Ways & Means Magazine for OFFSET Dublin 2016

WAYS & MEANS

ISSUE 3 PRODUCED EXCLUSIVELY FOR OFFSET DUBLIN 2016

www.iloveoffset.com @weloveoffset

PRINTED IN IRELAND AT PLUS PRINT

C REDIT

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Editor & Design Bren Byrne Contributors Lisa Haran, Lauren Pritchard, Orlaith Ross, Brian Herron, Linda King, Roisin McVeigh, Rob Alderson, David Wall, Steve Simpson, Pam Bowman, Matt Edgar & Adrian Shaughnessey.

Special Thanks Ciaran Smith at Plus Print Paul Scharf & Rob Mannix at G. F. Smith Parents & Family for babysitting so we could work late.

PAPER STOCK SUPPLIED BY

WWW.GFSMITH.COM

COLORPLAN TABRIZ BLUE (135GSM) COLORPLAN CITRINE (135GSM) HEAVEN 42 SOFT MATT (135GSM) ZEN PURE WHITE UNCOATED(120GSM) COLORPLAN HARVEST (135GSM) COLORPLAN COOL BLUE (135GSM) COLORPLAN COOL GREY (135GSM) COLORPLAN PRISTINE WHITE (100GSM)

ADVERTISING DESIGN FIL UX TRENDS GRAPHICS CO SOCIAL DIGITAL PRINT A ER EDUCATION TRAINING EL MAKING ANIMATION M

LM ILLUSTRATION CRAFT OMMUNICATION FASHION ARCHITECTURE ART POST G TECH INNOVATION MOD MUSIC TASTE INDUSTRIA

ADVERTISING DESIGN FIL UX TRENDS GRAPHICS CO SOCIAL DIGITAL PRINT A ER EDUCATION TRAINING EL MAKING ANIMATION M FURNITURE STAGE INTERA

LM ILLUSTRATION CRAFT OMMUNICATION FASHION ARCHITECTURE ART POST G TECH INNOVATION MOD MUSIC TASTE INDUSTRIA ACTIVE EFFECTS MOTION

CON TENT REED&RADER Digital Artists

“Be nice, be hungry, have fun, and acquire a lot of cats.”

STEPHEN KELLEHER Designer

“I enjoy pushing shapes and colors around. Playing in the sandbox of design is something of an escape from reality.”

ROTHCO

Creative Agency

“At Rothco, anyone can have an idea, anyone can be creative.”

4CREATIVE Designer

“Start somewhere negative. Look for the wrong answer. Not the right one. You’ll be guaranteed to be somewhere different.”

MR. BINGO Illustration

“Hate Mail allows me to take things I hate about people and get them off my chest. It’s a cathartic process. ”

ANGUS HYLAND Graphic Design

“The only reason why anyone does a book? The twin allures of curiosity and commercial gain. ”

ROBERT BALLAGH Artist / Designer

“My approach to the theatre design is non-realist because you have all the reality in a live performance, you don’t need to be adding anything to that.”

MORAG MYERSCOUGH Design & Art

“I think it is important to re-evaluate what you are doing and how stimulated you are doing it.”

TADO

RUSSELL MILLS

“We’re both 80’s kids so were privileged to enjoy the golden age of kids cartoons and action figures!”

“I enjoy complexity and ambiguity, and I’ve always been fascinated by how things in the world hook together.”

JONATHAN BARNBROOK

GMUNK

“It’s not a war, a client isn’t an opponent, when you design something you should do it in an integrated form.”

“I just want to look back on a long career where I did everything, I tried everything I could. ”

Illustration / Character Design

Design / Art

Design / Art

Digital Art

PALOMA STRELITZ (ASSEMBLE)

PIRAHNA BAR

“We have the pleasure of not sitting neatly within a specific industry – our references reflects the diversity of our interests.”

“I really wanted to see a studio that was more artist-centric than facility led.”

NIALL MCINERNEY

LIZA ENEBEIS (STUDIO DUMBAR)

“Portraiture, new fashion photography, street, everything about Photography still intertests me.”

“In the studio we often forget how public the projects are and are reminded when walking around when see so many logos we designed.”

Architecture

Photography

Creative Agency

Design

ANDY RISTIANO

ÚNA BURKE

“Limit your independent work. Work at a smaller scale, something that is do-able in a spare moment or a lunch break.”

“People sometimes dress in outlandish things because they want people to focus on the clothes rather than the person inside.”

MCBESS

AVERILL & MCGRATH

“I enjoy pushing shapes and colors around and playing in the sandbox of design as something of an escape from reality.”

“The ideal way is to hear the music and to discuss the possibilities of the artwork at an early a stage in the process as possible.”

Illustration / Character Design / Animation

Illustration

Fashion Design

Design

SEB LESTER

Typography / Design

“Calligraphy started as a means of escapism and therapy for me and things progressed from there.�

G.F SMITH THE GODS OF PAPER.

When George Frederick Smith set up his small paper merchant G . F Smith in 1885, little did he realise then the impact that the marketing of his growing fine paper collection would have on generations of graphic designers over the next 130 years.

Generally paper samples then would be loose sheets simply marked with the name and weight of the paper. This way of promoting paper to customers was how most paper mills and stockists would try to encourage sales but through a journey to America and a twist of fate, G . F Smith were to become synonymous with the art of fine paper promotion.

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n 1890 in Springfield, Massachusetts a gentleman named Horace Moses who was the president of the Mittinigue Paper Company was producing an ever growing range of beautiful papers with fine textures, deep hues, deckle edges and rich colours.

I

nspired by events such as the World Fair in Chicago in 1893, which gave impetus to fashion, textiles and architecture, Mr Moses saw great opportunities for his papers in all kinds of customers’ advertising material, but realised he needed a dramatic demonstration of their potential. He turned to a young designer and printer by the name of Will Bradley who owned the nearby Wayside Press and commissioned him to produce working demonstrations of his paper collections and with that step, Mittinigue Paper were the first paper mill in the world to initiate contemporary paper promotion and Will Bradley went on to become one of America’s leading designers and typographers.

W

ith his passion for Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement, Bradley’s designs encompassed decorative borders, whimsical figure illustrations and inspiration from French Renaissance drawings and Japanese woodcuts, and a myriad of beautiful sample books were produced to market the mill’s paper products.

F

rom back in England, George Frederick had knowledge of these new and exciting papers and dispatched his son Thomas Brooke Smith, a salesman, to the USA to try to secure an agency to bring these papers to the UK, but Mittinigue sold via a merchant in Berlin, and access to Horace Moses proved difficult.

U

ndeterred, on a Sunday morning prior to his journey home, Thomas decided to visit the Moses household where he indeed, (perhaps through his initiative and persistence) achieved a short meeting with Mr Moses. The conversation was not going in his favour when suddenly a lady came into the room (Mr Moses’s wife) distressed to announce that an Aria they had arranged for guests at the local church that night was doomed as the organist had taken ill. This was Thomas’s perfect chance...he himself was an accomplished organist and offered to step in; the evening was a great success and Thomas was invited to stay at the Moses residence until his departure, with the promise to stock Mittinigue paper in England. Success followed success and this relationship exists until this day. Over the next century, G . F Smith would stock and market these American papers (Mittinigue would evolve into the world famous Strathmore Paper Company) alongside their own British produced paper ranges.

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ignificant processions of gifted artists including some of the world’s most revered designers such as Milton Glaser, Paul Rand and Saul Bass would lend their pen to sumptuous paper books of inspiration and these would be eagerly sought after by designers looking to specify wonderful paper.

O

ver the years G . F Smith amassed a huge archive and in 2009 made the decision to take these hidden treasures to the design community. An exhibition of museum style display cases featuring decades of loveliness in paper toured the UK and Ireland (and most recently Milan). Designers and students were invited to exhibitions and talks and this potent mix of design for paper promotion, from the decorative styles so prominent at the beginning, to traditional, modern, post modern and contemporary styles of every description has given the creative community a peek into a beautiful past, present and future heritage. The desirability of G . F Smith’s fine paper collection is thus assured.

This exhibition is now here at Offset Dublin 2016 and attendees will find it’s location on the first floor mezzanine where staff from G . F Smith will gladly take you through the displays.

We hope you enjoy this fascinating archive.

ANDREW BECKLEY PRINCIPAL DIRECTOR DESIGN STRATEGY GROUP FJORD

Digital and design are emerging as subjects that cannot be avoided by people, communities or governments: We’re designing for people’s happiness. Whether it’s in the workplace, in the home or as a concerned citizen, the urge to design for happiness is one common focus that resonates at the core of many of our 2016 Trends. Happiness through the impact of design can manifest in many ways – from an evolved definition of simplicity to life-changing services once reserved only for the wealthy society.

LIVING SERVICES UNDERPIN EVERYTHING How are our devices learning from our critical micromoments? How is digital technology making luxury available for the masses like never before? And are we about to see a major shift in the mobile app landscape as it evolves from being user-controlled, to proactively powering a user’s life?

In the coming year, we’ll see a continuing drive toward the goal of constantly changing services, dynamically responding to user needs and context in real time. Developments are emerging fast, both at a technology level (the rise of AI) and at the demand level (the quantified self is now a widespread liquid expectation, not just the obsession of a few). We expect the liquid expectation phenomenon to continue, as we see it bleeding into government and the workplace - shifting expectations in both.

FOR THE PEOPLE Governments are embracing digital and using its full potential to improve how they serve their people. This is coming about, both as a generation of digital natives starts to enter junior ministerial ranks (bringing their understanding of liquid expectations with them) and as a way of saving cost in an age (in many countries) of “austerity.” From connecting communities around a cause to addressing asymmetries of information to giving the under-represented a voice, there has been a great leap forward in terms of how some governments are thinking about the citizen experience. This is moving from a one-sizefits-all approach to finely tuned services that are tailored to individual needs. We’re even seeing archaic government departments step aside to allow for citizen-centric holistic solutions. This is the year when technology will be in service of the public good. And more

importantly, technology will enable a new breed of citizenship.

FASTER. BETTER. GLOBALLY TRUE.

Governments around the world are taking a cue from – and sometimes outpacing – the commercial sector; traditional costly programs are now being replaced by more rapid and agile development cycles. Furthermore, extensive, long-term planning is being replaced with prototyping and iterative improvements that allow problems to be spotted and resolved before resources are wasted.

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION The U.S. Digital Service has reimagined how the Department of Veterans Affairs operates.

Its mission? To make using the notoriously complicated Veteran Affairs services “as simple as buying a book online.” It’s a story of how the U.S. government is delivering cultural and service transformation within its own organizations. Six months into the experiment, the VA is seeing some major shifts within the organization that is evidence of real, lasting change. One interesting approach used is the deliberate design to make it easy to be an employee at the VA. After all, employees deliver the service experiences for veterans and their families. It’s an approach that examines old habits and moves to a culture of trust and collaboration. + PRIVATE SECTOR CAN LEAD TO BETTER EXPERIENCES Technology has also paved the way for governments and the private sector to solve major challenges together. The White House brought together the U.N. Refugee Agency and Kickstarter, known for crowdfunding creative projects, to raise money for the Syrian relief effort. The weeklong partnership raised nearly $1.8 million, which can be used to provide necessities and a place to sleep for more than 7,000 people in need.

GOVERNMENT, BYPASSED When governments fail, citizens step up and answer in droves. Technology allows the spread of ideas and instant action to occur. That’s where we are seeing a rise in private digital citizenry, where technology enables social good. In the case of the recent Syrian refugee crisis, Berlin-based Refugees Welcome,

described as the “Airbnb for refugees,” has helped refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan and Somalia. So far it has allowed 26 German citizens to invite refugees into their private homes.

THE FUTURE OF INSTITUTIONAL EDUCATION In the far future, we also see a seismic shift in education, both in legislation and reform. The Khan Academy has more than 10 million users visiting its site every month. Knowledge-sharing platforms like Lynda.com are indicative of the recent wave of self-learners, virtual diploma seekers and affordable home schools.

Could this mean the bypassing of national rules around education and devaluing the diploma itself?

A TALE OF TWO GOVERNMENTS The focus of public service design may be vastly different for more established, democratic governments like the U.S. and U.K., who will focus on the quality of design output. Governments in countries like Dubai and Singapore are making more radical statements with technology. For example, the United Arab Emirates’ government requires its major national infrastructure companies to pursue a vigorous digital agenda with public benefits, and the UAE measures them on doing so.

Digital can be used as an incredibly powerful tool. As John Mathers of the Design Council says, “How has design … come to be something one might look to for solutions to the most complex and challenging problems facing humanity today?”

Too many government services, tools and processes can be opaque and cumbersome.

Immigration, making a tax submission, dealing with a lawsuit, deciding on child care after parents have separated, adopting a child – these are by default very important but also anxious experiences for most. This makes it all the more critical that governments simplify processes, interaction and language, and bring humanity back into their interaction with citizens.

Read our full 2016 Trend report at www.trends.fjordnet.com

THE STORY OF MOO.

Hello, we’re MOO and we know a thing or two about shaking those tail feathers!

We are passionate about great design and we create products that get your business noticed - from business cards to stickers to flyers and lots more in between. We also offer great designs, fully customisable templates, the best quality paper and proper lovely customer service to boot.

We’re proud to partner with OFFSET and wonderful production team to be at the festival this year and look forward to meeting you all at our stand in Foyer. Come and see us for some MOO treats, limited edition postcards or simply to say hello - we love a good chat. In order to whet your appetite, here’s a little about what we do.

ONE PACK, 50 POSSIBILITIES Printfinity™ (yes, we made up a word) is our unique technology which allows you to print a different design on every business card, sticker or postcard in a pack. It means you can present yourself differently every time you meet someone and show off more of your work. It’s a real conversation starter that means you can carry your portfolio in your pocket, show off your favourite products and help people remember your business.

RAISE (AND FOIL) YOUR BUSINESS CARD GAME If you’re looking for a business cards that’s a little different, our brand new Tailored Collection includes shiny, tactile and golden elements that, when added to your business card designs, turns on their ‘wow’ factor. We’ve created lots of special design templates, meaning you don’t need to be a designer to get the tailored look. If you’ve got your own design, you simply select which parts of it get the special treatment.

TAP INTO THE FUTURE Say hello to our Business Cards+. These little wonders not only function as the MOO business cards you know and (hopefully) love, simply tap them to an NFC-enabled phone and they come alive, performing an unlimited range of digital

functions. You can program your Business Cards+ to give the recipient customised directions to your hard-to-find office with CityMapper, easily schedule meetings with Sunrise, or share your portfolio in seconds.

A NEW WAY TO SHARE WHAT YOU DO Monogram is our brand new mobile app for creative professionals seeking to quickly and easily showcase their work while on-the-go. Part portfolio, part contact details, Monogram seeks to occupy the space between the simplicity of a business card and the richness of a website; all delivered on your mobile phone. Looking forward to meeting you on the MOO stand throughout the whole of OFFSET for MOO treats and MORE!

www.moo.com

IBM STUDIOS DUBLIN X OFFSET.

WORDS BY LARA HANLON VISUAL & UX DESIGNER FOR IBM SECURITY IBM.COM/DESIGN

Post-it notes, sharpies, sketchbooks, MacBooks, donuts, and coffee – these are a few of our favourite things at IBM Design.

Part of the global IBM Studios network, the Dublin studio at the IBM Technology campus, Damastown, is a space for collaboration, reflection, creation and observation. Our goal is simple: to transform how enterprise software products, solutions and services are designed, developed and delivered by focusing on user-centered practices and outcomes. Okay, so in practice, it’s not that simple at all – our products and services are complex and the problems we aim to solve can be difficult but through radical collaboration with engineering, management, sales, and marketing, our designers are focused on producing innovative, creative outcomes that solve our users’ needs.

We create experiences that work together, work the same, and most importantly work for the people who interact with and rely on our products every day.

The IBM Design initiative began in 2012 and since then over 1000 designers have joined IBM worldwide. That’s a lot of creative thinkers! Each one of us has a different set of experiences, cultural and educational backgrounds, skills and beliefs. We come from all corners of the world to collaborate and change the culture of a 100-year-old company and to shape the future of technology and design…pretty exciting, wouldn’t you agree?

We have almost 40 designers working at IBM Studios Dublin today. Our multi-disciplinary teams are made up of design researchers, user experience designers, visual and interaction designers, and front-end developers. We work across a myriad of products and divisions including healthcare, security, social, and cloud – to name but a few. So, what is an average day like for some of our IBM designers here in Dublin?

WILLIAM MCMORROW Front-end developer for Smarter Workforce

ROCHELLE CARR Lead UX & Visual designer for Talent Insights, Smarter Workforce “Talent Insights is a HR analytics tool that allows users to make fact-based decisions based on visualisations from their data. I work closely with product management and development regarding the strategy and timeline for the product. It’s my job to design the best user experience that aligns with the business needs.

Not only do I create wires and visuals that satisfy user needs and pain points but I also host design thinking workshops with the cross functional team to encourage alignment and collaboration. Being responsible for the design work means I have to explain and present design decisions and be the point of contact for any design related issue.”

“I was hired as a front-end developer shortly after finishing my bachelor’s in Creative Computing at IADT two years ago. Since then I have worked on a range of products mostly in the HR space.

My day-to-day tasks tend to change depending on the part of the design process my team and I are at. When a project starts most of my time will be dedicated to user interviews and facilitating design thinking workshops. Telling your user’s story is very important at IBM Studios – for a project to progress I need to show that my users have real pain points and then show how my product tackles them.

Later in the process, I can put my front-end skills to use and develop prototypes for use in usability tests or more robust demos that can be used to sell products at conferences.”

MARK GILROY Lead UX Designer for Watson Health “My average day in the IBM Design studio goes something like this: In the morning, I arrive at my desk, but only after taking a few moments to appreciate my surroundings – namely the awesome studio that I have the pleasure to work in. First thing is our daily scrum meeting which is usually followed by an afternoon of hashing out project plans and collaborating with the rest of the team. This often means lots of ‘as-is’ scenario maps, countless post-it notes and sharpies, all in a room that appears to be made entirely of whiteboards. After lunch (and an often overly competitive game of foosball) I usually meet with our engineering team to discuss deliverables

and share our latest ideas. As a UX designer I spent a lot of my time producing wireframes, all the while observing, reflecting and iterating!”

ROHINI GOSAIN Team Lead for Smarter Workforce “Each morning as I walk through our studio to my workspace, I find myself admiring and appreciating the thoughtfulness and empathy with which our space was designed. The little marker found in its required spot in the moment of need provides an efficiency and thus happiness so great – as a designer it’s humbling to realise how much happiness we can bring to those who’s day we indirectly become a part of through the experiences we create. A chocolate croissant in hand (that is an absolute must) our end user in mind, a bunch of people with different skill sets aligned at the heart come together to create happiness to every user’s day…just like the pleasure one gets from finding the little marker at it’s right place.”

