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IntroductionStudio 8 360

The Typographic Circle Presents: Studio 8

Studio 8 is an independent graphic design studio with a reputation for delivering intelligent and engaging creative solutions. Matt Willey and Zoë Bather set up the

studio in 2005 and have since worked with clients both large and small, in the UK and overseas, gaining a number of awards along the way. They produce a diverse range of work across multiple disciplines that includes editorial, exhibition, signage, corporate literature, websites, and brand identities. The Studio 8 team bring a lot of knowledge

and enthusiasm to every new project which is partly one of the reasons they have been selected to talk at our next talk event as part of the typographic circle.

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Matt Willey is a co-founder of Studio8 Design, a graphic design agency established three years ago in London. Studio8 produces mainly print

and editorial projects, and recent awards include its At This Rate booklet being named winner of the 2008 Design Week Award for editorial design.

This year the studio also received a citation for typographic excellence from the Type Directors Club in New York.

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How and when did you form Studio 8 and what does it do?

Zoë Bather and I set up Studio8 Design in 2005. Before that we were creative directors at Frost Design, London. Our work is predominantly print-based. We have a reputation for editorial work but we’ve been lucky that the work that has come our way has been so varied: website, identities, record covers, exhibition graphics and so on. We’ve just completed a commission to dress the ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall with life-size illustrated characters and furniture.

What aspects of design, or parts of the process, do you enjoy doing the most?

I wish there was a better word for it but it’s the ‘brainstorming’ part where we discuss ideas and responses to the brief. Coming up with a solution to the brief that works.

How would you describe your graphic style?

I slightly resist the idea of having a style. We work very hard on each project that we take on, and it’s about responding appropriately to that brief. We don’t have a style that we simply apply to a job.

Print seems to be thriving alongside several new forms of media. But do you think it is improving creatively?

I think it is improving. Clients aren’t being as frivolous with their print budgets, there’s much more focus on what the piece of print needs to do, why it’s being produced, how it will work in our experience at least, and I think that does improve the piece of print in the end. There’s a necessity for intelligence and thought in print. The new forms of media are largely without tactile qualities, and people still respond positively to print in that respect. I don’t think print is about to disappear it’s just that its role now, alongside things like the web, has to adjust in order to be relevant. Can Studio 8 remain a print-focused agency, in an increasingly interactive digital age? Yes, Everyone’s been talking about this in a sort of scaremongering way for as long as I can remember. There’s just been a transition in the sort of people that read magazines. Mags such as Esquire and Playboy don’t sell hundreds of thousands any more, they sell 30,000 or 40,000. You have to find a new and creative ways to attract consumers via print.. nothing beats the touch of paper and I can’t see that dying.

“We work very hard on each project that we take on, and it’s about responding

appropriately to that brief. We don’t have a style that we simply apply to a job.”

Are changes in the publishing industry changing your work as an art director or designer?

It’s very interesting how, for example, magazines and newspapers are responding to the web’s ability to provide instant, free and bang-up-to-date news; how newspapers are evolving to incorporate better colour printing; how magazines are coming up with new ways to encourage subscribers. But to be honest there has been very little change in how we work on magazines. We work on small niche titles that, for one reason or another, have limited budgets. I haven’t yet noticed any changes in the publishing industry that have had any direct effect on these titles. Similarly with the books we work on, the print budgets are rarely excessive but the aim is, as it always has been, to produce a visually pleasing and well thought-out book that people would like to own. The way we work on books and magazines hasn’t changed.

What do you like about British graphic design?

It’s great. There are so many good design studios producing so much wonderful stuff. All the design studios that I admire, the really creative ones, are small, which is a healthy

thing in my opinion. It’s not a foregone conclusion that the ‘big’ clients go to the ‘big’ agencies anymore.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned, or best piece of advice anyone gave you as a designer?

