Design’s young guns

Published in Desktop Magazine, Niche Media, 2010

With so many young designers out there, how do emerging designers make themselves stand out in the crowd? What factors drive the success of up-and-coming design studios across Australia? Creativity? Entrepeneurship? Insanity? Desktop takes a look at some of Australia’s hottest emerging designers, and what drives them to their ends.

Is Not Magazine

The winner of this year’s State of Design award for Communications Design, Is Not magazine has become a colourful feature of many alleyways, building sites and stately walls around the Melbourne CBD. The A1 magazine layout, incorporating fiction, non- fiction, mobile phone flash points and fabulous typography capitalises on Melbourne’s street art culture and acts not only as a curiosity, but as a tool to bring readers together. Stuart Geddes is currently art director for Monument magazine who has recently finished his Masters in Communications Design at RMIT university and Jeremy Wortsman, an editorial designer and self-confessed New Yorker are co-designers of Is Not magazine.

What drew you both into design?

Stuart Geddes – I really found myself in second year graphic design before I really realised what I was doing and what potential graphic design had for me. Before then I was just unwittingly drawn to art and design, and loved to read. But I didn’t see what they had to do with one another. Since then, that close, intertwining relationship between writing, language, communication and design has drawn me further and further into the fray.
Jeremy Wortsman – For some stupid reason I egged my dads car from my bedroom window and as a punishment he sent me to the Edward Tufte Visual Explanations workshop. It was a life-changing experience really, to see how design could profoundly affect peoples lives in a myriad of ways. From there I did a pre-college course at parsons and began an internship with my professor’s studio that was starting up while I was still in high school.

What have you found to be the biggest hurdles in the development of your careers as designers?

S – Negotiating a relationship between doing the kind of work I’m interested in, and earning my keep. Design is a difficult, and potentially demoralising profession. Working out ways to stay interested in it, by critically considering how and why I practice, and what my practice is.
J – The Australian Department of Immigration. I’ll leave it at that. Is Not magazine was co-founded by the two of you in 2004 and has grown into an element of Melbourne’s design culture, receiving recognition in this year’s State ofDesign awards.

How was Is Not magazine first envisaged?

S - The co-founders are actually: Mel Campbell, Stuart Geddes, Natasha Ludowyk, Penny Modra and Jeremy Wortsman. (two designers and three writer/editors). Is Not Magazine came out of about nine months of conversations and meetings between these five friends. It started out as a vague idea of starting a cross between a literary magazine and a street press. As a result of the amount of time spent playing with the idea and the different things each of us wanted to bring to it, it turned into the monster it is today.
J – During the course of these conversations a lot of separate elements began to coalesce. I had a poster from the Astor Theatre in the house, and when I walked out the door, there was a whole wall of street posters on a building site. When I turned the corner and saw a whole group of people standing outside Readings looking at the housing notice-boards, the whole idea really clicked. The idea of people gathering outside to read this I found a really powerful image, and I think this is where the idea really took shape.

What combined experiences and skills did you both bring together to make Is Not happen?

S – My experience at Studio Anybody and my just completed research masters were my main influences on Is Not. They solidified an interest in communication as a complex, human, political activity that design can and should aspire to contribute to.
J – I had come from a very focused career in editorial design in New York, and when we started Is Not, I was working as a Senior Finished Artist in Packaging (See Australian Department of Immigration, above). I think working in a sector of the industry that was more technical than creative really pushed me into the realm of self-initiated projects.

You’re about to start distributing Is Not within Europe. Will the publication be altered to suit different audiences, or do you believe the message of Is Not will remain strong, not to be lost on alternate design cultures?

S – Through our association with Underware (the type foundry that supplies all of our typefaces), we have a small distribution idea set up in Europe. At this stage it will be the magazine as it already is, as a curiosity from Melbourne. Ideally, a model of expansion for the magazine would involve local content and street poster runs – perhaps through collaborations with other local magazines. But at this stage the scope of that undertaking is beyond us.
J – What he said.

Where do you see your careers 20 years from now?

S – That’s really hard to speculate on. Hopefully I’ll be doing something that I haven’t thought of yet. We are in the process of starting up a new studio to focus on publication design projects, which is tremendously exciting. It’s called Chase & Galley.
J – Hopefully still in Australia (See Australian Department of Immigration, above). I am very eager to see the where Chase & Galley will take us, but I have also had a lifelong dream of selling fish tacos out of a converted and renovated 1959 Airstream trailer by the beach. So who knows really?

Voice

Competition is fierce in Adelaide, but co-directors Anthony De Leo and Scott Carslake have received attention for their sumptuous and elegant communications design. Since having founded the practice in 1999, De Leo and Carslake have received numerous Australian Graphic Design Association awards as well as prestigious clients, one of the hallmarks of success.

Voice’s clients have included the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Kelloggs and Spicers Paper. These kinds of clients don’t just walk through the door – when do you think people first stood up and took notice of your work?

We took the view from our inception in 1999 that everything we produced simply had to exceed our clients’ expectations and be the best possible quality. We wanted to establish a solid foundation by ensuring clients would come back to Voice again and again – and, more importantly, refer us to new clients. This has largely worked - excellence is its own reward and we always sought to excel.