WATCH THIS SPACE Our studio fosters great teamwork, thoughtful outcomes, challenging and rewarding opportunities. At the heart of it all, the IBM Design Thinking framework and the IBM Design Language guide our designers and help our teams to define and produce industry-best standards and outcomes. IBM Studios Dublin launched in November 2015 so we’re relatively new to the scene here in Ireland but we’re here to stay and we’re very very excited about the future.

MICHELE NEYLON HATES BUZZWORDS.

THE BLACK NIGHT RISES.

Online, social, mobile, inbound - sure they’re perfectly good words, he acknowledges.

And of course they have meaning. But words can wear out, lose their impact, when over-used.

“You see it again and again”, says the Blacknight CEO. “‘Paradigm-shift’, ‘ground-breaking’, ‘disruption’. Someone comes up with a phrase that fits perfectly when it’s first used, and then everyone piles on and applies it where it has no business being used.”

Of course people can use any words they like, he says. It’s a free society. But what irks him is the unending clamour for the shiny and new - especially in the technology and internet industry.

“Real innovation is something we should rightly celebrate, but it’s rarer than you think. And with all the attention we give to startups and Foreign Direct Investment, are we forgetting the ordinary everyday SMEs who create most of the employment and opportunity in our economy?”

Michele’s passion for the everyday SME is based on his own experience. Today Blacknight is the leading Irish domain name registrar and hosting company, but in 2003 it was a bedroom startup founded

by Michele Neylon and his business partner Paul Kelly.

The company grew steadily and organically, without venture capital or incubator programmes, developing its products and a reputation for personal attentive customer service.

Blacknight has a 100% Irish approach to Internet infrastructure, controlling its own network linking its installations in Dublin data centres, as well as its own data centre in Carlow which it opened in 2014. The company now employs 40 people and is certified to the international ISO 27001 standard for data security and privacy.

“Technical reliability and support might not be ‘sexy’ - but we know from our customers how vitally important it is to them. And having come up the same way as m any of them have, we understand what SMEs need”, says Neylon.

That understanding has led to the expansion and development of Blacknight’s product range beyond the basic domain names

and hosting, to include DIY Web Design, SEO and Digital Marketing tools designed for SMEs and sole traders. And last year Blacknight added Microsoft Office 365 to its product line.

lead you through the steps you need to enhance your search rankings for your chosen terms. It offers daily statistics and weekly reporting as well as competitor analysis.

“Once again, this is driven by what our customers tell us”, explains Neylon. “The aim is to offer a one-stop shop for online business needs, starting with a simple domain name and web page, and scaling up to dedicated e-commerce installations on virtual servers or dedicated hardware”

Last month, Blacknight launched Sóshlr, a social media management system which gives users greater control to coordinate brand management and marketing inside social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn - all from a single dashboard.

Even the simple domain name offers more choice now. It used to be said that all the good names were gone, but that’s certainly no longer true. In the last three years there’s been a huge expansion in the number of available generic Top Level Domains.

Using Sóshlr, a business can create, schedule and publish campaigns across platforms supported across one to 50 social media pages in a single click, removing the need to individually access each social media platform.

The new domain extensions range from the fun and frivolous such as .LOL and .PARTY, to .SCIENCE and .FASHION. .ROCKS is a popular choice and there’s also .ACTOR, .DANCE, and .BAND, as well as new names associated with places and communities like .LONDON, .NYC and .IRISH. .DESIGN is a particularly exciting new domain which launched last year.

“With the new domain extensions”, says Michele, “it’s about much more than being able to call dibs on a name. There’s also more meaning to the right of the dot. Instead of having a superfluous suffix, now the whole domain name is meaningful for your brand.”

All Blacknight’s DIY web tools are available with a 30-day free trial. It’s something Michele feels strongly about.

“We love SMEs”, he says simply. “This is our community, and we keep our feet on the ground. Last year we launched the Blacknight SME Awards to recognise the unsung heroes of the Irish economy, and we’re very proud to be the headline sponsors for that event again this year.”

The second annual Blacknight SME Awards will be held on April 16 in Cork. For tickets and further information visit smeawards.ie.

One of the most important things he has learned from listening to other companies is that technology can be a challenge for SMEs, as well as an opportunity.

“Small businesses can’t always afford their own on-site IT departments. That’s where we can help, by providing good-value, simple, and easy to use DIY tools that give SMEs control of their online presence”.

Now Blacknight offers the BaseKit Site Builder as well as Blacknight Site Backup, which allow users to create their own website and back it up safely with just a few clicks, and no IT experience required.

Blacknight rankingCoach is a DIY Search Engine Optimisation tool which will analyse your website and your target market and

www.blacknight.com

INTERVIEWS>

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LET’S BE FRANK

We first encountered Stephen Kelleher creatively through two different routes, each without knowing the other. He was delighting the Dublin street art and design scene under the pseudonym Frankenstyles whilst “moonlighting” as a motion designer in Pirahna Bar. His work always had an international edge, a style that had legs and could take him places. Well...it did, and we are delighted to be able to bring him back to say “Hello.”

I

’m a graphic artist born and raised in Dublin, attended the National College of Art & Design in my hometown and have been living and working in the US for the last decade.

My visual practice in its current state is a mixture of happenstance, curiosity, hard work and taking advantage of opportunities that have come my way. Where I’m going to is always the more interesting thing for me - I’m literally and figuratively always looking forward.

Buck saw my work around 2005/6 and offered me a job! I credit long hours building my portfolio and centering my life around work as a 25 year old for that opportunity - perhaps not something that was healthy and holistic but sure, it helped me get rec-

ognized at that time. I think the exchange program I did in art school to the US and my later move to LA and subsequently NY has greatly shaped my career and outlook on life 100%.

I’ve had several phases of work that I recognize as being creatively important - my exploration of screen printing and street art in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, my introduction to motion design around 2003 which continues to be my main area of work and most recently my focus on self portrait photography in the last year.

These disciplines have all in turn informed and influenced each other.

T

he process of making work is always reve-

latory and there have been thousands of mini-breakthroughs that create a body of work or style rather than one or two finished projects that I could cite. In terms of business success / paying my bills; I’ve always been fortunate to have a steady stream of clients since graduating from art school. Very often the most lucrative work has required me to repeat myself and would be in opposition to having a creative breakthrough.

m

y contemporaries in the New York design scene / people I regularly work with and know have the most impact on shaping my professional aesthetic. My influences are largely based on my world view - I am an atheist, a realist, to a degree a nihilist and I ally myself with thinkers that reflect how the world presents itself to my eyes; people like Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Richard Dawkins, Camille Paglia, Carl Sagan, James Randi and all of the musicians and artists who create work that resonates with me.

I came to realize quite some time ago that the best design is never informed by design itself but rather life.

Producing work is something else - it’s an individual’s method of working that is practiced, honed, thought about and the key realizing an idea. My method of producing work is not influenced by anything other than my energy levels on a given day.

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rofessionalism in the design industry however mostly means being objective and dispassionate about work and rather solving a given problem in the best way possible. So while my influences may make me question the purpose of creating funny little pictures I still quite enjoy pushing shapes and colors around and playing in the sandbox of design as something of an escape from reality.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.stephenkelleher.com Interview by Lauren Pritchard

We grew up in farmtown and coal country America and come from working class families. While going to art school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we found each other on a pre-Myspace social networking website and found out we were both going to the same school. We met up IRL and the next year we moved to NYC and the rest is history. We went into this art world without any mentors or guidance and made things work through brute force and sheer determination and really not knowing any better. Without each other none of this would have been possible.

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here has always been an interest in combining multiple mediums and elements into our work. Even when we were shooting film we were incorporating paper collage and other elements. When we moved completely to digital those ideas came with us. Photography, video, animation, 3D modeling, game design, programming, AR/VR, etc - for us, using all of these mediums makes sense to us and allows us to create the worlds and tells the stories we want to tell.

p

amela not being totally creeped out by Matthew’s first private message and deciding to meetup was a breakthrough moment for us. Moving to NYC. Our first magazine cover. Deciding in a single night to stop shooting film and move completely to digital and only do GIFs. Starting to use gaming engines to build our worlds. Beginning to do 3D scans of people and build virtual reality experiences.

O

ne of our earlier commissions that was a pretty big deal for us was for Beck’s. They were doing an augmented reality project with QR codes and these physically constructed boxes all over the world and we go a chance to be part of it. We had total creative freedom to be as wild as we wanted and that project did a lot for our self-esteem moving forward and helped to embolden us to be kooky and true to us.

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he Internet, and everything that is created there, was foundational to our personal and professional aesthetic. In more recent times though the use of gaming engines has come to completely define our work. We’ve always been world builders but now we can actually construct a three-dimensional world that with a virtual reality headset our audience can become immersed in.

T

he community remixing meme culture of the internet and video games are huge to us. Our digital worlds emerged out of the ashes of the death of Polaroid. We used to shoot large format 4x5 polaroids with both of us under the dark cloth together but when the film died we made the drastic decision to go totally digital and start doing GIFs. It was one late night conversation and that was that – print and film was dead to us.

Our work combines fun with technology.

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e like to be on the cutting edge but only if it makes sense as a tool for us to make better worlds with better stories.

O

ur adventure from collage to GIFs to social to video to augmented reality to 3D to virtual reality has been with a continuous vision in mind. That vision being that we want viewers to be able to become more and more immersed in our stories.

Better technologies are helping us to realize that dream.

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rowing up with GIFs, their re-emergence was never in doubt for us. It just took a few years of us pitching to clients for them to realize their popularity. Tumblr culture helped turn our tiny niche into a big deal and we are glad for it.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.reedandrader.com Minute by Minute @reedandrader Interview by Lauren Pritchard

EMBRACING POSSIBLE DAMNATION EVERY DAY After a while working in advertising, the same questions cross everyone’s mind. Am I selling out? Have I compromised my creative integrity? Am I going to hell? If you believe Bill Hicks, then the answer to all three is a resounding yes. But if you work at Rothco, the answer is… probably not. Jessica Derby, John McMahon and Shane O’Brien discuss Rothco’s work, their creative process and how they’ve all learned to stop worrying and love the job.

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essica Derby has been a Producer at Rothco since 2012 having spent 6 years in Publicis Dublin before that. Her first advertising job was at the age of 4 when she fronted a Milk campaign for Premier Dairies. The only time she ever mitched off school was to crash her Dad’s TV shoots. He’d back her up and write fake sick notes. Her mother never knew… until now. John McMahon left a lu-

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othco was founded in 1995 at the back of a wool shop in Blackrock. Twenty years later... it’s going okay. They were the most awarded creative agency in Ireland last year.

and went off to tour the world with comedy rock band Dead Cat Bounce. Five years later he grew disillusioned with comedy and returned to advertising. Since joining Rothco his levels of illusionment are currently at an acceptable level. They’ve a had a few defining moments over the years. Winning the Tiger beer international account was one. Launching Hailo globally was another. Big wins like those gave us an opportunity to grow and opened a lot of doors for us.

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crative career in philosophy to pursue his first love: advertising. He has been at Rothco since 2012. Some day he hopes to get a job there.

Shane O’Brien started working as a copywriter ten years ago, joining Irish International straight out of college. Two years later he grew disillusioned with advertising

ost recently, they made a lot of the right noise during the Marriage Equality referendum with they’re Shred of Decency campaign for Daintree Paper. They had a really simple idea – to take homophobic campaign literature and turn it into confetti to sell in support of marriage equality. They wanted to create a Catch 22 for the No Campaign – spread hate and you’re inadvertently raising money for the Yes Campaign. Shred of Decency was important to Rothco because the whole agency was responsible for it. It couldn’t have happened otherwise. We had no budget but we had an idea that we really believed in, so we made it happen through sheer force of will. They sold a lot of confetti, and the

campaign was shared by people and publications all over the world. It also won our first Cannes Lion… And we’d always wanted to win one of those. Without wanting to sound too wanky (a bit wanky is okay), we’re influenced by each other all the time. It’s part of the whole gang thing at Rothco. Someone could send round a funny ad or a smart campaign idea or even just a weird little cartoon made with faces drawn on people’s teeth, it doesn’t matter – everything we like canbe-

come an influence.

It could be from New York or London, but it could equally be from Copenhagen or Finglas (not often, admittedly...) It doesn’t even have to be from a traditional advertising, brand communication or whatyamacallit agency – we like to think we’re open to great ideas from all sources.”

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othco is very much driven by a group culture. We operate in what we call ‘gangs’.

That doesn’t mean we go around the office wearing bandanas and (in the parlance of our times) popping caps in each other’s asses. It just means we act collectively. The responsibility for any aspect of a job is distributed over the whole gang instead of being focused on one or two people based on their job title.

Sure, there are creatives. But, at Rothco, anyone can have an idea, anyone can ‘be creative’. If the gang likes the idea enough, it flies – simple as that. Similarly with planning, production and client services – if anyone in the gang wants to do something differ-

ently from how we’ve done it before, and the rest of the gang agrees, it happens. By distributing permission and authority, we don’t get stuck in ruts. You can think of gangs as a way of avoiding corporate bedsores. That’s a terrible metaphor. Actually it’s not even a metaphor.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.rothco.ie Minute by Minute @rothco Interview by Lauren Pritchard

ACCIDENTaL ROBERT BALLAGH TALKS MODERNISM, MONEY & IRISH DANCING.

Every Irish person of a certain generation has held his designs in their hand, while audiences in their millions sat agape as Irish Dancing took over the world with his designs as the backdrop. RobertBallagh’s graphic design and fine art has shaped a 20th century interpretation of Ireland. His unassuming studio on Dublin’s Northside is a stone’s throw from our office so we dropped in to talk…

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ooking back at the Ireland of the mid 1960’s, still a relatively new country of course, was there an embracing of the global cultural movements of the time or was the official position still that of the C eltic Revival movement, so strong in the pre-Independent Ireland of British rule?

For the visual arts world, the really significant event was the ROSC exhibition in 1967, which was mind-blowing, even if you weren’t involved in the arts. They took the big hall in the RDS and they hung the work of 50 of the leading artists in the world – there were no Irish artists in it by the way which was a big of a slur on us – but from Roy Lichtenstein and the pop artists to Picasso to all the, I mean if you look at the catalogue now, it’s amazing that all of those modern artists were showing in Dublin in 1967. It was a modernist international influence that we very much bought into as young artists. It wasn’t a rejection of the kind of romantic, Celtic kind of thing you’re talking about. It was this acceptance of this terribly exciting international kind of art.

What was the agenda of that show?

The idea was very much one of feeling that Ireland was very backward in terms of the visual arts. I think that that was an incorrect view by the organisers, people like Michael

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.robertballagh.com Interview by Bren Byrne Portrait photo by Lauren Pritchard.

Scott the architect and Dorothy Walker the critic and these people very much felt that artists like Sean Keating who would have been very academic, should not represent “Modern Ireland”. They just had no time for that and I think they made a mistake in that Keating, and it’s an interesting debate now, even though his work formally was quite conservative, his content was very radical. So I think they saw things very much in black and white terms. You were either a modernist or you were a heretic. We were young and all of this seemed so exciting. We wanted to get on that train, you know? All sort of things changed, a brand new Arts Council came in in ‘73, which was much better funded and had a much broader remit.

And from an institutional point of view, government commissions for instance, was this Modernist agenda prevalent?

What happened from the sixties on was because of an enormous amount of cultural spadework being done by certain people, Modernism for want of a better term became the official art and people who didn’t do Modernism were left behind. So from that day on, the notion of, for instance, sending an academic painter to represent Ireland at a biennale was never going to happen.

It was all about “The Sixties” and The Lemas / Whitaker programme, we’re outward looking, joining Europe, all very progressive. I was a bit different in that I was always a figurative painter but the bulk of the work that was being promoted as part of this development was mostly abstract. And if it wasn’t abstract it wasn’t very figurative or realistic.

How did you navigate that world when realism and tradition seemed to be at the core of what you did?

It’s a fair point to say I was making work that didn’t quite fit in. I mean the kind of breakthrough stuff I did was a series which I did over a good few years which was very much

influenced by this challenge and I suppose it was a bit of an intellectual cheat in that it was a series of paintings of people looking at modern paintings and I thought it was a bit ironic but the art establishment just thought that it was irony free and that it was celebrating contemporary modern art.

Jackson Pollock was in the Trinity collection.

Now I didn’t know anything about this lecture but somebody obviously pointed me out to him and he came over and he said I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of Pollock forgeries in my life but he said your painting is the best one I’ve ever seen. So I said thank you.

So they embraced it?

A lightbulb didn’t go off in your head then?

A new career perhaps?

Oh yeah, it became very popular, not just in Ireland. I think in the mid seventies I had 13 shows in Europe, it was really very successful.

I don’t think most people realised what I was trying to say when I painted someone looking at, doesn’t matter who, I actually did a load of people looking at Jackson Pollock. That it was questioning the role of contemporary art in

Irish society. Brian O’Doherty wrote a really interesting book called Inside the White Cube which is all about the presentation of art, because people forget now all galleries tend to be white. This is an environment that has been created for the display of modernist art. So I was interested in looking at all of that. It just happened that the kind of critique that I was engaging in didn’t seem to bother the people who actually liked the work on a surface level.

Interestingly enough I remember, there was a chap who was an expert, he wrote the definitive biography of Jackson Pollock. He was in Trinity College giving a lecture one night and the picture I did of people looking at a

A new career in forgery, yeah, ha ha. I mean that series was very successful. I had a show in a very prestigious gallery in Brussels and it sold out and the guy said to me we’ll have another show in a year or so, same stuff, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do exactly the same stuff. It was the same theme, it was still

people looking at pictures but I’d changed it a bit and I remember when I brought the pictures he was absolutely furious. He said I wanted them exactly the same and I said I can’t keep doing the same things and to a certain extent he was right because – as it only sold half or three quarters rather than all of them. But I couldn’t keep painting people looking at paintings and also I found I was getting kind of silly about it. People would come up and say bet you couldn’t do Francis Bacon and I said we’d see about that.

But then suddenly I felt this is not what artists are supposed to be about.

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his feeling of not being content with repeating yourself creatively, keeping your own interest fresh, was that why you started to explore designing for the theatre?

The first theatre design I did was in ’85.

