B) Does Peter and Paul have a motto?
L) That's funny because we do but we're trying to shape up at the minute exactly what it means. The thing we always talk about is that we call ourselves idea makers, we're bringing in everyone's opinions and what they think it means and we're trying to identify common themes that everybody believes. But to me I think my own personal perspective is that idea making splits into two different meanings. The idea of creating a conceptual piece of work is really important from the standpoint that nobody really gives a shit about what we create and noone cares about it. People don't want to see this thing that we're trying to sell. Be it a campaign for a music festival or an identity for a product etc. Nobody really cares so the only way I feel to cut through that distraction there is is to create something that has a very strong concept in there and demands attention. So that's the idea part. The maker part for us is that we all come from a creative background and the making part is to try and translate the idea that gets through the distraction and start making it quite early with quite an industrious sort of outlook. In our studio we all work really hard and I think that it's quite a Yorkshire type quality to want to work hard, but it's about not letting the idea that phase of the work live in the strategy but getting to making it early because making is the best way to test an idea and see if it works. So idea making is the motto. How we all interpret that at the moment (as a studio) may be a little different from person to person but we're doing a piece of work at the moment to understand how we all see that.
B) How would you describe your approach to design?
L) A conceptual thinking and the most important thing that we do everyday is that whatever we make has got to stay with whoever is looking at it so I think that that has always been the centre of everything we've ever done. It drives quite a different approach to what the output is because if I go this absolutely has to be a film about a guy carving a piece of stone then that has to be what drives the output. Whereas if it's a book that's a very different output. So what I think you get with a conceptual starting point is a very diverse way of making.
B) Is there any kind of brief or project that you enjoy working on the most?
L) For me personally, I think the projects that I've enjoyed most are the ones that have posed a number of challenges at the first stage which we've managed to almost give answers to with a piece of creative. That can be an ad campaign or it might be a piece of brand identity work. With brand identity work it differs really as it can either be massive or small. Someone can come to you and be like we need a new logo and I've got a budget to do that and someone can come to you and be like we've lost or way a bit and we need to rebrand but we also need to reposition as well and it's those slightly bigger projects that I like more because what you find is you get involved in a project quite a lot further back than you would do if you were just designing a logo. So more design thinking has to happen because you have to challenge how people see the organisation and how they see themselves. And the piece of design you give back to them has to answer those questions. They're the briefs that I think we do best at called 'end-to-end' where the starting point really is the start and the piece of Graphic Design that happens at the end is the full picture. Anything that has a smaller budget or less time frame than that we sort of slot into the middle. They can be really good but you never really feel like you've gone through a completed piece of work.
B) Is there anything tat you're currently fascinated by and how is that feeding into your work?
L) This will probably be different for everyone again but the thing for us is that we all kind of act like we're part owners, even though we're not, which kind of comes from not having a massive team, but everyone is interested in different things. Personally, in recent years, I've gotten quite interested in weirdly behavioral psychology, and understanding what drives what people do and why people do it. There are different things which are happening in your mind which kind of drive decisions be it a logical one or quite an instinctive one so there's all that kind of thing which has fed the work in like a simpler work as to say will that work? will that actually reach the people it is supposed to reach and does it speak to them at all? And it's not always very easy to get that right especially when you're trying to manage that against quite a conceptual pice of delivery. But for me I think the thing that I've become quite interested in is the context of the work, who it's for, what they're thinking, what do we want them to think, and how can we change that? And that can be down to anything really from just something as simple as trying to brand somebody and what do they want to do with that? It's the understanding about what drives decision making.
B) Well that's a major part of graphic design in the sense that you're never designing for yourself you're always designing for someone else so it's important to have an understanding of what they're thinking.
L) Yeah and that's the major dichotomy of that because you are designing for someone else but you are kind of doing it for yourself aswell. It is a piece of your output which is where it can become difficult sometimes when you're showing someone a pice of your work and they don't like it. Because it's a part of you and you've put yourself into it, you've made the decision and you think it's right and sometimes you do get people coming and saying I don't like it, it's not right for us and that's a bit of you. Alan Fletcher's mantra was design you do for other people, and art you do for yourself. And I think that's probably right really and I got into design because I needed the brief to start thinking. I was like not somebody who could self direct because it's that trigger point of the brief which drives what I do. I need something to answer or a problem to solve. The formal creation of design, eg. colour, binding stock, we've been around long enough to achieve that so it's making us think outside of those areas. It's not just the physical aspect, it's how it's going to have an emotional aspect. even with digital design it's how to create an emotive experience and response on screen. Like weirdly a 2 year old will instinctively know how to work an iPhone within a few seconds, and I think that's because the design of it is connected to an emotive thing. So when we come to design websites they're like interactive online experiences. Really good ones make you want to stay there, it's not just about the home page and menu etc. it's about wanting to walk around it.
B) Can you remember the first images or events that made you think about becoming a Graphic Designer?
