Comes Cake used to be three friends that fooled around with cameras and adobe programs during college that quickly became something a bit more serious when people started paying for it. By the time they graduated they founded a company and started working from the living room in one of their homes. Now six years on, the team has grown to 12 people and have an office they very proudly decorate with framed works Comes Cake.
What’s your take on internships? (Do you take interns now?)
We love having interns. People that are currently studying or currently graduated come out of school with a very different take on things; they are a lot more eager to create, have less limitations and tend to be a lot more enthusiastic. On the other side they come out clueless of how the real world works; most of the time they are very talented students that have no idea how to make that talent profitable or how to apply it commercially, they learn that in our lab— everyone at the office has to present a photoshoot/visual project with a controlled budget, models and dates every two months. This process works as a lab because through Comes Cake we learn what we like, what others like without the fear of failing but the goal of learning.
What do you look for in a great client?
We like clients that like our previous work and want us to do something similar to what we have done before for them, but LOVE clients that are willing to take the risk of creating something new. A lot of the times clients don’t understand that there are risks in creating something new, it takes experimenting, time and patience, those clients that are willing to go through that with us are the ones we enjoy the most.
What qualities and skills to you look for in a graduate?
We have to feel related to their taste, be inclined to put forward proposals, have a critical eye, know how to dominate their technique and not have their technique dominate them, someone who´s not afraid of exploring and mixing resources, someone resourceful and finally someone who has no problem with talking about issues like gender, politics, religion while respecting everyone else views, we love talking about controversial issues and learning from different point of views.
What have been some of your biggest disasters and how have you learnt from it?
Comes Cake is trapped in creative limbo; galleries think we are way too commercial to be art and businesses think we´re too artistic to be commercial. We´ve learnt not to care, to keep creating regardless of what institutions or certain clients believe, we create ads for own brand and pay for our own art shows, so we don´t have to depend on everyone else´s approval.
Design and other creative areas are entering a less labeled future, were we don´t waste our time and limit our work trying to decipher if it´s art, or music or fashion or whatever other creative category we´ve come up with, we just acknowledge it as a creation.
Where do you think design is heading in the next five years and how will you adapt?
Design and other creative areas are entering a less labeled future, were we don´t waste our time and limit our work trying to decipher if it´s art, or music or fashion or whatever other creative category we´ve come up with, we just acknowledge it as a creation. Different areas will feed of each other, musicians doing fashion, fashion becoming furniture, websites acting as art installations letting them be and grow.
What is the design landscape like on your city and where do you fit in?
Bogotá, Colombia is where we’re currently located, a third world country where 95% of it’s population is very religious and extremely conservative. We consider ourselves to be very open minded and daring, and a lot of the times we want to push boundaries but clients in our city are very hard to convince and budgets are limited to do so, so we end up compromising. With time clients are giving us more and more creative freedom but we still have a long way to go. On the other hand the fact that others are so conservative have given us an edge, the competition isn’t very big so positioning ourselves in the market wasn’t that hard.
Whats on the cards professionally and personally in the next 12 months?
We’re growing every year, we want to do bigger things locally and globally, we have been creating for 7 years, we have worked with people in Europe and North America but we have grown, like most of the world, very curious about Asia.
What do you think the design community could do more of to give back?
Designers have the power to transmit ideas, good and bad, through their work, so that’s a huge responsibility. Getting involved in pro bono work supporting causes that seem important to the studio is important.
2018 for you in a sentence.
The most amazing year in our image lab, no doubt.