Michael Colgan from the Gate Theatre contacted me and said he’d like to invite me to design a Samuel Beckett show that he was doing, a one-person show with Barry McGovern. Michael was working in the Dublin Theatre Festival and I had done a poster for the Dublin theatre festival in 1980 or maybe

1979. I had also done the letterhead as a graphic designer for The Gate before he asked me to actually design a play. And I discovered, not that I’d be good at it necessarily, but I discovered I had the basic skills for it, because if you’re designing for a theatre you have to do drawings that people can build from. I didn’t realise that I had a particular vision or a particular way of doing it until I did the first one which still it’s amazing, what is it, ’85, 35 years… it’s a long time ago, that show still goes out with my set.

And did you talk to any professional set designers before you started?

No, not at all. I was lucky in that first project

was quite collaborative, which is a bit unusual in the theatre. Barry McGovern (the actor) was going to do a one person show that Jackie MacGowran had done called From Beginning to End which is basically just excerpts from Beckett’s writing but when Colgan approached Beckett about permission to do this Beckett said he’d promised Gloria MacGowran, Jackie MacGowran’s widow, the rights to do this. I don’t think she ever did it actually but the great man said no, but he asked Colgan had he thought of the novels, which Michael hadn’t. So suddenly we were all given copies of, I mean why they gave it to me as a designer, I don’t know, but Barry, Rupert Murray who was the lighting designer, Gerry Dukes who was Barry’s collaborator

do it as well in the cinema, cinema demands a kind of realism. It’s funny being a realist painter, my approach to the theatre is very non-realist because I reckon you have all the reality in a live performance, you don’t need to be adding anything to that.

Despite your “modest career in the theatre” your designs are probably the most seen and high profile of any sets in Irish theatre history.

For the last 22 years it’s been very exciting to be a part of such a significant project as Riverdance. And has been a great honour to work with some extraordinarily talented people, all over the world. You know, if somebody had told me that I’d be designing a show for Radio City music hall in New York I would have said you must be mad.

It must be a massive undertaking, do you have to adapt your designs for each venue?

None of us I think believed it was going to become the success it became so we didn’t design a kind of generic set or anything. So for the first, well half a year or year, every venue had its own set which was a kind of very expensive way of doing this.

The Celtic Tiger way of doing it.

and Colm O’Brinn who was the director, we were all given copies of the novels and told to read them and come back with ideas. So the show I’ll Go On, which I think is a great show and has been very successful for many years is a dramatisation of the three novels of Samuel Beckett. But I remember saying to myself Jesus, if you’ve to do this much work in the theatre, reading, making suggestions about adaptations and everything, too much hard work, but I discovered it’s not like that normally. I mean Beckett had written the novels but there was no dramatisation. I think the next show I did, was it The Importance of Being Ernest, the play’s written, it’s set, I didn’t have to read it unless I wanted to read it.

Have you a set process you follow designing for Theatre?

Well, I mean, as a designer you usually work quite closely with the director. So the director has a vision of what he or she wants.

I discovered I had no interest in recreating a period set and rummaging through antique shops in Francis Street to get a period table or whatever. If you look at my modest career in the theatre, all my designs are very minimal, very abstract and they’re all, to my mind they’re all about the text and the performance. Their only purpose is to assist the performance and the text, they’re not about people coming out and saying oh did you see that wonderful furniture. I don’t think you can

Ha, yes exactly, we were all taken by surprise at the success and weren’t prepared for the demand. But then obviously the producers said let’s try and design something modular.

Some changes were driven by technology because in the beginning Moya Doherty, the producer, very much had the idea of using projections and in those days projection technology was very primitive, it was analogue, huge big fucking projectors the size of a car. And cumbersome, susceptible to breakdowns, the amount of times you’d have panic stations where the thing would jam. And then digital projection started to develop. We tried it a few times and weren’t happy but then it became powerful enough to project. I had originally created all these images, based on paintings that I did so they were still images, but then when we moved to digital photography or digital projection, we initially projected just the still images but then it dawned on us that this is now digital, we can animate them. Now the animation is very modest but I think it’s quite nice and subtle.

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ollowing on from Riverdance, a successful export that engaged with huge audiences around the world, can we talk about another high profile project, one that literally was in the hand of every Irish person. You were the designer of the last series of Irish banknotes. How did that come about? Was it a public tender or invitation? Can you describe the process?

The Central Bank invited, I’m guessing 15, maybe 20 artists and designers to submit designs for a new £20 note, which would feature Daniel O’Connell, and I was one of the people asked. I always remember I couldn’t get a fucking idea into my head and when I got the commission there seemed plenty of time and I’d go at it every now and again but I had no ideas or if I had ideas they were boring. And then suddenly the deadline was two weeks away and I said ah, shit, I’m going to have to write to these people and say sorry. Then I found this old engraving of Daniel O’Connell, which seemed to be a bit different from all the other images I’d seen of him and I developed something out of that. I did it all on photocopying machines, colour-photocopying machines which then were the latest technology and it pasted together. Talk about cut and paste. And I have to say I thought my designs were pretty rough and ready looking. But I banged them in and much to my surprise I got a call to come in to the Central Bank on Dame Street to be told I’d won the competition. And what was nice about it was that the competition was judged anonymously. Nobody could say I’d pulled strings or anything. They had judged all the entries anonymously.

Did you ever get a chance to see the other entries?

I did.

And did you feel from looking at them that yours was the right choice?

I thought there were some other good ones.

Were they ever published?

No, they never published the others.

I mean the initial commission was just to do a £20 note but I got on really well with them because you know they print them here but also they don’t have plate making facilities or anything here so it was a real adventure.

I think there’s about five companies in the world that produce banknotes. I know the

Bank of England would be one and there’s a Japanese one as well as a company called Giesecke & Devrient in Munich. They got sample banknotes from all of these people and then they asked me to look at them. We all concurred that the ones from Giesecke and Devrient we liked a lot so they decided

to go with them. A banknote has a lot of different printing technologies used. And to me the most important is what they call intaglio or engraving because that’s the really fine detailed part that you can actually feel the depth of the ink on it.

And when you presented your work, the final work, what format was it in?

Well, I’ll explain, what was interesting was the meeting in Munich with the people from the banknote manufacturing company, who were German obviously, and we were Irish and I don’t think either of us – well no, they were not bad in English, we were fucking useless in German, so everything was being translated. So at one stage, because I had admired the portraits on the notes that they had shown us, I asked who actually does these portraits. There was a lot of huffing and puffing and then they said his name is Antonio Lopez, so I asked was he there? I was told he was. I asked could I meet him and there was more huffing and puffing about whether we should meet him or not. He was eventually produced. He was a senior artist, designer, engraver and I was asking him how did he do it and then the interesting thing was there was lots of translations going on and it was all terribly slow and I just looked at him and I said “hablas español?” he replied “Sí” while the rest of them were looking at us.

His work is so specialised, they must wrap him up in cotton wool. Very interesting though, did you get to know him well?

Yes, I developed a really good relationship with this guy. He told me that because his work is so specialised - I think there’s only about six people in the world that can do this kind of work, he was told that like if he didn’t feel well, don’t bother coming in because you can’t correct mistakes.

Initially I had to do a small portrait of the subject, which would go to the board of the

Central Bank of Ireland for them to approve.

Then I had to do a drawing of the painting to send to Lopez who would do a drawing of my drawing to show what he was going to.

Once all this was approved, he would start working. Incredibly he did it 100% to scale as it would be printed and it took him about six months to do a portrait. After a couple of months’ work he would take a pull of his engraving and send it to me. I might say could you do the eye a little more like this or the hair or whatever, but the only way I could do that, I couldn’t work that small, I would get a blow up of it done and I would draw on the blow up and send it back to him and he would reduce it down again. So it was a very interesting experience.

What about the other stages?

Well I had to design the watermark but that is done in the paper manufacturing stage and that was in Switzerland, a lovely little village called Louisenthal. So basically you make paper, it’s cotton-rag paper and this pulpy stuff is laid on a mesh cylinder.

The mesh is pushed in relief so when this stuff is spread over it, obviously the higher points the paper is thinner and that’s how a watermark is made. I didn’t know that.

But then it also has special security inks, they were made in a factory near Lausanne in Switzerland so I went there too. The serial numbers were done with a letterpress.

Nowadays you would have silkscreen printing to do the optical variable ink, which is ink that changes colour depending on the angle you look at it. You have intaglio or engraving, another printing process and then you have wet litho and dry litho so there’s at least five or six printing techniques on one little piece of paper. So for me it was a very interesting experience in that by the time I got to the end of the series I was a kind of expert banknote designer with a skill that I’ll probably never use again. Because Ireland certainly, unless we leave the euro, we’re never going to produce another banknote.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.4creative.co.uk www.johnandchris.org/ Minute by Minute @4creative Interview by Brian Herron

JOHN ALLISON & CHRIS BOVILL TALK AGENCY LIFE, COLLABORATION, TAKING RISKS & STAYING TRUE TO EACH OTHER AFTER 20YRS.

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he creative industry can get pretty brutal – how have you survived working as a team for 20yrs and stayed on speaking terms?

It’s a good question. We strongly believe in collaboration. We’ve opted to get professionally married, but we don’t stop there.

We collaborate with many people.

It’s how we stay fresh. Keeps the spark alive. 4Creative and Channel 4 is in itself is one big collaboration.

Do you see yourselves as an agency within a company, or a company with an agency or … well maybe you could give us an overview of how you see your role in the Channel 4 machine?

We see 4Creative as one of the creative tools for Channel 4.

We are Channel 4’s in-house advertising/production company hybrid. We are set up to write the ideas and make them and make over 900 bits of content a year.

was really our work on the huge and flawed Cadbury Spots V Stripes campaign that taught us the most. How to oversee a huge unwieldy project with a vast team and a big budget with a high profile. We fucked that one up.

So we learned that this time we couldn’t…

Given how close you are to the brand was there a need for research, or did you research to the same extent that you would if you weren’t in-house?

Yes, there was research done, but at some point, like referencing other branding, you have to burn it and get your pen and paper out.

If you don’t look at what others are doing you’re going in blind, but you can also see too much.

It’s a balance. We did a historical search and scan of current stuff and concluded that it was a sea of dancing logos. We’re admen, we’re reductive in nature, but it was all-uninspiring and in love with itself.

You recently launched the Channel 4 rebrand, and it’s been really well received. What did you set out to achieve?

Being an outsider can sometimes be a huge advantage in convincing a client of a position – how do you communicate your ideas for the brand? What’s the level of trust like with the suits? Please don’t forget that we will print this so don’t say anything that will get you into trouble.

We decided it was time to create a brand identity that truly ran across everything and a brand identity that shouted about Channel 4’s remit. Tell ‘em why they’re watching, not just what channel they’re watching. It’s a brand that has a big impact on the world culturally speaking, so the new identity had to reflect that.

We wanted it to be real, tactile and of this Earth.

During our time at 4C had rebranded, Film4, launched All4, launched Born Risky, C4’s first ever brand positioning and rebranded E4. We felt ready to take on the big bad lad. However, it

It’s a really good question and again, we’ll touch upon this in our talk. You jest about relationships with the “suits” and we believe that whilst its very funny to reduce them to cardboard bean-counters it’s just not helpful. In fact it’s dangerous for the creative process.

It’s a very outmoded view and ultimately will get you nowhere.

We learned early on that “suits” are our friends. Account men and women and planners were all smart and passionate. Make friends with them. Collaborate with them. You need them to make the work robust and sell it

in. We also learned that clients are the real risk takers. They’re the real heroes. It’s their jobs on the line. Treat them all with respect, don’t feel you have to talk “suit” to them, just be a humble creative weirdo and they’ll love and respect you for it. It’s probably their favorite meeting of the day.

You’ve got a mandate to be risky – for such a huge rebrand, what does risk mean in that context?

Same as always: Risk with a purpose. Not naked skydiving strapped to some instructor called Pablo or licking an Amazonian toad for some YT hits.

Creative risk is highly calculated leap into the unknown. Whether its Channel 4 or Skoda you have to push it as far as you can.

The identity has so many components – shape, colour, typography – how do you keep everything ‘true’ to the vision?

Dunno. Really. Its best not to overthink these things. Take a risk.

Work your ass off. Then make it up as you go along. Professionally wing it. Spend too long thinking about all the elements and you’ll freeeeeeeze.

It’s a massive undertaking, yet you’re still tasked with producing stuff day-in-day out for the business. How do you divide the work in the studio between the big stuff and the less big stuff?

There’s only one way it can work.

With an incredible team. Everyone lives and breathes 4. We’re all rooting for each other. A 30 second clip trail will be given the same amount of scrutiny and love as a big-ass brand thing. Everything is an opportunity. No really it is. We’ve turned poster briefs into big strange multiplatform headfuck ideas. Don’t write anything off and NEVER chase the shiny stuff.

Start somewhere negative. Look for the wrong answer. Not the right one. You’ll be guaranteed to be somewhere different.

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et’s talk about the Humans campaign – OK, maybe you talk about it. What’s it about?

This was bags of fun. We set out to fool people into thinking that synthetic humans were actually going on sale.

because the lines between marketing and broadcast were well and truly blurred. We expanded the narrative world of the show across many different platforms. A Shop in Regent St, the Ebay store, ads with no 4 logo running on the Channel. It really freaked some of the beautiful idiots out there.

What’s the process like?

From the show theme to the media buying, is this an example of form and function working together?

Again, collaboration is the key, and don’t overthink stuff. Don’t force it. You need a design for how people work together. Get good passionate people in a room and get your idea as big and noisy as you can then the rest will work itself out.

Absolutely. We’re proud of this work

What makes a campaign successful?

What else have you done this year that you felt has really made an impact, or made you really proud?

We just finished writing our talk for Offset.

It’s about what we’ve learned from 20 years in advertising and broadcast. We don’t look back much, so we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved. Hopefully we can pass some learnings on. Then after Offset, It’s Paralympics 2016…

You run what seems to be a pretty great (and fairly paid) internship programme, where you bring in people in pairs. How successful has that been?

Well, we do 4 placements a year. Always teams. At that stage in your career its foolish to go it alone, you’ll be twice as slow, you can only be in one place at a time and its lonely.

We don’t hire. We have a strict headcount.

So at 4C its not a placement, it’s a leg-up.

You get to work on all the best briefs and most of the time, people leave to a job, recent alumni have gone to Grey, W&K and Lucky generals.

We should get a commission.

MORAG MYERSCOUGH

MORAG MYERSCOUGH

mo y father was a musician and my mother a textile artist and so our house was full of music and making. I really took to making clothes and embroidery when I was about 9 but I did not want to follow my mum as a textile artist I wanted to do something that was different, something of my own. I have always loved colour and not working just in 2D. We were introduced to music, colour, food, discussion, commitment, questioning, looking & seeing and always being slightly on the outside. My final show at the RCA was everything to do with the Benjamin Britton opera ‘The Turn of the Screw’ the sets how to interpret the libretto the posters etc. But this was not encouraged at the end of my time at the Royal College and I was told I would not get a job, and at that time it worried me that I was doing something wrong. So I felt pressured to take the route of a more conventional graphic designer. But sadly by 2000 I was bored and I met Luke Morgan who had always kept to his psychobilly routes and it made me think I needed to go back to expressing myself more rather than serving others. That is when the true Morag started coming out. ‘Her House’ was established using my house as a gallery and making products and showing at Designers Block.

ld trains conversions into and café in Deptford for a client I had worked for for many years who trusted me. This was in 2008 and we had been making our products for quite a few years by then and this was the perfect project to use all the things we had been developing over the years. In 2010 onwards I had been designing the summer shows at LCC using shipping containers in the street. So when in 2012 the same client as the train Cathedral Group asked me to design a café on a sunken building site in a very short period of time I was not phased in anyway just excited. I have been discussing a permanent poetry project for the same site with the poet Lemn Sissay and we had been discussing how the restrictions of the amount of words in tweets were interesting. I met the client and he told me I needed to get him the design for the café by the following day as we had so little time before the Olympics. Luke and I had been looking at the structure but nothing was quite working. In a mild panic I went straight to my studio to start and I thought I would read Lemn’s tweets and the first one I read was the one. Immediately I got to working into the early house making a physical model. Went to bed got up in the morning and just thought yes this is it. Sent the model over to the client and immediately they said yes and then we got into production. Nobody can predict the response of projects and I really think the Movement was the right project for us at the right time, but thinking about it, it was 10 years of hard work to get to that point and also people had changed attitudes and more open to the type of work we were doing in public places.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.supergrouplondon.co.uk Minute by Minute @moragmyerscough Interview by Matt Edgar

Temple of Agape, Morag Myerscough & Luke Morgan, photo credit: Gareth Gardner

SUPERSTRUCTURE, Morag Myerscough & Luke Morgan, photo credit: Luke Morgan

RA G eal breakthrough moments are hard to define, I have been working a long time and I think I am a bit of a slow burner. Also the landscape has changed and now feels much better to me than the past. Minds of people are more open now and less controlling and less about conforming. I think it is important to be very aware of how your work is going and re-evaluate what you are doing and how stimulated you are doing it. When you do work that has a depth to it I think people can tell.

Studio Myerscough did grow until 2000 when I realized that my heart was not in running a studio with lots of people working for me. I had so many ideas inside me and I wanted to make them happen. It took me a few years but finally I came to the conclusion that at least for a while I did not want to employ anybody.

So most of the time it is just me and my dog Lemmy. Then depending on the project other collaborators get involved like Luke Morgan. That is why we set up Supergroup London to have a much more flexible way of working and it ensure we collaborate with the best people for each individual projects.

rtistic movements or “isms” are not something I see myself being alligned to. I mean I’ve grown up through different periods and I’m aware of them, you know in the 80’s I absolutely loved Memphis. I even went to work for Michele de Lucchi who was one of the Memphis group, but I think I fit a little bit somewhere else. A bit outside — where I’m not trying, or don’t feel the need to be necessarily connected to something - you know it’s like a big melting pot, a big mélange… hopefully there’s a new place that will open up.

I think it’s interesting with Assemble winning the Turner prize and the way they speak about their practice… there is this other area of where the whole multiple ways of working is really coming into its own. I think it’s broken down traditional views of the different disciplines, which for me is very exciting. I knew when I was at college that I never really fitted in. I was designing opera sets at the Royal College and everyone else was designing posters and stuff like that. So I sort of new then, and the tutors were worried about me wondering, ‘well what’s going to happen to her?’ What was great was I had, at that time, something to respond against, you know? Which sent me on my way, even though I didn’t really know what my way was, if that makes sense?

iving lectures and talks has essentially allowed me to crystallise how I look at my work. I’ve been doing them for five years now. Maybe the first one was the Typo London — which Adrian Shaughnessy put me forward for. I feel that sometimes people can take your work on face value and not really understand everything about it, so if you don’t talk about it or explain what you’re trying to achieve, then that’s your own problem. So I like being asked to do talks because it gives me a place to try and explain what I’m trying to do with my work and that then, maybe, it can come across in a different way. I think it’s quite nice to be able to have this platform. And because I don’t teach it’s become important; it’s a way that I can give back whilst still carrying on doing my work. People seem to want to hear me speak about my work and I do get asked quite a lot. I did a talk in Liverpool last week at the University and I did a colour talk the week before that up in Scotland, so if I can do that, and if it’s in any way useful to young people starting out or other people at different points in their careers, then it’s a worthwhile thing to do.