In 2003, Voice published a reference guide for punctuation called Type it Write, which received a lot of public attention and picked up many international, national and local awards. Publishing this book had a tremendously positive effect for us because it displayed our creative execution while proving useful and showcasing Voice to a wider audience.

We maintained and built on this momentum, and we’ve found that producing quality work that is consistently in the public eye definitely benefits the studio’s creditability.

What drew you into design?

Anthony - I had a creative bent even as a child, and art and design were easily my strongest subjects at school, so I was certain that I wanted to pursue a creative career. Early on I was very aware of the prestige of the Visual Communications course at the Underdale campus of the University of South Australia and wanted to get into it. It was an extremely difficult course to be accepted for – there are about 900 applicants for the 20 places – so it became a challenge from a creative perspective to win a place. And it proved the best thing for me although it wasn’t until years into the course that I began to understand and really appreciate design.

Scott - In the beginning I was not really aware of what graphic design really was. My first true experience of being drawn to design was in my first lecture in design principles at the University of South Australia. I was blown away by the knowledge and

enthusiasm for design displayed by the lecturer Lyndon Whaite. I had total admiration

and knew I was in the right place.

What have you found to be the biggest hurdles in the development of your career as a

designer?

Scott and I came together as young directors of an unknown consultancy, so our first challenge was to build a reputation and win the confidence of the business community

that would form our client base. This isn’t something you can fast track and we had to work hard at building a presence in the marketplace over time.

Being a small studio required us to be multi-tasked. While our strength is designing and that’s what we enjoy, we found ourselves doing everything in those early years – the accounts, studio management, as well as finished artists. This has obviously been alleviated by the addition of staff, but it was another challenge in the early years. We knew however where we wanted to be as a business and we sought to align Voice with the right mix of clients across various sectors.

What combined experiences and skills do you and Scott Carslake bring together to make Voice happen?

Voice brought us together as an inexperienced design team – Scott had had 15 months’ experience with a local agency and I hadn’t worked for a studio, so our working knowledge of design as a business was extremely limited. But it was a meeting of like minds because both have a love of constantly developing new ways of communicating with alluring and engaging visuals.

For us the creative process is a cooperative one – and not only between ourselves. We sit down with colleagues and clients to dissect and probe the task and ask questions until our understanding is complete. We like to have an insight into the brief and the personalities of the people behind the brief. Since we started in 1999, what we have learnt, we have learnt together.

What design philosophies do you subscribe to?

As designers we believe nothing is without consequence so everything we touch/create must have purpose and function. At Voice, our fundamental philosophy is that the influence of authentic, definitive design can never be underestimated because it is often the unspoken voice that resonates the loudest.

bernabeifreeman

Rina Bernabei of bernabeifreeman has worked in design studios in Sydney and Milan, and her furniture design work has been exhibited and recognised internationally. Her lighting designs with bernabeifreeman explore the relationship between textiles and the interior environment. The idiosyncratic approach of bernabeifreeman to design has been the one of the keys to the firm’s success, with their definitive style easily recognisable.

bernabeifreeman’s clients have included the Eastern and Exchange Hotels. How did you initially attract clients like these?

We have been fortunate to receive considerable press from our exhibitions and product launches, this has given us a bit of a profile. Our work also is quite recognisable, so word of mouth has also been invaluable in getting jobs.

What drew you into design?

Design was just a natural progression from making as a child – toys, clothes etc... Industrial design is a really challenging world, as you constantly try to balance the philosophical concepts with commercial manufacturing and market demands. This challenge was very appealing.

What have you found to be the biggest hurdles in the development of your career as a designer?

Australia is a really hard place to be a furniture/lighting designer. The very limited manufacturing, and small market means that you will never be selling huge numbers here. It is actually a different model here to Europe. In Europe as a designer you would approach leading furniture/lighting manufacturers with concepts, they would produce and distribute the work for you, and you usually receive a royalty payment.

In Australia, as there are very few furniture/lighting manufacturers (even less that would take on a designer), you really need to take on the manufacturing role. This also requires you to take on the financial liabilities, distribution, packaging etc.... The designer in Australia takes on a design entrepreneur role. So one of the biggest hurdles is taking that financial risk, many designers who do this often leave design as they simply cannot afford to continue earning very little year after year.

What combined experiences and skills do you and Kelly Freeman bring together to make bernabeifreeman happen?

Both Kelly and myself have backgrounds in Industrial design, and work experience in lighting design. We also both teach design at the University of NSW, and I think this academic slant does help differentiate our work.

We also share a very similar visual understanding of things around us, so we tend to be drawn to exactly the same things. Kelly does seem to be more organised and analytical, and I am more of a dreamer. Together we somehow seem to finish each others sentences and sketches – it just works.

What design philosophies do you subscibe to?

To design products that are beyond function (although we do think this is very important). Our products must connect with the user on an emotional level, and in doing so we hope remain in their lives for quite some time. There are so many products out there. For a designer to bring out a new product it must be saying something new, something that speaks of now in terms of culture, manufacturing and materials.