to concentrate on his own practice in 2008, he had his first solo show on Brick Lane in 2009 – this sell-out success enabled him to invest in a bigger, better workspace in the well-established Make Space Studios in Waterloo, as well as set up his own enterprise, Studio 180. A converted Georgian terrace containing five unique artists’ studios tailored around the original features of the building, Studio 180 also hosts live music gigs, art exhibitions, theatre performances, a dinner club and cinema nights in what is affectionately termed ‘The Basement’. The coming together of Leamon’s rich and varied experience, not only as an artist but as an avant-garde visionary in the complex world of contemporary art, has resulted in his latest venture, Gallery 223, which has been made possible by local entrepreneur and arts patron Denis Geary. Gallery 223, situated in an eerily atmospheric railway arch underneath London’s Waterloo station, opened in October 2013 – an inspiring and unique space which represents some of the most cutting edge of London’s contemporary art, as well as offering an arts club promoting all manner of cultural activities including music, poetry and performance. It may be the antithesis of the white-walled contemporary gallery but the art itself truly comes alive in this exceptional space.
The opening exhibition, entitled ‘Pleasant Remains’, was born out of diverse and experimental approaches to materials and explores the transient nature of everything that surrounds us, be it an object, an idea or indeed human life. The word ‘pleasant’ alludes to the good that can come from life after a death and how life in one way or another recycles itself. The exhibition was a mixed show with works by established artists Rowan Mersh, Adeline De Monseignat, Kim Donaldson, Tim Hill, Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate and Tom Leamon himself. As well as providing a platform for Leamon and his inner circle, an important part of Gallery 223’s ethos is to share the potential that this imaginative space offers. Their next project is a partnership with the much-esteemed Black Rat Projects who are unveiling their latest show “IʼM NEVER SHOPPING HERE AGAIN”. Renowned artists Candice Tripp and Giles Walker will present not only new work of their own, but also several collaborative installations and a collaborative print. Next spring the gallery will present a solo show of Leamon’s new work entitled ‘Everyone’s a Narrator’. Currently a work in progress, there will be 1000 illustrations documenting Leamon’s time and people he discovers along the way. The illustrations will be part photograph, part drawing, each with their own personal story. Leamon explains: ‘sometimes the story will explain why the person has been chosen, sometimes the story is about the environment at that moment the work was created and sometimes it is just a single line of writing about how the image makes me feel.’ Gallery 223’s situation and set up, with an artist as the creative force, certainly makes for an remarkable venue, a portal through which Leamon can exercise his own curatorial judgement as well as showcase his individual talent, in a space as unique as it is inspiring. For more details please see www.gallery223.co.uk
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Bless your soul
The Saint
Orange Blossom
Ink Associates
Views of inside Gallery 223
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CONTACT
Ink’s London Offce in Southwark
London 10 Chancel Street, London, SE1 0UX. +44 (0) 20 7021 0561
Submissions are welcome please get in touch at
Christchurch Tolsey Studio, 46 High St, Christchurch, Dorset, BH23 1BN. +44 (0) 1202 496 222
Design by Ink
studio@inkassociates.co.uk www.inkassociates.co.uk
studio@inkassociates.co.uk