R.

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InGO.

Most creatives are pretty vague when you ask them how they came to end up doing what they do. But Mr Bingo can tell you exactly how it happened – as a student at Bath Spa University he had to choose between focussing on illustration or graphic design at the end of his first year. Torn between the two, he decided to ask his peers to vote, and illustration won a landslide. The anecdote reflects some of the traits that have made Bingo one of the most interesting and unusual creatives working today – an eye for theatre, a sense of mischief and a refreshing willingness to follow through on his ideas. Since graduating in 2001 these instincts have served him well, initially as an illustrator working for clients like The New York Times, Wired, Byron and Runners Need, and more recently through his own artistic projects. Perhaps the best known of these is Hate Mail,

which is exactly what it sounds like. Since 2011, masochistic members of the public have been able to order their very own abusive postcard, complete with an offensive sketch and a deliciously vicious barb.

These range from the considered, “Your online dating profile is dishonest” to the joyously random, “You are shit with boats.” Last year he published 135 of his favourites in a book, Hate Mail: The Definitive Collection. It was funded through Kickstarter and the appetite to support this seemingly sadistic enterprise was enormous – he raised £100,000 more than his initial £35,000 target. This was in part due to the rewards available for backers, which included Bingo ringing you to up to abuse them on Christmas Day to the marvellous opportunity to “Get Sh*tfaced On A Train.” Following these particular excursions through Bingo’s social media was one of

A F*CKING LONG INTRODUCTION my genuine media highlights of 2015. Bingo launched the Kickstarter with a rap video, because of course he did. The three-minute film encapsulates what makes Bingo great; it’s funny, self-aware and takes something supremely silly very seriously. The rhymes range from the impressive to the knowingly clunky (uniform and unicorn, masochist and massive fist). In a creative landscape that can sometimes feel predictable and cynical, Bingo is anything but. He commits to those tenets that we hear a lot about, but which have become castrated by their over use – he takes risks, ignores received wisdom and follows

his own instincts. This is a guy who once when asked about other creatives he admires, admitted that he didn’t take much notice of anyone else and was more likely to be found watching Come Dine With Me than poring over design blogs.

Having known him for a few years – and been on the receiving end of his abrasive charm more than once – I decided it would be fun to channel the confrontational spirit of Hate Mail in this c*nt of an interview...

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.mr-bingo.org.uk Minute by Minute @mr_bingo Interview by Rob Alderson, Managing Editor, WeTransfer

WITH A F*CKING SHORT INTERVIEW Y

and potentially building up to some kind of Michael-Douglas-in-Falling-Down moment, I can channel that hate into a piece of art and send it to a stranger.

o u are known exclusively by your pseudonym Mr Bingo – is that because you’re a charlatan or a coward?

You once described your personal motto as “Nothing matters” – is this nihilistic posturing or do you really mean this?

When I was 21 years old I started attributing work to Mr Bingo. It’s a fucking stupid name, a bit like The Arctic Monkeys; surely they regret that now they’ve all lost their teenage acne and started prancing around moodily in smart clothes in black and white photos?

In answer to your question: yes, a charlatan.

I really mean it.

Through your Hate Mail project you have sent personal abuse to thousands of strangers – does this make you feel good about yourself?

No. A few people pointed out that the Hate Mail project coincidentally began as I was coming out of a divorce. What it does do is that it allows me to take things I hate about people and get them off my chest. It’s a cathartic process. If I see some c**t travelling to work in a suit on a micro scooter, instead of holding that anger in

Why on earth do you think more than 30,000 ostensibly sane people choose to follow you on Twitter?

Because I don’t Tweet about what I had for lunch, DIY, family, TV, babies, being bored at work, birthdays, Christmas, dieting, shopping, socialising and looking forward to the weekend.

You have developed an interest in rap recently – do you think the world needs another middle class white boy with an NWA fantasy?

Yes it does. Of course everyone hates a middle class white c**t stealing from other cultures that he can’t relate to, but I’m doing it under the thin veil of comedy which (in my

opinion) means you can do whatever you like.

The sculptor Wilfrid Wood has made a sculpture of your head – would you say this is an artwork that the world really needs?

That’s two consecutive “Does the world really need this?” questions. F**k me, is the best journalist Offset could find? Anyway, no, but it’s something that I really need.

Again, going with the charlatan thing, having a sculpture of your own head makes you look more important and successful and gives you a false air of superiority.

Realistically, do you think that this can all go much longer?

I think so yes. I need to come up with some new stuff, but hopefully I can think of something that people will be into. I know I’ll never be homeless. If things go really tits up, I’ll just open Hate Mail again and the rent will get paid.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.pentagram.com/#/partners/109670 Minute by Minute @angushyland Interview by Adrian Shaughnessy

ANGUS HYLAND Y

ou were part of the team that staged the AGI Open conference in London in 2012. Was there anything about AGI Open that made it different from the normal conference format?

Other than the fact that all the speakers were members of AGI, I’m not sure. As the conference theme ‘dialogue’ was pretty straightforward, I’m tempted to say perhaps that because it was a one-off event in London there was a kind of – Oh God, forgive the dated analogy – a Woodstock quality about it. If you missed it, you wouldn’t be able to catch it again.

Designers seem to have become better at speaking at conferences. They now see it as part of their job, rather than something painful to be endured. What do you look for in a good conference speech?

For me, a good talk is one when the speaker makes a memorable point or position which I can, in recollection, articulate in a single sentence.

Conferences usually have themes, but often speakers disregard them. How important is it for speakers to ‘follow the brief’?

I think it’s really important to follow the theme if the organisers have stressed it as a requirement and you are part of a tight format. However, often it’s a rather loose or abstract theme that is basically a framework and not an overarching

construct. So breath between presentations is rather hardwired from the onset.

Whose work is impressing you currently in the world of design?

Ah, that’s tricky to answer. I tend to be into a subject – like for instance, botanic art or anime, or folk-rock, or modernist abstract symbols – at any one time. My pursuit of the muse tends to drive me towards graphic or illustration/popular artwork related to the subject, usually either historic or vernacular. A friend once told me, quite plainly, that she didn’t think I was a fan of design – which, while being slightly disingenuous, was accurate up to a point; I tend to be interested in stuff that is tangential to design.

Your wife, Marion Deuchers, is a prominent illustrator and artist, and you have two sons. Are they showing signs of following in their talented parents’ footsteps, or are they destined to be accountants?

Well, the poor things haven’t much of a hope of escaping – sometimes I feel the house is like an extension of art school.

I have a vague, and perhaps twisted hope that they will rebel and then, who knows … an internship at Deliottes? My eldest son drew figurative representations of vacuum cleaners before he was two, which extended out into sculptures incorporating building bricks, coat hangers, pile of clothes, in fact anything to hand. For a short while we were amazed by this young Duchamp until he settled into more conventional creations.

I blame an early obsession with Naughty Noo Noo from the Tellytubbies rather than the Baby Mozart tapes we were playing in the nursery. Still you’ve got to follow the muse, to reference my previous answer.

Printed books or e-books?

Don’t do e-books, Adrian. Too intravenous – they by-pass the palette. As for books, I Just finished The Goldfinch by Donna Tart, and I’m now about to embark on the new Michael Faber, The Book of Strange New Things. Between times I sporadically read The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution by Frank Dikötter. It illustrates the horrors of when poets become dictators.

Last design book you bought?

Design Concept Realisation by Wolfgang Schmittel, published by ABC Verlag. Cost a prince’s ransom, but I needed it for a talk.

Last non-design book you bought?

The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn – actually my wife bought it but she gets all her Amazon packages delivered to Pentagram, and what’s hers is mine and vice versa.

What is the secret of Pentagram’s longevity?

It’s impossible to either buy or sell it; so we have to keep the pyramid game going. And it is essential to be adding new, innovative partners. It’s like the quest for the holy grail.

T

O

In Sheffield, in a leafy area, down a lane, between a primary school and a church, 10 minutes run from the Peak District, live Tado.

Mike and Katie live and work together in their attic studio, in a lovely house, crammed full of vinyl toys, mountain bikes and comics. Their studio is set up for digital and analogue making and sometimes spreads into the garden, What have you two been up to?

Katie: Recently we’ve been doing a lot of client work and not in a tent when spray paint is required. as much personal work.

Mike: Yeah, we’ve not been doing a huge amount of personal It’s an idylic setting. work and not a huge amount of toy making stuff either. Sky and Now TV have been pretty much the past 8 months.

I saw some work you were installing at The Sheffield Children’s hospital.

Mike: Yes, and there’s a really cool wooden automata project we are doing with them, it’s about 2 meters wide, a moving piece that we might have some prototypes for soon. We’ve started drawing it but not made anything yet.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.tado.co.uk/ Minute by Minute @wearetado Interview by Pamela Bowman & Matt Edgar

You are a cottage industry, in the way that you work and you are very private, your work is well known but you’re not celebrities, is doing Offset at odds with that?

Mike: Bren’s been asking us to do it for years.

Katie: Its not that we didn’t want to do it, it’s the fear of doing it! We admire the people that do it and we’ll be really inspired but we think ‘Oh god! Its our turn now!

Mike: We are happy to talk to students and we go to deliver a brief and we know what we are talking about with the brief, but talking about your own work, its not a natural thing.

Are you always together, like Gilbert and George, always shoulder to shoulder?

Katie: We go running together, riding together…

Mike: Its an important part of being self-employed, exercising the right to go on a Thursday morning to the BMX track if it’s a nice day.

When did you first realize that you were going to work together professionally?

Mike: We both grew up with a strong love of animation and characters - we’re both 80’s kids so were privileged to enjoy the golden age of kids cartoons and action figures!

Katie: I think from Uni wasn’t it?

Mike: Yeah, we were on the course for three years (Graphic Art and Design course at Leeds Met University in 2001) and had never spoken to each other until a tutor suggested that we work together. As we were both very keen on exploring animation one of our tutors suggested we try working together on something.

Katie: We were doing similar things then.

Mike: We both wanted to do Flash. We both collected comics and toys. It was all the dark, kind of gothy stuff then.

Katie: Chris Ware.

Mike: Whatever was in Forbidden Planet at the time in Leeds. Gothic American kind of

stuff at first then swiftly into the Japaneese stuff. Ghost in the Shell and Akira and collecting toys.

Katie: We got a couple of jobs when we were still at Uni. We thought ‘We’re going to graduate! What are we going to do?’

Mike: We went from not knowing each other to spending 24 hours a day together.

Katie: We went to a proper Graphic Design firm, to see if we could get a job there.

Mike: At our degree show someone left a card there. We went and it pretty much confirmed that we didn’t want a proper job.

Katie: We both went back home and got part-time jobs while we built the website.

Mike: We built a flash website and there was us and Jon Burgerman and that was pretty much it, and pixel surgeon and Designers Kinky. It was a small community and all fresh and exciting, when Flash was cool.

We got to know Jon pretty quickly and in Sheffield there was funding for start ups to have a mentor and Designers Republic took us under their wing. I think quite a lot of the attitude came through to us.

The funders gave us £500 and we spent it all on stickers, as promotional items.

Katie: To have Ian Anderson as your business mentor was amazing!

Mike: We moved from Leeds to Sheffield and set up our ‘studio’ in a tiny broom cup-

board above the Site Gallery. Since then not a great deal has changed! We still work in a tiny studio, still draw characters and still make ourselves laugh every day.

Japanese themes run throughout your work, is there anything in particular about the country and culture that inspires you? How do you mix that aesthetic with British influences?

Katie: We’d say the whole amazingly busy visual culture of Asia has a huge influence on us. As character designers it’s such an exciting place to visit - we love the way that even the most mundane of the everyday can be brought to life and represented in character form. Pretty much everything and anything has a mascot and they are an ingrained part of everyday society.

Mike: We love the attention to detail, the ingenious use of space and the obsessions with things like hobbies taken to the extremes that also flourish in Asia - things we can both really relate to.

Is there anywhere else in the world you’d rather be?

Mike: We did look and apart from Japan, there are parts of America that appeal but also parts that don’t.

Katie: We did look but we’re pretty happy

here. We are looking at moving but we’ll not be moving far. If we had a garage we wouldn’t move at all. We’ll be happy for the next 40 years.

Mike: The house has been turned into the studio. The hello Kitty animation was made in the basement.

Katie: The Children’s hospital work spray-painted in the garden Mike: In a massive tent that we bought.

There were spray cans everywhere. Upstairs is our main studio, office.

Do you have working hours?

Mike No. Katie: We tried but it just doesn’t work.

Mike: Whatever is required. But sometimes we only work 2 days a week.

Katie: Hello Kitty was full on, then we worked all night.

Mike: We’ve not done that for a while now.

Do you ever want to do anything really dark?

Katie: We used to.

Mike: Some of our old stuff was really shady Katie: It was all the comics we were reading and the Japanese horror film we were watching Mike: We used to get stuff back from editors requesting that we remove some of the pointy teeth and breasts off the bear. We used to do a lot of bears with breasts. We don’t get much of a chance to do dark stuff but it’s a theme in our personal work. We have a graphic novel that we’ve written in our heads but not had the time to actually do it.

Is there anyone you’d like to meet?

Katie: Miyazaki. But I think we’d be too scared.

Mike: I think when we started out we had a lot of heroes and we actually reaslised that a lot of the people who are really good at what they do are also really nice people.

Do you get fan mail, fan email Katie: We got one the other day Mike: Since social media its been much easier for people to just say Hi. We’re not as active on it as some of our friends, being at home all the time, there’s only so many things that we can take photos of. There’s countryside, pictures of sheep and mud. animation one of our tutors suggested we try working together on something.

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y father was in the RAF. He’d been a rear gunner in Lancaster bombers during WWII, had flown on several “1000 bomber raids” and survived. After the war he stayed in the RAF and worked in radar and air traffic control. My early years were peripatetic; every two years we were posted to a different air base. As our family is from Yorkshire, my father always tried to get postings to Yorkshire, so we alternated between locations in France, Germany, Holland and Yorkshire.

When I was nine years old my parents separated and divorced. We were stationed at RAF Bruggen, then a bomber base shared with the USAF, between the Dutch border and Cologne. The Cold War was at its most intense and the station was on constant red alert with loaded bombers lining the airfield, waiting. My father had custody of my brother (six years older) and me. As a single parent working on 12-hour shifts in the middle of such a tense period my dad couldn’t look after us adequately and he was obliged to send me to a boarding school in Surrey. I hasten to add that this wasn’t a public school.

The Royal Alexandra and Albert School was a state co-educational (mixed) boarding school, which had started life as an orphanage in 1758. It took a mix of kids from broken homes, from socially disadvantaged backgrounds or those whose parents were abroad. For example, one of my best friends at school was from a broken family whose father was in prison for eight years for grievous bodily harm; another was the son of the Ghanaian ambassador. It was the perfect environment in which to learn about and overcome differences, intolerance and prejudice and it taught me a lot about the potential of community and collaboration.

I loved and was good at art and I was lucky enough to have a very cultured and supportive art teacher who took me under his wing and urged me to apply to art college.

I went to Canterbury College of Art for a year on their very intensive and successful Foundation Course. From there I went on to a BA design course at Maidstone College of Art. I didn’t particularly get on with the tutors or their idea of a design course and spent most of my time experimenting with mixed media and hiding in the printmaking

department producing hundreds of etchings. In my final year I became interested in what was happening at the Royal College of Art. It seemed to me that there was a quiet revolution going on in some of the departments. As I really didn’t know what I wanted to do on leaving Maidstone and being sure that I didn’t want a job, I decided I’d investigate the possibility of applying to the RCA. On learning of my proposed application, my tutors at Maidstone advised me not to bother applying as in their view they were certain that I wouldn’t even get an interview.

I’d originally intended to try for the Fine Art course, but having visited and looked around I was soon deflected to a far more interesting area. On a visit prior to applying, wandering around the studios, talking with students and staff, I found the Fine Art course to be painfully self-absorbed and insular.

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n leaving the studios I wandered across the corridor into another unnamed small studio, in which a group of students were producing an extraordinary diverse range of work. This was the MA Illustration department. I’d had no specific knowledge of or interest in illustration and certainly had no aspirations to become an illustrator, but what was happening here captivated me. Here were artists exploring their own visual languages with great originality and passion and none could be described as illustrators. Stuart Mackinnon, a fierce Scots communist was producing disturbing and sublimely beautiful drawings and making socially committed films; the Quay Brothers, striking identical twins from Philadelphia, who went on to make some of the most surreal stop frame animation and live action films of recent decades, were simultaneously working on drawings and dark collages together; Sue Coe, a Londoner was producing huge collaged political paintings on paper dealing with all manner of social injustices.

This environment, which encouraged and enabled such a high level of diversity, experimentation, individuality, commitment and passion, was exactly where I needed to be. Thankfully I did get an interview and was accepted. My three years there were

crucially formative, and my time there and in London during those years, 1974-77, were extremely important in shaping my future.

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y first ‘commission’ came when I was at Maidstone College of Art (1971-74); it was a hand drawn/painted poster for an antiques/ junk shop in the town. I think I was paid about £7.00, which enabled me to pay a week’s rent on my tiny bedsit behind Maidstone Jail.

My first genuinely ‘commercial’ commissions were in the mid-late 1970s when I was at the Royal College of Art for magazines including The Radio Times, New Scientist, New Society, amongst others, and book publishers such as Pan/Picador, Faber and Penguin.

P

unk had exploded in 1976 and I was going to gigs about four nights a week. Recognising correspondences between the subversive energy of Punk, of its DIY aesthetic and collage, I became immersed in Punk culture.