I’m not sure, I’m still learning. Studio8 Design is only three years old and we’re feeling our way. I remember in my first job out of college, I named a file I was working on ‘This is f*&king cr*p’, then I printed out the job with crop marks, which meant it printed the file name at the top, and then faxed (it was a while ago) it to the client, a shirt makers on Jermyn Street. It didn’t go down very well. That was an early lesson. With nearly all of Studio8’s work in the last three years coming from word of mouth, the team also feel it’s time to become a little more proactive, approaching clients with ideas. One thing that won’t change, though, is the team’s small size, which is just how Studio 8 likes it. It works because we have to be careful not to overstretch ourselves - so each client gets the attention they deserve and as a results we can build a strong relationship with out clients and make some nice work.

“I named a file I was working on ‘This is f*&king cr*p’, then I printed out the job

with crop marks, which meant it printed the file name at the top.”

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“It’s unusual for us. All the other mags we work on are art, literary or cultural - stuff we’re interested in. Plastique is

slightly odd as it’s not content I really care about. I eventually agreed to it, as long as we could do whatever we wanted.”

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Why print isn’t going away any time soon.

With a portfolio of regular magazine design work and a host of other projects on the boil, Studio 8 tells Ed Ricketts why print isn’t going away any time soon.

It’s a strong indication of the studio’s integrity that the publishers of Plastique - a quarterly fashion magazine - should not only offer them the job, but also be perfectly happy to allow them free reign with it. But then Willey and fellow co-founder Zoë Bather have earned it, having specialised in a diverse portfolio of print design projects for three years in their current incarnation. “Plastique’s design is immediate, and visceral, and plays around with typography,” Willey continues. “This is a rare opportunity. The inspiration was the first magazine I did with Vince Frost, called Zembla, which didn’t have any stylesheets and completely ignored the grids. Lots of magazines are too templated and can be designed somewhat lazily, due to time restraints, making them look really uninteresting. Plastique magazine is fairly free with no rules, which means it’s difficult because with each spread you have to start again - because of this it’s much more hard work.”

The pair met at Frost Design, set up by the eponymous Frost, and soon became creative directors there. With more and more work coming their way, they independently went freelance and eventually found themselves sharing the same studio space. Almost haphazardly, Studio 8 Design was born from a common love of the printed medium: “It was just what we did. We’d met a lot of people

and become known for doing that [at Frost Design],” explains Bather.

This inventive approach to editorial design is evident in each project. “For Plastique, we’ve created rubber stamps of the typeface we use called Rhode,” continues Willey. “We use it almost like letterpress, on features. If you haven’t got massive budgets you can’t commission your own fonts, so you have to think of other ways with type to be more creative.”

Studio 8 also regularly designs Map magazine, the quarterly international art magazine based in Scotland. In contrast to Plastique, each section of Map is pre-designed, based on a template that Willey, Bather and designer Matt Curtis created for the issue 11 refresh.

“The concept for the cover was designed on issue 1, which we created while still at Frost Design,” explains Bather. “After that we handed over the templates to Matthew Ball, who did the next nine issues. We specified the typefaces and how to use them. The idea is that the design of the features can respond to the content, which is a tricky balance to give to another designer.”

Every cover has a map-style image, with the masthead moving around as necessary and page numbers ‘mapping out’ the progress through the magazine. With the redesign, Studio 8 implemented a more templated approach, expanding on certain elements that had been there from the start.

“There’s the use of boxes for example, which is reflected from the cover,” Bather continues. “Now we use the boxes to hold things together at the front and back sections of the magazine, and the features in the middle are more expressive of their content,” she says.

“We’re currently halfway through designing the third

issue of Plastique magazine.”

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Astonishingly, the redesign took a mere two weeks. “What was nice was that we could do a sort of refresh rather than starting from scratch, which we normally do,” adds Curtis. “We could massage it and make it a bit more contemporary. Another good thing was that once the design was sent off we got it back within two weeks, which makes a change from seeing it six months later.”

In addition to these regular commitments, the studio takes on a variety of other semi-regular and one-off projects: brochures, record covers, editorial, posters, awareness campaigns and more. This, says Bather, suits their way of working perfectly, with the team all concentrating on a number of projects simultaneously. “Personally I prefer it to working on one job for, you know, the next six months. That would probably drive me crazy. I quite like juggling things. It’s a kind of organised chaos and everyone gets to experience the projects - there are no project managers here.”

