Find a rich investor.
I’d go to a fine art school, I never trained as a graphic designer at a school.
I fell in love with design when I could execute my ideas to paper at a young age.
Any book from Unit Editions catalogue.
Jeremy Evans, Matt Kitto and Kirsty Dawn, all creatives leading design projects across many different commercial industries.
I don’t really crush on designers... in saying that I've always enjoyed the work coming from studios like Made Thought, Spin, Bunch Design, BVD, Kurppa Hosk, Manual and more.
Growing into a team so I could share my ideas with other intelligent cool people, then rebranding this year has been a huge highlight.
1. Design is hard, don’t underestimate how long design can take.
2. Human conversations solve things 10 times faster than computers.
3. Listen to your clients.
4. Don’t overcommit your studios production calendar.
5. Don’t stoop on quality to get work out the door, it's better to keep the bar high for studio satisfaction and staff moral.
The world is so populated with design, good and bad, invisible design is the best design, so less embellishment, more clever thinking.
Keep paying my designers wages! Aside from that push our studio and its work onto the world stage.
We try to offer two internships per year if we can fit them into our busy schedule. One in March for 1 month and 1 in August for 1 month. We judge whether we’d take someone on purely based on their online portfolio.
Learn the technical skills because the ideas should come naturally. Once you have both you become a product of desire for design directors.
Clean pragmatic work, nothing too trendy.
Across the board skills, strong conceptually with good technical skills to execute their ideas.
I didn’t study anywhere, my first job was doing packaging graphics for a New Zealand beverage company. It taught me a lot about print production and how to build vector art into nice print outcomes.
My role as creative director is to provide an environment where my designers feel comfortable to confidently express their ideas. I'm in charge of all communications from sales to important creative decision making process’s. I build relationships on a daily basis with new and existing clients and suppliers to solve creative problems. This takes up 65-70 hours worth of my time every week. I wear a lot of hats!
Our recent project for our new studio name was a very passionate project, limitless in budget, so very enjoyable to produce.
Spelling someones business name wrong when presenting their identity! Always check your work before presenting.
Professionally I'm extending my creative strategy skills, as our projects become large and detailed across more layers, the need for strategy and definition of design purpose is key. I'm also still trying to learn to spell better. Personally – I'm getting married to my best friend, she is my world outside of work. We’re also renovating our house a little.
Sharing design stories is intuitive and understanding how others work is nice, so I’d like to see as much of that as possible. Less tax from the government on the design industry would be good.
We are a very inhouse style studio, we take pride in trying to produce everything. We often collaborate with local based artist Elliot O Donnell, (TMD) the guy is so talented. We collaborate with Torque Productions a lot with high end fabrications.
I recently did a lecture at Whitecliffe School of Design to the 4th year students about how to prepare for the commercial world. I think all students need to be very focused moving into the commercial world, it's competitive out there.
1. Haha, I'm a pretty honest guy.
2. I've used the same font for a few logos...!
3. I've sold expensive design solutions to my good friends!
Bonus. I didn’t go to school! Whoops
The digital landscape is a monumental part of just about every large identity we do. Applying the same principles you would use for print design is creating a much simpler web environment. I'm enjoying where the web is heading.
I've worked on some shocking projects, it would be embarrassing to publicly list anything so I’ll just say I've sold my soul and integrity just to get a project over the line a few times. It's normal I think!