In my work I was exploring collage and mixed media, using destructive processes in order to create new ways of working. Luckily these experimental works found an audience via various small Punk record labels and Punk bands who began commissioning me, such as the fledgling Virgin Records. In this period I undertook art and design for groups such as the Skids, Penetration, PIL Ltd, Generation X. I also did the cover for the ‘Short Circuit: Live From The Electric Circus’ 10” featuring the debut recordings of The Fall and early recordings of Joy Division performed under their original name Warsaw; others featured included the Buzzcocks, Steel Pulse, The Drones and John Cooper Clarke. It was in this period that I started working with the band Wire, producing covers, set and lighting design, and performing live in several experimental evenings of creative mayhem.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.russellmills.com Interview by Lauren Pritchard

T

he early 1970s the music world was dominated either by bland pop or inflated Progrock. Having discovered the likes of Hendrix and Captain Beefheart when I was about 15, these choices held no interest for me.

And then, in 1971-72, suddenly, Roxy Music appeared and knocked me sideways. Their eclecticism and energy appealed to me and I quickly recognized that they were yet another exemplar of the collage principle at work. It quickly became evident to me that the most interesting member of Roxy was a chap wearing make-up, tight Lurex costumes, glittering platform boots and feathers, who coaxed otherworldly sounds out of complex, weird instruments – this was Eno. Having read and heard various interviews with him I felt that he was a real kindred spirit. His ideas about creativity and culture, about the potential of hybridity, the need for diversity and variety in the arts, echoed my beliefs and ideas.

I wrote a letter to him via his management company, not really expecting their gatekeepers to allow it to reach him. Surprisingly they did and he replied about six weeks later.

We arranged to meet and Brian came into the RCA soon afterwards. We clicked immediately and, as I suspected, we did indeed share a raft of similar interests, beliefs, reference points and aspirations.

Brian had recently left Roxy Music and his solo career was progressing at a pace. Our meetings and conversations continued and it wasn’t too long before he began commissioning me to do album covers for him and collaborating on various projects such as set and lighting design, video presentations and installations.

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orking with Trent Reznor, who essentially is Nine Inch Nails, allows me to pursue ideas and processes that I feel are contextually appropriate for each commission, that are exploratory, experimental and hopefully meaningful and aesthetically striking. Right

from my first commission for him/NIN there seems to have been an immediate mutual respect. This is exemplified in the trust he has in me, and in the fact that he allows me to simply get on with the work that I feel is right. He allows me to experiment and by doing so accepts that my advocacy and use of indeterminacy, chance and contingency may lead to failures. He understands that my following such a contextually-anchored, process-driven direction can lead to new ways of working.

While we talk and bounce ideas around a lot early in the genesis of each project, once we have reached a mutual grasp of the essence of a commission, of its potential direction, he’s happy to let me get on with whatever I need to do. He imposes little or no interference or control: this is rare.

That’s not to say other people I’ve worked for are not as trusting or as open or that they interfere disproportionately. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with and for people whose work I love and respect and they in return seem to like my work enough to trust me implicitly. As with Trent/NIN there has always been a mutual respect. People have commissioned me to do what I do, because of what I do, and very rarely have they tried to change me or influence the work. I don’t consider any commission to be a job as what I do is a vocation. A commission allows me to do what I want to do.

I

enjoy complexity and ambiguity, and I’ve always been fascinated by how things in the world hook together. Nothing exists in a vacuum; everything relates to and is connected to something else. I’ve always sought to find correspondences between apparently disparate objects, processes, actions and ideas.

Picasso is supposed to have once asked, rhetorically, “What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he’s a painter, ears if he’s a musician or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he’s a poet.”

He continued: “Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, passionate or pleasing events in the world…”

We live in an increasingly fragmented world

in which we are bombarded with ideas, images, facts and stories. We are obliged to navigate through this chaos in our attempts to understand the world. By doing so we attempt to impose order on everything. I’m fascinated with ideas about chaos, order and contingency. The way I work and think, and the ideas I’m fascinated by are reflected in my choice of materials, processes, mediums and the genres that I work in and across.

I accept that everything and anything has potential and nothing is to be rejected. I work with materials and processes that I consider to be appropriate to the ideas I’m exploring: nothing is invalid.

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he artist is obliged to explore new ways of thinking and working, as a means of understanding the world and therefore art should be experimental. Experiment, by its very nature is exploratory; it requires one to surrender to what is. By doing so one is opened up to the unknown, more receptive to the new and often revelatory. My work and the processes I employ constantly throw up surprising results; this is serious play; it should be fun, enjoyable and exciting while also having a serious end in view.

PALO MA STRE LITZ. ASSEM -BLE.

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any of us studied architecture together and once we’d graduated we started discussing the possibility of creating a project. As ‘The Cineroleum’ began to develop more people got involved from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Together we now form the core group of Assemble.

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he nomination for the Turner Prize came as an immense surprise to us. I imagine it does for everyone because the process of nomination is very secretive. We all met up that evening to have a drink in the pub and discuss it. We were very excited but we felt we wanted to understand the implications a bit better before we accepted.

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n terms of influence we have an incredibly broad field of reference, so it would be impossible to distil into a couple of names. When we talk we tend to draw on the work architects, artists, directors, writers, politicians, policy makers, economists, scientists etc. As we have the pleasure of not sitting neatly within a specific industry – our range of references reflects the diversity of our interests.

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e think that the city can be a very dis-empowering.

And, as a practice, we’re really interested in addressing the typical disconnection between the public and the way our buildings and built environment are made. After all cities are man-made and material and over the past five years we’ve explored a range of strategies that explore this gap and try make the city more malleable.

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or us the practice of architecture incorporates policy, economics, brief building and the process of construction – not just building design. Our studio is therefore interested in a broad design process from initiating our own projects, to establishing new independent organizations, running spaces and events, building ourselves and opening up the building process to others.

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hen we built ‘The Cineroleum’ and ‘Folly for a Flyover’ everyone was involved at each stage of the process. However, now we tend to work on projects in smaller teams, which are then discussed and developed alongside the broader group at more specific moments.

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he Granby Four Streets CLT were also our clients on the project. We had a wonderful experience working with them because our interests and perspectives are very aligned. Many of the residents had been working-on the project to save the Granby Streets for so many years, so we fitted into a much longer trajectory and culture of creativity and action. In Granby, a culture of creativity is embedded in everyday life and has been used by residents to bring about remarkable change. In response to the Turner Prize nomination, we set up Granby Workshop to support and develop this culture, giving it new generative possibilities and a long-term home. The workshop uses the process of rebuilding the houses to contribute directly to rebuilding the social and economic infrastructure of the area. Granby Workshop is a place where things are learnt through making; as well as physical craft, it is a space for social, imaginative and political making. The exhibition at Tramway in Glasgow is coming down this month but the work to develop the workshop is on-going.

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e are also currently working on a project commissioned by Goldsmiths’, University of London, to create a new public art gallery within a former Victorian bathhouse at Laurie Grove, New Cross. Reflecting Goldsmiths’ culture of enquiry and making, it will offer a public programme of exhibitions, films, talks and performance in addition to a range of teaching, research and residency opportunities. As a critical testing ground for exploration and discussion the Gallery will become a new public resource for the arts in South London.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.assemblestudio.co.uk Minute by Minute @palomastrelitz Interview by Lauren Pritchard

PIRANHA BAR GAVIN KELLY ORIGINS BACKGROUND STORY BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT INFLUENCES & INSPIRATION PROCESS DESIGN PRACTICE & AESTHETIC & AMBITIONS

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was an avid sketcher, painter and comics guy from an early age - I really worked the creative angle when it turned out I couldn’t do soccer or basically anything else.

I came across computers in the last few weeks of my degree in Fine Art Sculpture at NCAD. Some Photoshop doodles combined with impressive spoofing got me a job at Picture Company, a traditional post production house in Dublin. I started learning compositing followed by 3D, and directing and animating was a natural, if long winded progression from there.

I

was very frustrated with how post production was run at the time.

I really wanted to see a studio that was more artist centric than facility led. An opportunity arose for a management buyout of the old Picture Company and Dave Burke and I took the plunge and founded Piranha Bar.

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e had a huge tank of piranhas in the basement. Not the most ornate fish in the world. They just sort of float there staring at you until it’s time to feed. At the time, we wanted a name that referred to the studio as a place to visit instead of a fancy concept with which to limit ourselves and irritate everyone. I can’t say that the Piranha team in Wipeout had no influence either!

A

vatar Days was a turning point that we didn’t see coming. I directed this short film for the Darklight Festival many years ago as part of a ‘day in the life of’ project. We had four days to concept, script board and shoot.

We sat on the film after the festival, busying ourselves with post production work. It was only after it got accidentally noticed online that we realized it was really our first live action project. It started winning stuff and went mental online with 2 million views. That told us that we were allowed to use a camera as one of our tools, a highly unconventional thing for a post house then.

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I

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he preschool long form animation sector is incredible. There are several giant studios knocking out amazing work. The pre school or 6-11 age groups are a bit of a tyranny though - these projects happen to be easiest to find funding for. I’d love to see Irish animation break past that age ceiling.

think it’s impossible to ignore the greats of commercial design and animation - Buck, Psyop, Passion Pictures in terms of influence and inspiration. And we are huge fans of studios that can pick up cameras too - Post Panic, 1stAveMachine and Motion Theory for example.

love following the wider spectrum of art and design and figuring out how ideas from these areas can be imported into animation and live action communications. Following product and automotive design for instance shows how the current climate is feeding into shape and line, informing our design decisions for characters and sets. The Lowbrow art scene from LA is also an influence.

he nature of our studio coupled with my fragmented creative identity forces me to wear many hats. Along with the executive functions as a partner and creative director in the studio, I’m pitching, filming, supervising,

developing, animating, compositing, writing, and presenting to our clients. I normally skip rush hour and start a bit later and finish later. Two nights a week I’ll work insanely late.

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think the big change is that as the work has become more and more demanding and ambitious on tighter timelines, down time is virtually a thing of the past.

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ast hijack is a hybrid live action/ animation documentary feature

directed by Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting. As animation supervisor on the show, I developed the ‘paintmation’ look which translates 3D animation into an organic expressive style where the forms are outlined and filled with paint strokes. I love how in this film the animation style fits the story. The protagonist is haunted by memories of his past and by visualizing the traumas he lived through we gain a deeper understanding of his choices in the present day. As memory itself is subjective, biased and even fabricated, the fluid and imprecise expressionism of paintmation helps us represent the shifting sands of our mind’s eye.

mercials for our domestic clients.

We have just finished some work for a Taiwanese agency and we’d like to see more work coming from beyond our shores. I am currently finishing our next short film, an extremely ambitious live action genepunk story called ‘Doom Newt’. We developed a performance capture pipeline to transfer the live performance of an actor to a complicated 3D facial rig. We’re actually replacing his head (and adding two extra arms) for the full short. Gulp.

W

Look at lovely things www.assemblestudio.co.uk

e are continuing to direct com-

Further Reading & Credits.

Minute by Minute @palomastrelitz Interview by Lauren Pritchard

JONaTHAN

BARNBROOK

Jonathan Barnbrook is a designer and activist who has worked with some of the most prominent artists, organisations and movements in the world. The studio that he founded in 1990 produces typefaces, books, and a host of client work that marries a powerful and memorable aesthetic with a sense of responsibility and awareness. Barnbrook’s work has been widely published and written about; in its own right and often in connection with a fruitful series of collaborations with David Bowie.

A lot of the discussion that I remember from college and my time as a graduate (2002) revolved around the co-option of underground style for nefarious purposes.

It feels like the time between the creation of a new (or genuinely) challenging design style and its co-option into use for other purposes has been reduced to almost nothing. In that context, is it possible to create anything that has meaning?

That’s an easy question. If you start worrying about how quickly things are appropriated or who appropriates them, you need never do anything. I think the important thing is what you’re trying to say in the first place.

[Any] new philosophies in your work are a response to the world today as it’s never been before, so I understand your question in a way, but also it’s just completely relative to the time. Appropriation always happens.

So I can’t really worry about it to be honest.

Can design be an agent of change or does it only encourage or facilitate it?

It’s very difficult to know because societies are complex things. I think what design does is quite a small thing; helping those people who want to get that issue on the agenda, helping them to say it clearly and as loudly as possible. I’m often asked ‘have I done a piece of work that’s changed anything’ and I would say that I haven’t. It doesn’t work like that, it’s more about being part of a voice that hopes to change and works in the service of protest. It’s not the end in itself. It’s part of a way of living which is doing the work, protesting and following your own principles.

And only graphic designers ask that question.

When we have done work with people who protest, they know graphic design works because they’re asking us to work on it. I think the problem with graphic designers is they avoid the question of the political

nature of graphic design in any form. In itself, consenting to do a commercial project is a political decision.

The left and/or more progressive politics seems to have an uneasy relationship with design. Why is that do you think?

I don’t think so. I think all the best design has been done by the left, hasn’t it? I mean… constructivism!

Maybe I’m biased from an Irish perspective.

We recently had an election here in Ireland, where more radical ideas tend to be paired with reactionary aesthetics.

Graphic design is a particularly neutral thing.

The same ideas that appear in the work for multinationals to sell products appear in work for subverting those things. So there’s a suspicion from the left. When you look at

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.barnbrook.net Minute by Minute @barnbrook Interview by David Wall (WorkGroup)

extreme politics, either left or right, there’s a certain amount of black and white there that’s very effective for conveying in official graphic form. Work from the communists or work from the Nazi regime is somehow so powerful and attractive to us all because there’s an element of certainty, of confirmation in it. I think it’s much more difficult to explain the nuances of a complex political problem in graphical form. It doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t try. It doesn’t tend to work in a one big headline. And you don’t always have to offer the solution in a piece of political work. What you can do is highlight the problem which I think is just as effective; you don’t have to say ‘this is the problem; this is how you solve it’. Life often isn’t that simple. And designers set themselves up as having the solution. It’s an ego trip. When I first became involved in political work, it was viewed as quite shocking that designers should have a political opinion or be heavily involved in political

work which uses the tools of all the contemporary corporate work. Nowadays, most people are aware of the anti-globalisation movement. I think there’s an acknowledgement possibility that this isn’t the perfect system and that other solutions could be found. People who aren’t necessarily absolutely agreeable on certain political points share a common issue, that they want to come together over. Politics is much more network-based than party-based than it was before. So it’s quite encouraging to me what’s happening in design and what’s starting in politics at the moment, despite the world being a very dark shitty place.

Would you see that kind of approach or outlook translating into your own work; where it’s not necessarily about dictating a conclusion?

The slightly different issue is about wanting to add something positive to a media which as well as being right-wing biased is also extremely negatively biased. The digital work that we’ve been engaged in – I hope – shows some positive examples.

I did a project about Northern Ireland (niresolution.org) a while back. I was sick of the negative things that were going

on in the press and actually it’s a much more positive situation there than it was ten or fifteen years ago. So the work there was to offer a bit of hope and to make the conflict very much ‘history’ by acknowledging the aesthetics of it and not just talking about the terror all the time. There’s a piece of work called the Day of Forgetting which prompted the Northern Ireland work. I asked ‘what do you think someone who was killed… would want to say now if they had a say?’. The project was a specific proposal: rather than remember every single political aspect, every single political crime; to just simply forget, really forget. So that project was trying to sort of give a different view, but a hopeful view – an almost stupid view – but one that could actually help a situation.

Do clients ‘self-select’ your studio based on the profile and work, or do you have to explain or establish a stance from scratch?

You work in the area that you want to work in and then the work will find you. There’s no point in having a commercial portfolio of stuff you hate and then hoping that the work you really want to do will come along, because it doesn’t work like that. So we attract the work that’s appropriate for us.

The bigger corporations obviously tend to keep away from us because most of them don’t like designers with opinions.

They want to say how to sell a car, they don’t want to be able

to ask why you’re selling the car in the first place. We attract a certain kind of work which we’re very happy to do. I hope the positive thing is for others to see that you can.

I understand your work as being quite integrated: through concept to execution and with the tools that you use. When you work with clients, do you find it an interesting opportunity or a challenge to work with their viewpoint, content and context?

Well it’s not a war, a client isn’t an opponent, when you design something you do it in an integrated form including the brief the client wants and what they have to add to the project.

There’s never any conflict. What often happens though is that we are working on a personal project – whether it’s a typeface or some other ideological preoccupation – and the right project will come along at the same time. We’ll include it or somehow it will seem right, even if it’s not directly linked. I think one of the most important things you have to do as a graphic designer is be a nice human being. You have to leave the client with a pleasurable experience of working with you. And this is talking in non-political terms, it’s just on a basic communication with other human beings. If the experience is terrible, it doesn’t matter how good you are, it means you’re a bad designer because good designers work with other human beings.

GMUNK A VISiONARY ON THE EDGE OF THE FUTURE

K A Y N E E F E E

It’s probably fair to say that there are a couple of themes that run through your commercial work – tech is one thing, maybe cars, scifi. Is that where your interests are, or do clients put this stuff in front of you because you’re the tech/car guy?

You know, I did a lot of hologram design and UI design from 2010 to 2013. From then on I did stuff that was super technical but not necessarily sci fi. It was robotics and experiential work. So I think that that’s the work that I’ve been called on to do more of.

I’m certainly not known for lifestyle or comedy.

On the other hand, it’s my goal to stay as diverse as possible.

So I am going add a little whimsy to my style, merging the tech with some absurdism and a big dose of humanity. A touch more humour and light heartedness.

I’m always seeking to do something different. Although, I’m not super successful at that because I keep going back to light installations and experiential work that has a big tech foundation in it.

I’ll continue to do tech inspired work because of my background.

It’s hard to escape I guess. I’d like to something more psychedelic, more like an homage to the late 1960s and those palates.

Right, and your showing some of that intent on you website, with that psychedelic Pinterest board you’re curating.

Yeah, if you keep on doing the same shit you’re going to get bored.

That’s the exact reason I wouldn’t do a feature film because I’d get sick of it after 5 or 6 months.

We’re quoting you on that…

I’ve a short attention span. The thing that keeps me inspired is diversity. I’m doing a lot of photography I’m drawing and doing a lot of illustration. I’m doing short films. I’m writing more. In a week there’s going to be a 28 print series out. I’m always trying to push myself and make myself uncomfortable. More growing, more evolving, and subsequently more inspiration.

A large part of your work as been about creating physical space out of something as intangible as light. Is that how you’d see it?

I’m thinking of something like the Windows 10 image.

Yep, that’s true. I had some really powerful influencers when I moved to San Francisco. Mainly people from Bot & Dolly. Those guys were doing a lot of practical work. I was really inspired by the cinematographer and roboticists that I was working with some.

Those guys pushed me to dabble in experiential work and work in practical. There was a time there where I was: “Fuck post!”

I just want to get everything in camera. Which made some shoots rather difficult. It was that way on the brief for the Windows job.

It had to be real because real never dates. It can’t. You know?