L) Yeah definitely. It was because when I was a kid I was obsessed with drawing and it was the only thing I could do well really. I really loved comics and things like that really and I was obsessed with this comic book called Calvin and hobbs. And I used to really love the way it was drawn and get really into it and kind of try to find out what pens and stuff the guy who drew it used and try and emulate that and I think it grew from that. Then you get to school and arts the only subject you really like and then you end up on graphic design course whereas really I didn't know what graphic design was, but I knew I wanted to do something creative but it was definitely that early love of drawing. I loved Garfield and comic strips and I loved cartoons, hated anything with people or live action in but loved the way things were drawn. Because you read these interviews sometimes with designers and you often get that thing where they say that they were really into record sleeves and I'm just sometimes think what a load of bollocks! I think it's like a cool thing to say but you were probably just drawing Garfield like everybody else was. I just don't believe it. I used to record things on VHS and then pause a scene that I liked and sit and redraw the scene. And that's the thing that got me into it. When I was 16 in college I think I began to realise that drawing and graphic design wasn't the same thing and I had a really inspirational tutor who was from a contemporary art background who got us more interested in that and how to use photography and how to use image and word together. And having moments of thinking to yourself 'God I don't understand this' but it was from that point that she was getting us to open up to more contemporary conceptual ways of thinking that after that then you go to university and then you start by drawing but eventually you become to realise that it's ypur style of drawing isn't going to be appropriate for everything. Like if I was an illustrator it would be totally different but 90% of the things you're gonna have to do it won't be appropriate. That's quite a big epiphany when you're 17.
B) What opportunities do you think Sheffield presents to young designers?
L) Not a lot. I think there are a lot of design studios I think that not all of them are great. I think as a city it's probably one of the quieter ones. You're more likely to find more in Manchester and Leeds. You're certainly going to find tonnes more in London but the Sheffield scene as I know is quite a shallow pond and there's not many fish in it. I only know a handful of agencies really. There may be more that I don't know of but I think it's like personal taste but it may be do you want opportunities that are really great opportunities or do you want ones that are just there because they're there? Because Sheffield has designers Republic and the heritage that has come from that and then it's got like us, Cafeteria, Field, Dust and there's some big ones like J wing, Uber and places like that but certainly it's not Manchester who have advertising agencies, proper ones and they've got small design studio's aswell. We don't really have that here. a lot of the good designers here are freelancers but there's not the studios where yo can just go and hoover up a job.
B) What do you hope for Sheffield as a city in the future?
L) I think that Sheffield as a city, from being here for 15years, I feel like a lot of people talking about Sheffield and how it hasn't yet reached it's potential. I feel like sheffield has an identity but doesn't know what the good parts of it really are. Not talking about city branding, I don't really think that that works, but I think that Sheffield is a good city to be in but I think that it feels like it's not really realising it's potential. I don't know what that would be so I don't really know what the hopes of that are but everything would have to change, infastructure. Because if you were gonna brand Sheffield, then the centre of it would have to come from what's actually happening and so like whatever we think we are as a city, being something good, then really the infrastructure has to support that. What would be amazing is if we were really progressive as a city. It's said a lot that we're the greenest city in England, so why don't we have a really amazing electric run bus service then or buildings that aren't highrise and are more something at one with the landscape, (well we don't have that because it wouldn't be very good economically and we need to make money) but that's the thing for me that when we have an idea about what the city is but the nucleus isn't there. And that comes at all sorts of levels like the council. If you were to flatten the whole of Sheffield and start again you wouldn't build it how it's built. Fargate at 7 o'clock on a Sunday evening is desolate. If you go down any other main high street in any other major city there are people everywhere. There's just no action there. You've got the Moor and Fargate and it's really badly planned out. It feels like a Camel (a horse that's designed by committee) Sheffield's a bit like that for me, there's no vision. I would like the city to appear more progressive but the work that would have to happen for that would cost billions and billions of pounds.
B) Where id your favourite place to go in Sheffield for inspiration?
L) It's probably more the surrounding area like the Peak District. Culturally Sheffield is a bit behind other cities as well like there's no amazing art gallery because Sigh Gallery and Millennium Gallery are never as good as you're hoping them to be. The theatre is really good as well but do you ever really get as inspired by going to those places as you do when you go to Lady bower reservoir or somewhere like that? The different experience is what 'inspires' you rather than inspires you to do design. Not being in an environment where you're having to make an opinion about art can be more beneficial. so again sheffield isn't really that inspiring. You go to the places that you like eat and drink but I wouldn't call them inspirational and then gigs and stuff like that but probably the surrounding area is a bit better for that then what the city delivers.
B) What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out?
L) I think that when you very first start out you think you're kind of slightly in love with the idea of being a designer. I think you probably think it's a slightly different thing to what it is like a bit more glamorous, but I don't know really because it's so easy to forget. You know like when you meet yourself about 10 years ago in your mind you think you're the same person but if I was to meet myself when I was 24 I'd be quite surprised about the things that I don't know. But I just can't remember what those things are. I think probably a better awareness of the whole process and to not get so hung up on the output. But maybe you have to be dead into the final output when you're younger as otherwise you might make a load of really shit work and not have your eye on the ball. I think that I wish I'd pursued a bit more illustration work when I was younger and had that as a bit more of a thing that I'd done and also normalise and understand a bit more about just how big the world of being a designer was because I think I would have been a bit more fluid and open to learning about new things and trying new things.
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