Can Studio 8 remain a print-focused agency, though, in an increasingly interactive digital age? Is there a place for print in the world of the future? “Yes,” says Willey firmly. “Everyone’s been talking about this in a sort

of scaremongering way for as long as I can remember. There’s just been a transition in the sort of people that read magazines. Mags such as Esquire and Playboy don’t sell hundreds of thousands any more, they sell 30,000 or 40,000.

Bather agrees that while the sheer volume of print material may be going down, its quality is rising correspondingly. “I’m starting to notice clients asking: ‘What is this thing going to do and why do we need it?’ instead of just saying: ‘Okay, let’s print another brochure’,” she explains. Rather than simply duplicating material already available on their websites, clients are “thinking about things more and their briefs are becoming more focused.The briefs are more challenging - and there’s more pressure to produce innovative ideas and work.”

The Studio 8 team thrives under pressure, particularly the stress of trying something new, and one of Bather’s favourite projects provided plenty of that. Commissioned by a charity scheme called JoinedUpDesignForSchools, which puts designers with students and schools across the country.

“One of our projects was with Abbeydale Grange School in Sheffield,” Bather explains. “They seemed to be blamed whenever anything bad happened in the area, and they thought this was quite unfair. So we rebranded them.

A similar project on which they’re still working is with Dunraven school in Streatham, which wanted to produce a new school magazine that they could put together as students. The result was Zero magazine, with ideas produced by 20 pupils aged 11-15. “The students set the brief, and we presented the ideas to them,” says Bather. “They were pretty blunt about what they did and didn’t like!

One extra difficulty was that the magazine design had to be reproducible by the kids for later issues, none of whom had had any graphic design training. “It was like Press Gang - they made the mag in a day. That was great because

it got us out the studio. It meant we worked with a totally different sort of client - and it was hard, because it had to work for them.”

In the near future at least, Studio 8’s output looks set to remain in the print world. Both Willey and Bather, though, would like to get involved in other areas. Bather says she’s “really envious” of art created in situ, with which the public can interact - citing Why Not Associate’s Cursing Stone projects as a perfect example. On a similar note, Willey adds:

With nearly all of their work in the last three years coming from word of mouth, the pair also feel it’s time to become a little more proactive, approaching clients with ideas. One thing that won’t change, though, is the team’s small size, which is just how Studio 8 likes it. “I think most of the design studios in London at the moment are moving the same way, having a three or four person team,” says Matt. “It works because we have to be careful not to overstretch ourselves - so each client gets the attention they deserve.”

“But there are more magazines than you can count, and they appeal to niche audiences. It’s

interesting because people become more inventive, especially when it comes to getting readers

to subscribe, such as by producing subscriber-only covers.”

“I really love Paula Scher’s work with signage on buildings.”

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Photofit: Self-portraits

A project by Giles Revell & Matt Willey Interviews by Philip Olterman

There are no photos in circulation of Jacques Penry, the man who invented the Photofit, but from what he wrote in his books, you would guess that he might have looked a bit suspicious. A photographer by trade, the Frenchman had been fascinated by facial topography as early as the 1930s, when he published his magnus opus The Face of Man. There was, Penry claimed in it, a direct link between any human’s physique and their personality: philosophers, for example, would show a marked development of the lower cheek muscles, while idiots and simpletons would invariably possess a markedly receding forehead. Following the Penry-method of facial classification, he claimed, one could cleanse society of “criminals, mental deficits, neurasthenics and vocational misfits.” Perhaps unaware of the supremacist overtones of it’s creator’s early musings, Scotland Yard gave the Photofit kit a go in 1970. The kits come in wooden boxes, containing narrow paper strips with various facial features and an index listing the contents: eyes, noses, mouths, haircuts, chins, roughly 40 in each category. There are transparencies for add-ons, such as glasses, facial hairs or wrinkles, and a frame on which the individual parts can be assembled. The first Photofit portrait of a British suspect was broadcast on 22nd of October 1970, in connection with the murder of James Cameron in Islington, London. Surprisingly, it came up with the goods: the image jogged a shop

assistant’s memory and led to the arrest of John Earnest Bennett in Nottingham. Soon though, policemen found that Photofit portraits of suspects often looked nothing like the criminals that were eventually caught: the Penry-method clearly had its limits. In 1988, the Met introduced computer programs for facial profiling (“E-fits”) and Photofit kits across the country were hurled onto rubbish heaps.