Because it’s real. You can’t fuck with real. It’s the same reason that Bladerunner hasn’t dated. 95% of that was shot in camera. Star wars hasn’t dated. It looks great because it’s real. CG, certainly from 10 years ago has dated. Look at the Star Wars prequels.

The CG just wasn’t good back then for creating sets or digital characters. The characters in Dark Crystal don’t date – they’re puppets. And that was the theory I subscribed too. Of course, this year I’m doing one job that’s 100% post. It’s like a 7 month job, a huge campaign, and it’s all post. It’s fun to go back.

I always say that my plan is not to have a plan. Just stay diverse.

Have a diverse style as well. Like the new print series I’ve got is super colourful.

That idea of realness is interesting – because in the Window’s image you’d sort of question is it real, how was it done. And then, there’s this ten minute long companion piece that goes through the project piece by piece. There’s so much of both practical work and post that went into it. Is showing how something was done important to you, or was is that just the marketing machine at work?

I love ‘making of’ videos. And sometimes, if not most of the time, the making of video is more interesting than the final product.

I look at it as just as important as anything else in the project.

It’s another piece of media that makes the whole project more interesting. On a Samsung gig I did, I thought the making of was

way more interesting than the final product. You know doing the macro photography, the robotic arm in there, programming moves on the fly – showing the camera moving in the laser field.

I love that shit! And I thought that the Windows making of was really good. It’s good to show people the reality of it. I think of the Sprint campaign [The Dream by Artisan/UVA] from a few years ago where you look at it and assume that it’s all CG, and then you watch the making of and suddenly you’re like: “Holy shit, this is all practical. This is amazing!”. Actually, that particular making of was a huge inspiration for the techniques that I’ve been exploring over the past couple of years. So yeah, the making of is equally important as the finished product because of the process involved.

Once you unveil the process, you’ve got this holistic approach where you’re not keeping secrets you’re sharing. That’s good Karma. It’s fair play. And if you do things the hard way it’s also validation of your efforts.

I don’t know if it was part of the brief, but in the Cars vs. Drones piece a substantial number of shots showed the guys controlling the drones, the set up, the monitors side by side. Is that part of the same idea of lifting up the curtain a little?

That was intentional too. That one I wanted the feeling of … like you’d walked into a big hanger and a bunch of technical people were doing this experiment. I wanted all this stuff in the shot to show that they’re doing this on the go. It’s not super polished.

It’s supposed to be a dose of reality. And there is loads of gear everywhere because we’re pitting these two machines against

each other and we’re not sure what’s going to happen.

That was a decision on my part. It also makes the shots way more interesting. I like putting objects in the camera that obscure the shot. I love shooting through windows, through people. There’s a shot in there that’s partially obscured by a lamp. I got that inspiration from a creative director called Jeff Linnell, that owns that idea. He wanted the same kind of feeling for this piece Box that we worked on toegher. Like it was an experiment and you’re almost just there capturing it with your iPhone.

You know, thinking about it, at first I hated that idea. I wanted it to be polished you know? Perfect and pristine. But after I listened to him for a couple of the scenes in Box I was like: “this is nice to be really honest with your approach”.

Whenever you’re on set and you see all this gear its as if there’s a specific kinda of feeling where you understand the magnitude of the things you’re doing there. And it feels cool. Even the most expensive production still has an air of – I don’t want to say cheap – but there’ll still be shit taped together. All sorts of interesting rigs to make something work and I think that celebrates the creative problem solving that goes into big shoots.

Right – in the end it’s just a bunch of people having to be really quiet in the dark for thirty seconds hoping a shot works out.

Right. And they’ll all there waiting to see if a certain camera move works or lighting rig does what it’s supposed to do. It all involves a type of problem solving. And in Cars vs Drones we were celebrating that.

Were you pitching Cars vs Drones from scratch or did the client have the idea and come to you? How do you convince client of ideas like that? Is it just you in a room waving your arms about?

Usually in advertising work there’s an agency involved and they’ll present a really basic seed idea that’s not that fleshed out. They hire a director to run with it and put a production solution to it, an editorial solution to it, a musical solution to it. With Cars Vs. Drones we were lucky enough to work with Vice Australia – they’re about a cool an ad agency as you can get. They had this idea to pit the cars and drones against each other to see which machine had the greater agility, which would win in an obstacle course of sorts. And from there I brought in this idea of long exposure to show the motion path and show the trajectory of the machines.

It’s an homage back to animation where you show the trajectory of something from it’s motion path, which is how you can judge movement and speed. Including that made it feel more like an art piece.

It reminded me a little of Otomo’s Akira.

Yeah. Including that light technique helped me to really enjoy that project. But both Vice and the client were completely onboard to let us play and do interesting things. Those are the kind of agencies that I like to work with – they trust a director and let them run free and do their thing.

I worked on an Adidas commercial one time, and at the end of the project the guys says: “I thought you were going to go even crazier with the tunnel [that appears at the end of the ad] and you actually kept it kind of tame.

And I felt really bad. I didn’t know that I could have gone that way. I thought it would have been a waste of time and resources. I learned from that conversation; you should do whatever you feel is right until you’re told “no”. No exploration is a waste of time.

Clients can get pretty brave when everything is finished. You mentioned Vice Australia, is going further afield for work about searching for clients that will give you the license to do something different?

I think so. I’m not at that point where I can pick and choose the work I do.

My work is obviously influenced by my design background but also by the craft of cinematography and filmmaking and storytelling. I’m still pretty new to directing. I’ve been making short films all my life but I’ve only been doing it for real in commercial work for about three years, you know proper sets, proper crew, proper timelines, real crunch time directing shit. Hopefully I’ll reach a point where I can choose the work based on what’s interesting to me. At the moment I end up pitching on most stuff that comes my way.

That’s Ok because a lot of the briefs are hand-picked for my style and for my sensibilities so it’s usually in my wheel house.

At the moment I’m pitching for a brief to make art with an appliance – it’s got GMUNK written all over it so of course I’m going to pitch. I think that they were like: “we’ve got this brief and who would be a good artist to match this to?” And they came up with me.

The big difference between client work and artist work is that in art you’re unconstrained. You pick a theme and you explore it relentlessly. Client work you’re always aware that you can’t say that because that’s in accurate. You can’t do that because the shirt can’t do that. You have to be a little more straight. There’s a lot of legal stuff involved because you can’t claim things that aren’t true when you’re selling a real product. It’s my goal to do as much art and unencumbered design work as I do commercial work.

Is that where projects like the collaboration with Tycho come in? You get more freedom, get to hone skills in a

collaborative – let’s say – artistic space?

Yeah absolutely. That’s job that I did for free, rounded up a crew in San Francisco, went on an adventure and shot in the woods for four days. Just a really low budget, warm, pure project.

I’m always trying to get that feeling, where everybody is working for free and you’re getting so much out of so little. That is such an inspiring feeling.

You do these huge productions where each day you shoot costs 150 grand and you shoot for two and half, three days or whatever and you get a lot of good stuff but it still doesn’t seem that much for half a million. And then you shoot a Tyco video in the woods for four days for 20 grand but you shoot way more.

You find out that it’s possible to do this stuff. I’m still confused by how that works sometimes where it seems that can’t really do anything for less that 300 grand. And then you can get a bunch of friends together, pull a bunch of favours and you can make stuff happen for very little.

Before I moved to London I did a shoot for $3,000 with a bunch of friends and the only reason I did the shoot was to play. I just wanted to play with my homies. I had to pay money out of my own pocket to make it happen.

I’m always searching for those kinds of experiences because it keeps you honest. It reminds me why we do this, for the sake of making and the sake of collaborating. I’ve got a lot of close friends that I collaborate with, that I love as family. It’s so much fun for us to go out for a day and talk shit, turn on music, get stoned and make stuff.

It reminds me of why I was so inspired in school and what I need to do to stay inspired as a professional.

I guess I see you as having a particular, distinctive style, I’m not sure I would have seen you as a natural collaborator.

I’m not saying I thought you were an asshole or anything…

I love collaboration more than anything.

It’s the way you learn. If you’re just by yourself all the time doing things by yourself you have no opportunity to cross-pollinate. You gotta work

with others to really grow. I’m very chill person – people like to collaborate with me, me with them. You can’t really dominate a collaboration. It’s a 50/50 voice thing. Otherwise it’s not collaboration.

How does collaboration work for the Kosinski movies you’ve worked on?

You were feeding into a bigger vision.

Well it was Joe’s vision. So he gives you the seed idea – this is what it needs to do, this is what needs to happen, this is the story we’re trying to tell. And then he gives me great freedom to explore all sorts of directions. We collaborate with him to find solutions but we also collaborate internally with my team, the guys I brought in to work on it.

We work on it together. Everyone has a voice. The best idea wins.

Tron and Oblivion felt really natural experiences. One, because we were making art, and there weren’t a lot of rules involved. And two, because both Joe and my guys were great to work with. We just had a lot of fun. It never really felt like work.

I remember on Tron Legacy, every Sunday I went in at night to put in 4-5 hours of work to get ready for the week to bring some ideas, and I never billed for it. It was just passion for the project.

Oblivion was the same thing. It’s a lot of passionate people working together to make really beautiful art and tell a really beautiful story. I’m waiting for Kosinski to do another feature film so that I can get involved. I would move back to Venice Beach in a heartbeat to work with him again. It was such a rewarding experience. You’re getting paid to make art, and that’s where I want to be.

Looking back, what was the first project that you felt you were really finding a style that you could call GMUNK? I would say Tron Legacy – once that project was over everybody on the team took a lot of time to make sure that the collection of the project was really nice and we showed a ton of work that we did. The response to that was really positive and afterwards I really felt I

had momentum.

But maybe the the light triangle I did for FITC Amsterdam in 2013 was the first foray into saying: “hey, lets use light as an element in graphic design,” and the collaboration with Micheal Fullman in that project was the beginning of a many more collaborations with him.

But each project builds on the last.

Right now, I’m working on a short film called the Monkey King and my goal is to get that shot this year, and finish post next year. That’s a really important project to me because it’s a culmination of the last six years worth of work put in one short film. I’m super keen on that. I’ve a treatment done and there’s going to be a Kickstarter later this year. I’ve never been more excited about a project in my career.

I think that’ll be a signature piece.

And then it’s on to the next one. I’m not that guy who’ll spend six months going to all the festivals selling it. I’ll finish it, release it to the internet, put my head down and move on.

I just want to look back on a long career where I did everything, I tried everything I could. This is the career I’ve chosen and I just want to look back and feel like I’ve done everything.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.gmunk.com Minute by Minute @gmunk Interview by Brian Herron

Niall McInerney has been one of the foremost catwalk photographers since the 1980s.

SN

All Photos by Niall McInerney ŠBloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive

AP

Born in 1941, Niall was one of a family of five. Leaving Limerick when he was sixteen, he set his sights on the bright lights of London. When Niall first arrived in London, a city he describes as “exciting” and “full of bomb sites”, he began working a variety of different jobs including one as a stage manager for a strip club joint in Soho. It was when he was here that Niall befriended Lewis Morley (who quickly became something of a mentor to him) who had a studio nearby and introduced him to “real photography”.

Niall fell into the business of fashion photography almost by accident citing “chance” as the impetus. His first major commission being the Dunlop Calendar in 1984. But he stayed there for over twenty years with his influences coming from some of the photography greats,

“ Moment of Truth photogra-

phers such as Cartier Bresson, who made it looks so easy, I was thinking I could do that!

”

Early on, Niall could regularly be found along the sides of the major runways leaning in and out as the models passed.

One of the first fashion photographers to cotton on to the possibilities of backstage photography, Niall would stay after the shows and while the other photographers were packing their bags he’d head back to capture the models off the runway.

“

[Backstage] was more interesting than the conveyor belt of endless dresses.

”

Using his Irish charm he would put the models at ease and reveal the true backstage experience as it once was.

Niall had his camera poised and ready for two decades, capturing fashion as it enfolded before him. Throughout his career Niall has captured iconic shots such as Naomi Campbell’s stumble from her gigantic Vivienne Westwood platforms, Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture and John Galliano’s degree show at Central Saint Martins to name a few. His behind the scenes work, however, provides some of his most captivating images.

I Am LiZA ENEBEIS, Creative Director of Studio Dumbar.

What follows is a chat with Linda King on the importance of ‘staying foreign’, being a bad intern (at Studio Dumbar), founding a pirate radio station dedicated to typography, and what I would read and listen to on a desert island.

D

id you move to Holland as a child?

While I was born in the UK, my parents are Greek and they moved around a lot. I went to a British school in Greece, I moved to Paris [Parson’s] for college and then I did my post-graduate studies in London [RCA]. I worked in London [Pentagram] after graduation and then moved to the Netherlands.

What perspectives did those experiences give you?

Living in the UK had a big impact on me but living in the Netherlands more so. The way of communicating is very different here as people are really, really direct. The first year I moved here I suffered; I would show work and everyone would give an opinion - as everyone here is equal - and it was horrible. In England people have a sort of code when speaking and when they say something is ‘interesting’ you know it’s probably the opposite. If someone really doesn’t like your work they won’t tell you straight to your face, but if you learn the code you understand what is being said. When I came to the Netherlands I doubted everything I did, I thought I was a terrible designer and nobody liked my work. The first year was very difficult. But now I think I have become more Dutch than the Dutch. Now my colleagues say ‘Liza, maybe you should be a little more polite!’

S

One noticeable quality in Studio Dumbar’s output is that the work is not formulaic. That must be quite difficult to achieve as there are many companies that have a standardized approach to designing.

With other studios you have a Creative Director and they very much have a signature style; that was my experience at Pentagram.

The people that join us in Studio Dumbar are usually straight out of college and many of them are interns.

We

get to know them and it’s important that they have their own way of working and their own design visions. Our job is to try and push their talents as far as possible and that

o many of Studio Dumbar’s projects have been for the Dutch Government or various local authorities and it could be argued that the studio has visualised the infrastructure of contemporary Holland. Do you think that having cultural distance gave you a particular insight into how you could project ideas of Dutch or local identity?

I always say that in terms of working it is important to ‘stay foreign’. I really believe that if you are one step outside a culture you are able to see difference and it helps your design approach in terms of brings diversity. Again, it’s the idea of ‘staying foreign’ seeing new possibilities. Visiting the Netherlands you see things that people because when you are straight out of college everything is living here a hundred years won’t see, you look at everything with fresh eyes. I new and possible and you don’t know the limitations, but think because I moved around I’m always in this position of being foreign. I’m here find these out quickly. When someone is 23 they might in the Netherlands ten years and I’m not Dutch, I’ll never be Dutch and I speak take twenty times longer to find a solution but that can Dutch with a terrible accent. But I try to keep that position as it’s important for be very exciting as their potential is unlimited. I think designing that you don’t fall into the rut of doing the same things and getting the that is why our portfolio is diverse; we try to make same answer. I’m constantly trying to see things for the first time. In the Netherlands everyone as independent as possible. Our designers they make these big statements that foreigners should integrate, learn the language usually stay five to six years and then go on to start etc. and while I think you should integrate, you should also maintain an outsider’s their own studios. point of view in relation to design.

W

hen you were a young designer did you have a particular mentor that encouraged you?

When I was in art school in Paris there was a teacher there that always said: ‘It’s not about design, it’s about the way you live, everything you do is design’. He was important as he believed in me. Later on I had a friend who pushed me to go abroad, to go to London and study at the RCA, he also told me about Dutch design.

When I was studying at the RCA there were few design books available and no internet. My friend told me that I should go to the Netherlands because

You started in Studio Dumbar as an intern and came back as the Creative Director.

That was never the plan! Actually my internship was not the best internship. I remember the first day as the worst day. They gave me this PTT manual, which is now considered to be very special, and I thought it was the most horrible thing I’d seen. I thought the design was all over the place, the illustrations were horrible and it was a manual. At the end of the day I thought ‘Seriously? I’m reading instructions about where to put a logo on a letterhead?’ But they were so proud of the project and I really did not see that. What I enjoyed most was the people and the culture but I was not an exceptional intern.

However, I did get along with everyone and kept in contact and that was useful in terms of getting to know the company very well.

T that is where they were doing crazy design work and he really opened my eyes to see beyond Paris. Now I find the people here in the studio really inspiring. When we talk about design everyone sees things so differently and the discussions we have keep me going.

he kind of projects you undertake at Studio Dumber – many of which are governmental sponsored projects – is work that every citizen in the Netherlands knows very well. Do you feel a weight of responsibility about that?

Yes, of course, but I try not to think about it. It’s a bit double edged: if you think about it too much then you don’t do anything because you think ‘This is so much responsibility, how am I going to manage this project?’ In the studio we often forget how public the projects are and are reminded

when walking around when see so many logos designed by Studio Dumbar: they are part of the fabric of the country. With public projects you become very aware that people care about their country and how public money is spent.

They can react quite harshly and we can become the focus of such discussions because budgets are made public. As soon as the work becomes public everybody gets involved and it’s worse now with social media as it’s really easy to give any comment, educated or uneducated. In the beginning I found this quite hard to deal with as I didn’t realize the impact our projects would have and the reactions they would get. I now get worried if I don’t get any reaction!

I

interviewed Massimo Vignelli once and he said that designing for a national airline was the most prestigious project a designer could do. Do you have any ambitions to redesign the KLM identity now that Studio Dumbar’s redesign for its subsidiary - Transavia - has been such a success?

I would not touch the KLM mark as it’s a really, really beautiful design by Henrion. I really admire it and the signature blue colour; it’s important KLM keep those. Of course there are some small tweaks you could do but to do a complete redesign is not something I would recommend. As a designer you usually want to mark everything with your own stamp, but with KLM it’s different, it has too much heritage and equity.

A lot of innovative Dutch design exists in relatively unexpected places, for instance the identity you did for VBMS, the power installation company. The project reminds me of Piet Zwart’s designs for Nerderlandsche Kabelfabriek (NKF) in the 20s and 30s and how he made the mundane look remarkable.

That’s an interesting observation because those are the kind of projects I find the most exciting as if you can achieve great results with a project like VBMS then you are the first to do so. It’s like you say, you have to look back a hundred a years ago to think of something that remotely resembles it and it’s interesting to see the logo now on their vessels and cranes. The VBMS commission also represents the opposite of how Studio Dumbar thinks about design. For example PTT Post is not just a logo it’s also about the visual language around its use. VMBS does exactly the opposite, it’s only about the logo, there’s nothing else! Gert [Dumbar] would probably hate it as it’s exactly the opposite of what he taught us…

Is there a project you are most proud of?

