After the Christmas break, Matt managed to take time out of his schedule and reply to my questions. His answers are very in depth and it's clear he's put a lot of time and effort into this.
Our first project of the year was to create a leaflet explaining -the- design process, and it became apparent that everyone has their own unique process. Where do you start when receiving a new brief? What do you feel is the most important stage?
The most important first stage is establishing a commercial relationship. By which I mean agreeing a project fee and a scope of work. This usually takes place before any brief is written, but it's the most important first step. To embark on any project without an agreed budget, timeframe, expectations and scope would be bonkers.
We usually break our projects down into four distinct stages: discover, define, design and deliver. Discover is the first step: information gathering. This could include receiving a client brief, and would also include a meeting with the client, some desk research and fact finding, perhaps a site visit or field trip if that's relevant to the brief (i.e. if you were designing an exhibition, you'd want to make sure that you'd actually been to the space in which the exhibition is to be held). We'd be seeking to arm ourselves with as much information about the client and their project as we possibly could.
Then the Define stage is to take this information and to distil it into a creative brief. This will usually contain elements of the client brief, but may also challenge that brief if, through the Discover stage, we've identified something which allows us to think differently about the brief. Crucially, the output of this stage is a final creative brief that everyone can agree on: it will inspire the designers to do great work and will form a reference point to which we and the client refer back to throughout the project. Often, design can be very subjective ("I don't like it"). With a good creative brief, we and the client have something non-subjective to refer back to: we can ask ourselves "does it answer the brief?".
NB: a good creative brief includes a number of important sections:
Purpose: Why are we doing this?
People: Who is involved?
Standards: What do we need to be aware of?
Results: What will be delivered?
In our Define stage, we'd want to ensure that our brief contains information to cover all of these sections.
Then the creative fun can begin: initial concept development. Thinking, sketching, talking, planning. Crucially, much of the initial creative stage takes place way from the computer. We're interested in ideas above style. Good thinking comes before good Mac skills and styling.
What made you want to become a designer? Was it an ambition from a young age?
I went to the University of Northumbria thinking that I wanted to be an illustrator, over and above a designer. I was always good at drawing, loved comics and illustration and I did Art at A-level. But skipped the post-A-level foundation year as I was too impatient to get to Uni! This worked out well in the end (I got a first class Graphic Design BA as well as a D&AD Student Gold), but it did mean that lots of people on the course knew a lot more about design than I did! In retrospect, I did have an awareness of design before going to Uni. For example, through an interest in music, I knew that my favourite record covers were designed by Peter Saville and Vaughn Oliver. But because design didn't feature in my A-level (it wasn't offered back then), I still saw illustration as my main area. The Uni course very quickly changed my mind and I grew to love design almost straight away. That said, I do still dabble in illustration: I write and draw comic strips for the weekly kids' comic The Phoenix in my spare time.
Looking on your website, the Sabre identity you produced really caught my eye. What was your inspiration behind it?
Interesting that Sabre caught your eye. It's one of my least favourite jobs on the site (though there's nothing on there than I'm not proud of to some degree). Sabre was a good challenge in that it was a new tech start-up: a group of three young entrepreneurs had an app that they'd developed and a little bit of budget for us to help them come up with a name and a visual identity. The name took a long time to develop – naming is always difficult in my experience – but the visual identity was relatively smooth. As the primary function of the brand was as an app to be used on phones, we wanted to design something that worked at small sizes, felt simple and easy to understand. The very stylised 'S' shape symbol was derived from the imaginary 'swoosh' of a sabre through the air. Picture Zorro and you'll get the idea. We also came up with the streamline 'One step ahead', which articulated their offer really well.
Do you think having a distinguishable style, or being a flexible designer has the advantage?
People generally say that our work is simple, clear and effective. So you could say that there's an element of a consistent style or approach there. However, we try to approach every project on its own terms and create work that's right for that client and theiraudience. Some design businesses have a very deliberately identifiable style and clients go to them to 'buy' that style: those design business tend to be more aesthetically/stylistically driven. We tend to be more conceptually driven – we're an ideas business first and foremost – so the idea drives the aesthetic. Which means that the output can be very varied in the way it looks. I think it's better to be flexible, ultimately: as a designer, part of your job is to solve your clients design problem. If you have a very fixed style, you're using a limited palette to solve that problem. It's worth noting that in other areas of the creative industry, it is beneficial to have a distinguishable style: illustrators and photographers, for example, survive on having a style that people recognise and want to use.
What advice would you give your younger self as you were starting out in industry?
Work for a wide variety of employers: from small, boutique studios doing small, well-crafted design jobs right through to big branding studios working on large corporate projects. It's important to see how places of different sizes work. I only ever really worked for the former type of design business which meant that when I was a partner at a company called 300million and we had a team of 25 people, it was the biggest design business I'd ever been part of! I also saw people setting up their own studios at quite an early stage: I'd always say that you should hold on, work for a variety of people, learn from colleagues (and clients) and make mistakes on a salary, rather than within your own business. Then take all of that knowledge and experience and set up on your own. Oh, and maybe travel and work in design overseas for a spell. It's good experience if you can do it.
At the end of this interview, I must produce a creative report based on your answers (which could be done in any way I want). How would you go about this?
Hmmm. That's your challenge! Maybe start with that creative brief (see above). It's worth thinking about the final deliverable in as broad a way as possible. It could be a beautiful piece of print. But it could be a short animation. Or a box of dos/don'ts cards. Good luck!
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