I am really proud of the identity fo The process was not particularly e balance because you are talking abo ing a mark for a foundation. So if y disease then you end up with depr the potential effect of which is im sitting in a doctor’s office. So you some optimism and hope in subje was not easy, it was long journey u

or Alzheimer’s in the Netherlands. easy in terms of finding the right out a disease but you are also creatyou literally show the effects of the ressing communications material, mportant to remember for patients want to find a balance and to find ect matter that is very heavy. That until we got the result we did.

Can you tell me about the Amsterdam Sinfonietta posters?

Every year or two a different designer from Studio Dumbar will design a series of posters for Amsterdam Sinfonietta; each designer has a different style and every year the designs change.

And yet together they are all recognizable as a suite of related posters. They remind me a little of what Josef Müller-Brockmann did with the Zurich Tonhalle posters: all very different but they all are recognisably part of a system. How many are produced each year?

Five or six and there’s about two months between each poster. It’s a hard task, every designer that joins says ‘I want to design a series of posters’, but usually they have to work here for a year or two first. It’s a bit of an experiment as not everyone can design a poster. The client is very open-minded and always saying ‘who is the next person?’, they get so excited.

Can you tell me how Typeradio came about and was that a hard sell for a programme that is about something visual?

It was a project we started 10 years ago. There are five of us: the three members of the type foundry Underware, Donald Beekman [of DBXL] and myself. Underware were invited to speak at Typo Berlin and they came up with the idea of setting up a temporary radio station at the event to interview the speakers and broadcast these interviews on line.

However, they didn’t want to do any of the interviews themselves so they approached Donald and myself. I had just moved to the Netherlands and they heard that I was a designer that spoke English, as does Donald. It sounded like a nice idea, so we bought a transmitter, which are illegal here in the Netherlands but in Germany you can rent bandwidth. So we got the transmitter, researched the speakers, rented a van and went over there.

So it was almost like setting up a pirate radio station?

Yes, but in Germany it was legal. We practiced in Holland and that was a sort of like working in pirate radio. The funny thing was that we set up next door to the American Embassy and so I think you could hear us talking about typography on any channel that was nearby, but we got away with it!

At Typo Berlin we interviewed different designers and broadcasted these live on line. We bought a lot of second hand radios and put them all around the conference - even in the toilets - tuned in to our station and people listened. The first person we interviewed was Stefan Sagmeister then Matthew Carter. We had no previous experience and I had very little knowledge of typography. I’m not a specialist in the area and we thought we should find a different angle. So instead of asking questions about kerning - boring things you can easily read about - we decided to ask more personal questions, things you wouldn’t know about designers and things you wouldn’t dare ask. Donald and I would ask about cooking, eating, cheating, lying and have a normal conversations. For the type community it

was refreshing as suddenly they could hear Matthew Carter - their God talking about his family. I didn’t know all these people or their status within the design community so it was so much easier when asking them these questions. We are amateur journalists who made a lot of friends and but probably enemies too!

That sense of irreverence comes through in Letters to LoveLiza [Liza’s on-line agony aunt and advice column] which seems to gently poke fun at the design community; was that the intention?

Yes, of course, nothing is serious there.

The questions are always ones I ask myself or situations I have been in.

You clearly love books and I admire how you curate and categorise your book collection on Books LoveLiza.

So if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could bring along three books and three albums what would you bring?

Emm.. Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call for sure, but I’ll probably end up dying after listening to that! There’s also a Jay Zee album I like although I should probably be a bit more clever and bring a survival skills book. I’ll have to think about that and come back to you...

A week later Liza emailed me her desert island list: Nick Cave: The Boatman’s Call, Dean Martin: The Capitol Years, Peaches: The Teaches of Peaches, Homer: The Odyssey, The SAS Survival Guide, and a notebook…

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.studiodumbar.com Minute by Minute @studiodumbar Interview by Linda King (IADT)

DUDE, SUCKING AT SO FIRST STEP TOWARDS GOOD AT SOM

OMETHING IS THE S BEING SORT OF METHING. MEET ADVENTURE TIME’S ANDY RISTIANO!

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.skronked.com Minute by Minute @skronked.com Interview by Lauren Pritchard

I grew up in Massachusetts and was allergic to Massachusetts.

So instead of playing sports I drew. I drew a lot! I drew in all my classes, I drew while hanging out with friends or at parties.

Eventually I went to school at the Rhode Island School of Design.

I majored in Illustration, but started to take animation courses on the side for fun. When I got out of school it was much easier to find work in the field of animation than illustration (or comic books which is what I really wanted to do.) So that ended up becoming my main source of income. After a long and cir-

cuitous route filled with ups and downs I ended up landing the job on Adventure Time. That pretty much brings us to the present.

I first got in contact with some of the members of the adventure time crew about ten years before adventure time existed, at a comic convention called a.p.e. in San Francisco. That’s where I first met Tom Herpich, whose work I greatly admired. We did a comics trade and then ended up staying in touch through email. I had some artwork appear with him and Jesse Moynihan in a comics anthology called Meathaus S.O.S. When I heard

Tom got a job on Adventure Time I asked him to keep a lookout for job opening for me. Eventually, after taking a few tests for the show I landed a character design gig working under Phil Rynda.

That was almost 6 years ago!!!

As far as independent work goes, my comic called “the babysitter” that I did through SLG publishing was a big creative breakthrough for me as far as merging complex storytelling and pushing the boundaries of what you can do in the medium of comics. Commercially, I feel like becoming a character designer on Adventure Time will continue to be a real

breakthrough moment for me creatively and in terms of career.

There are tons of artistic influences it’s hard to pin down.

Some of my earlier influences are comic artists like Geof Darrow, Moebius, Leiji Matsumoto, Gary Larson, Ben Edlund, Jack Kirby, and Zander Cannon. But, I would say as I get older my influences tend to lean more towards what I see in nature and applying that to my drawings. I would say outside influences are maybe the most important influences to me now.

A lot of my design choices are based on what I see in the real world. Studying the natural way

that things organize themselves.

The way plants grow, or leaves fall, or time changes. That sort of stuff.

When I first started doing character design on the show, I was so excited about the work that I used to pick a theme, like robots or aliens, and draw nothing but variations on that theme on the hour-long bus ride into Burbank.

It would get my brain and my hand all warmed up to draw before a long day of designing at work. Later on in my time on AT I started doodling strange surreal landscapes in my sketchbooks just to do something different, now I’ve switched over to drawing

backgrounds on the show. You can use personal work as a bridge to the next thing. Right now I’m working as a background designer. The days are all relatively the same. Derek Hunter, the lead BG designer, will give me a bunch of specific scenes from the storyboards to draw the backgrounds from at the beginning of the week and any notes that I need to know.

Over the course of the week I try my best to get them all done so Adam Muto can give us notes. By around Thursday we get notes on the drawings, then we have to get everything fixed up for shipping by the end of the week. Repeat

at the beginning of the next week.

Most of the input comes from the writers and the story boarders. Sometimes the designers will be asked to do some work pre-board but it’s rare that things are organized enough for there to be time for the designers to get first crack at things. Writing and boarding are usually done very far in advance of things on the design end. Design does get the final pass on things so we can add fun little details or extra jokes in at the end. It’s very tough to balance work for adventure time with my own personal work. AT is a very demanding show and eventually

it seems to demand all of your time. The trick I learned is to limit your independent work.

Work at a smaller scale, something that is do-able in a spare moment or a lunch break. That’s why I started doing my character design zines like “123 creatures” or comic strips like “beau and boo” instead of working on something large scale like a graphic novel. Limiting the size of my independent projects lets me at least feel like you are still producing personal stuff.

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Leather is historically an inherently masculine material.

Would you disagree with that statement? And how were you drawn to working with leather?

It’s a tough material, so maybe people put tough down as masculine as opposed to delicate or feminine. I mean I never really put it down for one or the other.

My reasons for being drawn to it though, it’s hard to pin down. I was just drawn to it. It’s like saying why do you like something? There’s things about it that are important to me and I guess that’s at the base of it. Obviously there’s the history of it and the heritage. The quality, the longevity, the fact that something ages well, rather than deteriorating over time. Leather products become more beautiful with age. The material responds to the wearer and responds to it’s use. It’s almost like a fingerprint. A second hand pair of shoes always has the shape of the first owners foot in it. That’s probably a disgusting example so don’t use that! [Laughs] I guess it’s a very personal relationship that people develop with a leather product.

That’s from an emotional response to the material. Whereas from a technical point of view, I like being able to create sculptural shapes and sculptural forms and this material is perfect for it. Particularly the vegetable tan leather that I use, because it’s got a firm handle so I can achieve a interesting forms with it.

You spoke about longevity and heritage, they seem to be quite integral to your brand. How do you honor those values in your work?

The traditional techniques that I use, they bring that through.

They’re age old. I like to think that it’s timeless because it’s not something that’s being put into one trend or another from the fashion world. And that’s deliberate on my part, I don’t want to make a flash in the pan kind of product. I want this to be kind of like the tough girls heirloom pieces. I grew up on a farm with that appreciation for the life cycle of an animal and the skin of the animal and the body of the animal after it’s death even. A respect for, if you’re going to take the life of an animal use every single part of it and do respect to the animal in it’s death and so it’s that kind of mentality coming through.

You touched on the fashion industry a little bit there. The industry itself is in a state of flux at the moment with gender fluidity being a massive topic of discussion. You’re work is elegant and decidedly feminine in it’s form, but there’s also a significant element of androgyny. I wanted to know how important it is for you to subvert traditional codes and expectations in your work?

Well since day one I’ve been trying to make people question preconceived ideas and that I think factors in gender issues as well. So, within the pieces, men or women can wear them.

They are actually fitted on a female manikin, but I’ve had some guys wear them already. Both the bodies pieces and the cuffs and the bracelet type pieces. It sometimes even just changing the colour. You can have the exact same piece in a different colour for a man to a woman.

I’m very much open to whatever anybody wants to wear.

That’s no problem, I’m happy with it! I really liked to see

people being creative with the things I wear because I make the piece and then I hand it over and somebody else interprets it and styles it. Y’know whether it’s a photoshoot or a piece they’re wearing. So, I guess I just make objects and whoever wants to wear it. I’m happy with that.

You previously designed a unisex collection for Unconditional. Was that something you might pursue in the future with your own brand?

To be quite honest, they were the same pieces made with a wider waistband in a different colour worn by a man. All I need to do is take the pieces I’ve already made and photograph them on men and then I’ll have a menswear line. I know others brands that have done that as well. Y’know they’re already there. It’s more to do with the photography and the direct decision to inform the public. I just haven’t had the time because I’ve had so many other projects. I’ve even had guys contact me by email and ask ‘do you make stuff for men’ and I’m like ‘yeah have a look on the website, at all the bracelet kind of cuff pieces can be worn by men’ and they get back to me and say ‘I can only see men’s on there’. But because they’re photographed on a man they don’t get it. I’ll stop going on more tangents! But yes, it is something I want to do, But yes, at some point when I get the time to do it.

Another aspect of the fashion industry I wanted to ask you about is the fast paced fashion schedule system and how it seems a change is on the horizon. As a slow luxury goods company, does it still affect you?

Yes because I’m still trying to keep up with the seasons. You have to think about the fact that it’s a business and I have to make my sales when the buyers have the budgets. Otherwise, if you become so transeasonal that you don’t do the shows.

Then they don’t have any specific time when you can take an order from them, if you don’t show them the collection at the time when they have money. So from the logistics and the cash flow point of the view, it’s important do But actually this season I decided to take it out. I didn’t do a collection for Autumn/Winter ‘16 but at the same time AW16 hasn’t arrived yet so we could easily launch. Because as you said the seasons are changing. Already it’s been a case that we can make a collection, show it at fashion week and then make it for a customer immediately. We’ve already been able to do that. It’s just more awareness of that now. It’s been really good actually, to take a season off from Paris Fashion Week because all of our friends are doing it at the moment and it’s just that tensity. It’s really intense and it’s really stressful so it’s great to just have a season off and take a break, take a breather and step back and develop some stuff, some of the pieces in a more slow and calm fashion. Rather than developing a collection in a real hurry just for the demands of the fashion industry. I know some other brands that have taken it off just because it really makes sense. It’s interesting how the whole industry is changing and it is difficult for smaller brands you can;t afford to produce to sell straight from the runway to the stores but for someone like me who can get an order and produce it. It depends on supply and materials and that kind of thing but if you work with local suppliers, it is doable for some small business. It’s quite fascinating!

Simons likes to have a hand in all of the designs, whereas someone like Karl Lagerfeld is happy to just creatively direct. How was your role evolved within your own company as the brand has grown?

I’m very much hands on as well. With the creative stuff, I will take past styles and dismantle them and start developing new pieces based on that or I’ll take a piece of leather and get new knives made to kind of shape it out. I basically play around with the leather, building it up on the manikin itself. So it’s a very sculptural kind of approach with the forms evolving. I’m not much into sketching stuff before I start working. Sometimes I’ve gotten people who are working with me to play around with the leather on my behalf and trying out constructions techniques. And I’ll take those and apply them properly. Recently, I’ve had the first person I would say to definitely help me on the design and development of things. She helped me to develop some small leather goods. That’s another reason why taking this season out has been good for me. I had time to develop those small leather goods.

And that’s a much more easy product to sell because the products I currently sell are very, very niche and a high price point. So I’m looking into how can we maybe start developing more accessible products.

You said you work directly onto a manikin rather than sketching. So do you have a concept built up in your mind before that happens?

There’s kind of the same idea coming through all of the collections.

It’s like one collection weaves into the next conceptually. If there’s something strong within the storyline of the collection. For example AW12 I was looking at ships and my tumultuous relationship with water so I was looking at boats and headpieces. So yeah, the concepts feed into the shape of the pieces themselves.

There was an exhibition in the Science Gallery here in Dublin recently called “Trauma” which explored the link between the body and the mind and whether trauma can ever be purely physical or psychological. These seem to very much be perimeters in which you work. How does psychology influence your work?

I’ve always had a real interest in people. Maybe that’s just an Irish thing – I’m sure it’s not!

I’ve always been really interested in psychology, psychoanalyzing people, trying to figure out what makes people tick.

So it always comes into my work. There are always human stories at the back of every collection. For doing my masters collection, there were three collections and I read a lot of psychology papers to find out what were the common trends – not as in fashion trends! But the behavioural trends in the aftermath of a traumatic experience or at any stage during the event happening, the emotional aftermath during the healing, how people sometimes can go in a good direction and become stronger while others can fall apart and become really messed up as a result or you can become a combination of both but I feel like everyone kind of recovers in their own way. I mean we all kind of understand what trauma is. It’s not something that is exclusive.

We all have our own relative traumatic experience that has

happened to us at some point.

So, I suppose it’s about using that and making something positive from it. So my aim was to take that subject and create something that was incredibly captivating and the world is divided over so many things but I think anybody anywhere could look at that and feel something. A lot of people think it’s related to sex, which it’s not it’s so much deeper than that. It’s in the gestures associated with the human body and things that cross boundaries and culture and religion.

You’re work was featured in another SHOWStudio exhibition “Sex Sells” which featured work by female artists and their interpretation on the female body. Thus eliminating the sexualisation of the male gaze. Would you consider your work to be feminist?

When I made that work it wasn’t at the front of my mind, because I think trauma isn’t for men or women, we all know it.

It wasn’t initially which is why when they were asking me all the feminist types questions I

was like “Oh? Maybe!”. I felt like am I being a hypocrite now, tailoring my answers to please the ears of these people. It wasn’t deliberately. I mean I was really pleased to be part of that exhibition but what I found funny was that about that exhibition was, I don’t know for what reason, but a lot of the imagery that was featured was kind of sexually exploiting women so I don’t know if it’s that women exploit women in the same way that men exploit women. It could be, or maybe we exploit ourselves or maybe we’re also just influenced by the media. Even the name of the exhibition. I was isn’t it supposed to be the opposite? Maybe it was a taboo kind of title.

The concept behind your latest collection ‘Remembrance’ is about rebirth and new doors opening. What was the motivation behind it?

I was feeling a little lost and needed to get back to my roots. You start of with a really clear vision and then you get exposed to this and you get pulled in so many different

directions. Then I thought screw this. I loved my first work and I don’t think I’ll ever beat it. Because it was so true and sincere, from the bottom of my heart and the bones of my fingers and the tears in my eyes! Everything I put into that. My heart and soul.

So I don’t want to ever beat that work anyway. So I basically went back to everything that was fresh and pure. So that’s why I had the nude tones and the creams. All the kind of natural nude tones.

Did you feel creatively revitalised after that collection?

We’ve done loads of collaborations instead of collection this year. That’s been really fun.

Maybe I just needed a break from myself.

What is it about the collaborations. Do enjoy the aspect of being given a confined theme to work within?

I was just getting a bit isolated. Too much inward thinking.

I collaborated with Teatum Jones that have just won the Woolmark Prize which has

been won in the past by Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. I made some pieces for blanket carriers and rucksacks for them. Then I did a collaboration with a Russian couture brand and I’m doing a project with Swarovski. So those kind of projects have been great and it’s making me want to go into more kind of design areas.

Your designs have been worn by some famously eccentric dressers such as Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Daphne Guiness have worn your designs. Does it take a certain kind of person to wear your designs?

I think it takes a certain kind of person to wear some of the designs. It takes a very confident person…..and rich! I couldn’t afford it! Nor actually do I wear the big pieces because I don’t like to be the centre of attention. I prefer to wear a belt, a bag or a bracelet.

When you’re designing, do you think about how do you want people to feel in your clothes?

Yeah. Protected and strong, kind of like a warrior.

People sometimes dress in outlandish things because they want people to focus on the clothes rather than the person inside. And it’s almost like an armor. Like a psychological armor. I know of a guy who dresses in absolutely mental stuff because he doesn’t actually like himself that much. He’s very shy.

Further Reading & Credits.

Who else would you like to see in your clothes?

Look at lovely things Bjork. And Tilda Swinton, I really www.unaburke.com like her. Or maybe Bono! I nearly had a project with him, but then Minute by Minute they had a tour and it didn’t @UnaBurke_Design happen. But I’ll get him yet!

Interview by Roisin McVeigh

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M SSEB

Illustration is like a camera, it’s not about the act of illustrating that is interesting, it’s what you’re drawing about.

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W

hen I studied 3D animation, The Mill was where I did my internship, so that’s where I started. Over the course of my employment I started getting tired of the extra “D” in 3D and focused on stereo D which in layman’s terms is 2D. Illustration took more and more space until it was literally the only thing I was doing. People on the interweb saw some of them and though they were worth something and that’s how I became a pro illustrator.

I

llustration was always influenced by music, I keep drawing music instrument and pictures of the band. I used to think it worked the other way but I actually don’t write music about illustration. But they go so good together, I couldn’t see music existing without giving it an image.

T

m

E

w

he first time I did a black and white isometric illustration was the closest I got that breakthrough moment, I really didn’t invent anything but I felt like I digested my influences and really liked what I was doing, that illustration is called “ A perfect Saturday afternoon”

arly and mid 20th Century cartoonists and animators like Max Fleischer were always on in my house as I child, my dad loves these old cartoons. When I started drawing more seriously I unconsciously or consciously started injecting more and more of it in what I do, and I still do.

y influence varies but they’re always about something a friend a did or something I ate or cooked. Anything that makes me feel something strong is a good candidate as an influence in an illustration.

ell I keep working during rushes because I’ve always done it and don’t seem to be able to do otherwise. Depending on the size of the illustration or the medium I’ve chosen my week can have a very different feel, for instance working on photoshop is extremely different to paper, I can stay connected and see those funny videos that everybody is sharing on facebook and procrastinate, when I draw a big piece on paper it can take weeks of isolation.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.mcbess.com Minute by Minute @mcbess Interview by Lauren Pritchard

FARAWAY, SO CLOSE.

AVERILL & MCGRATH.

F A rom my early teenage years I had always wanted to be involved with graphic design (then know as “commercial art”). I had approached The National College of Art and Design at the time (1969) to be told that they only taught fine art and sculpture. I then signed up for the only course that I could find which was a one year full time “basic design” in Dun Laoghaire Tech. Following on from that I was advised to try and get a job in a print firm. That misinformed advice led to work in a photo type setting firm which in reality had nothing to do with the graphics on any level - but it was a job.

While working there I met Phil Walsh a creative team head from Arks Advertising who was doing a once evening week class in Bolton St. Although I wasn’t signed up for that class I went to an number of his lectures on the advice of some fellow works who thought he was somewhat eccentric and that I would like him. I did and he later informed me of an opening for a junior in the agency. I applied and although I felt my portfolio was not particularly relevant I subsequently was offered the position. I was told that they liked me more than the samples of the work. From that start I worked my way up through various agency and consultancies until I was offered the role of Creative Director of the Helme Partnership. As part of that move I expressed the wish to set up a separate design consultancy within the agency structure.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.ampvisual.com Minute by Minute @ampvisualdesign

dam Clayton was in the same year as my brother Mark in Mount Temple secondary school and he told me that there was this guy in his class who wanted to come and see me about my involvement with founding and playing with The Radiators from Space who have been recognised as the first Irish punk band. So I arranged to meet Adam and after a number of conversations the subject of design came up and he asked me to get involved. I did their first poster and 7” single cover as well as advising on and coming up with the name. My only request at the time was to do the first album cover. The band were true to their word despite strong objections from Island Records at the time. I just wanted to create something that I felt summed up the band’s music at that time. Obviously there were some risks involved in the choice of image and typography as it went against the norm for a debut release. The cover of the American version of the album was changed to feature the four ‘treated’ individual band images that were on the back of the album.

mE aybe it was around the time I was made Creative Director at Helme when Shaughn had come to see me to show me his portfolio. He was working down in Limerick but was unhappy there and so lobbied hard to join the agency. Straight away he was working on a range of advertising and design related projects, which included U2. So Shaughn was thrown in at the deep end when I got him involved with what became the Achtung Baby campaign. From then on he was involved with the band’s design, as were other members of the team, to this day and through various changes in the company’s name and structure.

ach band we work with has something but I have always like the work I was doing at the same time with the Virgin Prunes. They were an interesting set of individuals and because they weren’t signed to a major record label they had more freedom in the choice of photography and imagery the used. Some of the best work done around that time was for special promo packaging. Something that was never available to the band’s I worked with. It was only much later in their career that U2 began to do special and deluxe editions. I also liked to work on the accompanying tour programmes as they gave a bigger canvas to work on and were less controlled than the commercial record releases. The working relationship with U2 has changed over time in a lot of subtle ways. In the early days it was very one to one with, usually the band and Paul McGuinness, being involved. The budget and timescales were also a lot tighter. As the band become more successful that obviously changes although we still enjoyed a good face to face relationship as the band were often recording in Dublin or London and setting up listening sessions and artwork meetings was a relatively easy process. We had over time developed a close working relationship and began to have a good sense of what the band might like in terms of direction. We always tried to be flexible and make changes to the graphics as the music, titles, or direction changed.

V

inyl to CD as the lead packagingformat had a hge impact. But overall economics have played a huge part in the design process in the music industry. The fees involved today are a lot less that they were in the past. That has had a knock on effect on the scope of materials, such things as paper quality, special inks, die-cuts etc, as well as the time spent on a project. That’s something that was not as crucial for a band like U2 given their world-leading band status and the strength of their management team in making sure they got what was requested.

There are some really interesting packages that were produced for the CD era with some innovative design but that is changing again now with a lot of albums coming out on vinyl again. The need for the music industry to include graphic identities for an artist for merchandising, online usage etc has never really diminished. When the switch to digital occurred there seemed that there would be new areas for digital special packaging projects as PDF booklet formats but that option never seemed to catch on with public. The work might be viewed online but that was about it. The success of physical “deluxe and reissue� packaging shows that, in the main, the tactile nature of print still wins out.

W

hen artwork went from being delivered on flat boards to digital there was a massive change in the overall process. Prior to that you were able to make mock-ups a lot looser.

For instance track lists and credits might be indicated by a series of lines to indicate where they would be positioned. Making corrections was a pain in the neck though as you would spend a lot of time getting something like the lyrics to fit only to be told that a verse had been forgotten, or something like that so you would have to get that photo typeset and lift all the set type and relay it out. The introduction of the Mac (or computer) changed that. However the end result is now that a mock-up for an

album has to be virtually the finished thing when showed to a band or artist. Briefs have not changed hugely other than now there seems to be more input from the marketing department and the design has to accommodate their wishes. which are often, in the mainstream, clear photographs and easy to read titles. So Boy may not have made the cut now. Briefs can vary widely from different sources so you still have to find a way to find the best graphic solution.

S

ometimes I meet a band to talk about an overall image direction before they have recorded anything. On other occasions we would be the last in the line and the project is pretty much done when we would be brought in. The ideal way is to hear some music and to discuss the possibilities of the artwork at an early as possible stage in the process. That tends to lead to the most successful results. The key thing is to bring the artists identity to the forefront rather than the designers. That is especially true in a relatively small country like Ireland.

I

t’s something of a reinvention time for me at the moment. I am going to carry on working as a freelance art director and have a number of projects in hand. Recently I’ve been working with an upcoming band.

Giving them some suggestions for a name change was an early part of the process. I don’t think you ever stop being a designer (or at least thinking like one). I also intend to keep working on music with my band Trouble Pilgrims.

PASSION, OBESSION

& BEAUTY. SEB LESTER TALKS TO STEVE SIMPSON

Seb Lester has created typefaces and letterform based illustrations for some of the world’s biggest companies, publications and events, including the likes of NASA, Apple, Nike, Intel, The New York Times, The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and JD Salinger’s final reissue of The Catcher in the Rye. Previously a Senior Type Designer at Monotype for nine years, he developed custom typefaces for clients including British Airways, The Daily Telegraph, H&M and Barclays. But as he tells Steve Simpson, in recent years his love of calligraphy has pushed his work in exciting new directions.

Where you always a calligrapher? What was your first job?

My background is in graphic design and type design. One of my claims to fame is the first job I got out of college was working on a Rolling Stones tour book. I got a call after a designer saw my portfolio at my degree show at Central Saint Martins in 1997. I subsequently had plenty of lows in terms of my career, along with the highs, but it was a pretty exciting way to kick things off. I started doing calligraphy in 2011 almost by accident. My partner got very sick and I ended up being her carer for about 14 months. I couldn’t work; the only creative outlet I had was occasional sketchbook doodling with calligraphy pens. She is in remission now, fingers crossed, but it was a very tough time for us. Calligraphy started as a means of escapism and therapy for me and things progressed from there. I had no idea it would end up changing the trajectory of my career so dramatically. Some clouds do indeed have silver linings.

Further Reading & Credits.

Look at lovely things www.ampvisual.com Minute by Minute @ampvisualdesign Interview by Steve Simpson

So we all love your little calligraphic movies? Is there a name for them?

Calligraphic movie is fine actually.

Were you surprised by the reaction you got with those?

Yeah, I really have been absolutely surprised. It’s been quite amazing the effect it’s had in terms of it’s really changed the trajectory of my career. I’ve got a very high profile now in terms of online following and I’m getting offered a lot of work that’s come off the back of social media and calligraphy. I could never have anticipated it. Its really uncharted territory for me.

It was only 18 months ago when we were both speaking at OFFSET Limerick that the Instagram sensation had happened for you.

One of my films was shared on the official Instagram account. From that one post my followers went from literally 13,000 to 72,000 in 24 hours and now I’m close to a 1,000,000 followers now on Instagram.

It’s quite bewildering really. My followers seem to come from every continent and every walk of life. The last time I looked there was a pet shop in Iran following me, a pole dancer in Las Vegas, and a kid in Mongolia was trying to emulate my calligraphy videos.

That is a humbling, surreal and beautiful thing. The hand drawn logos project came about because I realised that almost everyone has a favourite logo. It occurred to me it was a great way to engage people from outside the visual arts. If I write out the Star Wars logo you don’t need to have to like letterforms or calligraphy to like the results, you just have to like Star Wars. Those logos are a demonstration of skill to some extent, but they’re really just meant to be fun little magic tricks. Calligraphy as entertainment.

I’m sure there would be a long line of people queuing for that job, Seb. Are you finding time to do personal stuff because I know selling prints has always been a big part of your work?

I’m in a fortunate position at the moment as a lot of the success I’ve had, almost all the success I’ve had, has come from personal projects and putting out personal ideas and work online and getting people interested in it. And it’s something everyone really needs to make time for. I’m actually currently spending 80% of my time working on personal projects because I recognise how important it is do that and for my own development and I want to try and do profoundly good work, work that’s progressive and significant in a format that endures and I think the way I work to get the best results, I need to devote quite a bit of time to personal projects. My Jerusalem limited edition print, released last year, is one of my best pieces of work to date. I really pushed myself creatively and consider it something of a break through. There were a lot of false starts but I really put a lot of work into this one and I’m very proud of it.

So what are the main changes then in the type of commissions you’re getting since all of this has happened?

I mean I’ve been really lucky, to be honest.

I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve always been offered quite a lot of work and quite a lot of prestigious work, but now a lot of commission’s people want are more calligraphic in nature. I just did some work for Tiffany & Co. for their Christmas campaign they wanted some social media calligraphy so that’s a good example of the changing kind of work I’m being asked to do.

Who or what has had the most impact on shaping your professional aesthetic?

The way you price jobs must have completely changed.

It’s a very subjective thing and I always struggled with pricing. I think I’m certainly in a position to ask for more, as I can also offer to show work to my social media followers, the 1.6 million accounts following me now. I’m still trying to figure out the value of what I’m doing and it’s a difficult one.

I’m completely overwhelmed and I’m currently I’m looking for an assistant to come and help me because I’m definitely at the point where I need some help in delegating because otherwise I’d just be spending all my time queuing in the post office which isn’t really what I should be doing with my time.

I worked at Monotype as a type designer for nine years. I do like legibility and I suppose that stems from designing corporate typefaces, where legibility is paramount, for so long. I have very mixed feeling about that time, but it certainly laid the foundations for much that has followed. I had a great mentor there, Robin Nicholas, and I learnt my craft there. Robin was a great boss, he was patient and offered gentle guidance and support in the early years. I’ll always appreciate that.

You spoke in Limerick at the mini OFFSET, probably two years ago nearly now. You then spoke at OFFSET London so you’ve been building up to the big one. Are you excited about OFFSET Dublin?

I am excited but I’m a bit nervous. I know it’s a very big crowd but I’ve heard from the organisers that it’s a warm and receptive crowd so hopefully it’ll go OK. And the fact that you’re the last speaker that means you have to buy them all a pint afterwards.

It means what?

BUS STOPS

is a mini-exhibition that is a celebration

of creativity and OFFSET in collaboration with a host of our favourite studios, illustrators and creatives. The mini exhibition, entitled ‘Bus Stops’, features eight works from: Workgroup (1), Steve McCarthy (2), ADW (3), Aoife Dooley (4), Unthink (5), James Earley (6) & WorkByPost (7) and DETAIL (8) All designs will be displayed at bus stops along the various routes to OFFSET see www.iloveoffset.com for more details.

Designed in Ireland

by WorkGroup

Designed in Ireland

by WorkGroup

Unthink

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| Bord Gais Energy Theatre | April 8—10, 2016 www.iloveoffset.com | Detail. Design Studio

THE PLAY PARK

REBECCA BLAKE ON BEHALF OF DCC & IAF

The IAF have embarked on a project to build a Play and Skate Park in Ballyfermot through an innovative and collaborative People First Design Process and international design competition. The competition has been won by London Based inter disciplinary Architecture practice Relational Urbanism.

The Matheson Foundation in partnership with Dublin City Council are generously funding the project forging new and exciting ways for the public and private sector to work together. The Matheson Foundation’s main objectives are helping young people to fulfill their potential and promoting corporate philanthropy in Ireland. The IAF director Nathalie Weadick said, “we had been looking for a project that combined the IAF’s experience in delivering high-end architecture projects in the community with The Matheson Foundation’s philanthropic remit.

When Dublin City Council came on board and suggested Ballyfermot as the location everything fell into place quite quickly.”

The site in Le Fanu Park known locally as ‘The Lawns’ was proposed as a group of young BMX and Skate enthusiasts from the Ballyfermot Youth Services had been lobbying for a facility like this in the area since 2011.

What really sets this project apart is the in-depth community engagement process that is embedded at the core of every stage of the process. The IAF designed and launched a programme of activity last June to engage local people in Ballyfermot to participate in the design of the new space. The aim was to include as many local voices as possible in the writing of the design brief to ensure that the design would meet the community’s needs.

With the support of the DCC local area office we began by going out to meet with some key community champions and stakeholders in the area through organizations like Ballyfermot Youth Services, local schools, the Ballyfermot Library, Leisure Centre, community centers and service providers and calling door to door to meet local residents as well as local Gardaí and Councilors. It wasn’t long before word got around that a great new facility was in the pipeline and local people showed real enthusiasm, generosity and appetite for getting involved in the conversation.

We hosted a number of carefully designed events including consultation picnics, artist and architect led workshops, guided tours and meetings to harness local knowledge from children, parents, teenagers, older people, people with specific access and learning needs and the wider community on how to ensure a successfully designed new space. Highlights included children building their dream play park, a psycho-geography guided tour with artist Rhona Byrne, exploring the wildlife of the Lawns with RTÉ’s Dale Treadwell and the Enable

by Universal Design workshop with architect Jacinta Curly.

In all of this activity, local people both young and old could build, make, draw, write and tell us what their hopes, fears and aspirations were for the play park with ideas ranging from zip lines and half pipes to meditation gardens and suggestions around fencing, access management and security. In turn we collated and communicated people’s feedback in the design brief directly to the competing architects. It was clear that it was a complex project posing many challenges but an exciting and rewarding opportunity to develop something ground breaking for Dublin and Ireland.

In September the IAF launched an international design competition to attract architect and landscape architect-led multidisciplinary design teams with a passion for working in community contexts. We received a wide range of applications from all over the world each proposing a variety of approaches.

We assembled a jury which we felt would understand the complexity of the project composed of Diarmaid Lawlor, Head of Urbanism at Architecture and Design Scotland, Leslie Moore, Head of Parks services at Dublin City Council, Ailbhe Murphy Director of Create, Turlough Galvin, Chairperson of The Matheson Foundation, Ger O’Reilly, Youth Worker at Ballyfermot Youth Services, Amy Harding, Youth worker and Local Ballyfermot Resident, Gary Mongey Box Architecture and Chair of the IAF, Nathalie Weadick, Director of the IAF and Amica

a collaborative design process which proved to be the clear reason for their success. Les Moore from DCC said that “The architects have proposed a visionary design for this Play Park and have demonstrated that they listened intently to both the jury and the community feedback after stage one of the competition process, as that feedback is clearly evident in their design proposal.”

The project is now in the planning phase with Dublin City Council and we are preparing everything that is necessary for the construction phase, which is due for completion in 2017. The IAF will continue facilitating a dialogue between the architects and the community in Ballyfermot until the park is completed.

As part of this ongoing exploration of the People First Design Process, the IAF are planning a conference called Beyond Participation on Thursday 16 June 2016, 10am-6pm at The Lighthouse, Smithfield in Dublin.

Dall, Founder at Assemble the Turner Prize winning architecture and design collective.

Together this group had a multitude of experience and expertise in the areas of developing public realm projects with communities, developing innovative play spaces, specialist architecture and landscape architecture expertise and the very important local knowledge of the site and its context.

After a very rich discussion on the first round of judging we selected four design teams to go into the second stage of the competition.

Each team travelled from as far away as New York, Amsterdam and London and from as near as Chapelizod in Dublin to the site in Ballyfermot and to meet the community to get further feedback on their designs for stage two of the competition.

On arrival they met with the 6th class group in St. Ultan’s Primary School, the transition

Year group in St. Dominic’s Ballyfermot and a specially formed community consultation committee who all gave invaluable feedback about what they could see would work and not work directly to the architects.

Meeting the designers proved to be a very empowering experience for both the local people involved and the architects; Jennifer Holland, the teacher of 6th Class in St. Ultan’s said that the process gave “a huge boost to their self-esteem to have their opinions heard and possibly incorporated into such an exciting project. They took it very seriously and learned a huge amount about team-work along the way.” Mark O’Connell a local resident said he gained “great insight into what needs to be done to achieve change in a community.”

The winning design team Relational Urbanism set up a range of innovative design tools using sand boxes and X Box connect technology to really engage the community in

Seven international speakers from the US, Europe and Ireland will present different ways of practice, revealing the challenges and barriers, the necessary creative tensions that lead to discovery and enlightenment.

The choice of speakers is selected for their propensity in questioning the norm, their reinvention, activism and innovation. The case studies will present a diverse range of themes from open source design, gender, ethnicity, technology, to harnessing local skills and will cover projects from housing, health, education and public space.

In the weeks following the conference the IAF will deliver 3 workshops influenced

by Beyond Participation in our new space, 15 Bachelors Walk, which will cover essential local issues in Ireland around housing, public and educational space and philanthropy.

These smaller focused conversations will be for groups of 25 people.

To find out more and to participate in the Play Park Ballyfermot project please visit our Facebook page and join the conversation, we’d love to hear from you. www. facebook.com/playparkballyfermot

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