Penry’s system might have been inaccurate and ideologically dubious, but it has qualities that appealed to us when we came up with this project. Photofit is tactile: you can touch the individual parts with your own hands and move them about until things click into place – it’s like creating a puzzle. And it is immediate: there is no person standing between you and the final picture. We managed to track down a male and female kit from a Police Museum in Kent and invited a number of people to assemble their own Photofit self-portrait in Giles’ studio in Clerkenwell. The end result, we think, is curious. Each portrait tells a story: it speaks of the hang-ups, insecurities and vanities we all have about our own appearance. They hint at how deceptive our relationship with our self-image can be. Jacques Penry claimed that he could deduce a person’s character from their face in an instant. If nothing else, we hope that this project shows how the connection between persona and personality is a lot more complex than that.

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I don’t look at my face that often, so I found the process of assembling my face quite challenging in the end. I definitely found that I got slightly obsessive about it. I am perfectionist, and I like to get things right. So that Bobby Dazzler haircut is a bit irritating. I do both cosmetic and reconstructive surgery on the face – but I don’t really see them as two different operations, more like two extremes on the same spectrum.The statistics for cosmetic surgery are quite phenomenal – there are massive increases year on year. Sometimes it can have massive psychological benefits. In other cases people think that surgery is the key that will unlock their problem but it isn’t. If we do reconstructive surgery, we will make sure that we have photographs in order to know what the person looked like before he had the accident. I once had a patient who was involved in quite a severe road traffic accident which had impacted on his

cheek, but also nearly ripped off his nose. We put that all back together in an emergency operation. Only when we looked at old photos afterwards did we realise that we had given him a straighter nose than he used to have. Luckily he was quite happy with the result in the end. In roughly a year’s time, I will be the first surgeon to perform a full face transplant in the UK. The greatest misconception among the general public, and even among some of my colleagues, is that there will be an identity transfer following a facial transplant. It’s the Face/Off syndrome: donors are worried that if they donate the facial tissue of a loved one, they might one day run into a stranger walking down the street with their partner’s face. In reality it’s not like that at all: the identity of your face is dominated by the bone structure and the muscles underneath the skin, rather than the colour or condition of the skin tissue on the surface.

I have to admit that I struggled to put together my self-portrait. I smile a lot, so I find it hard to visualise my face looking serious. I remember these old-style identikits well, because I joined the Facial Imaging Team just as they were phasing them out – nowadays we use comput-ers to create profiles of suspects. It is still a composite system, but the difference is that you can select features within the context of a face and alter them individually at the witness’s direction, using programmes like Photoshop. I deal with minor to major crimes. Sometimes people have seen the suspect for a split second. Sometimes the suspect we are trying to identify has committed fraud at his workplace and will have had colleagues who saw him or her every day. What’s surprising is that people sometimes find it harder to put the composite together if they think they know the face really well. Many victims of burglaries are old people. Often, they can remember someone they met 50 years ago,

but not the person who robbed them six hours before our interview. In other cases, you get what is called ‘weapon focus’: the victim will focus on the gun, and not recall the face of the robber at all. It’s the same effect as a disguise. If there is something unusual about a face, people will remember it. The problem is that most criminals look perfectly normal. My job is not to create a portrait that is 100% accurate – I just need a likeness, something that makes them recognisable. All I need is one person in a million to recognise the composite – it might just be the that person who drinks in the same pub as them. Recognition is a very powerful and complex mechanism in our brain. We pick it up right from birth, but I think we never really understand it fully

Anne ParryPolice artist

Peter Butler Plastic Surgeon

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Studio8 Design is an award-winning independent graphic design studio with a reputation for delivering intelligent and engaging creative

solutions. Based in central London, Studio8 was established in 2005 by Matt Willey and Zoë Bather. Working with clients both large and small, in the UK and overseas, Studio8 produces a diverse range of work that includes editorial, exhibition, signage, websites, and brand identities.

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Supplement Assembled By Elliot Mckellar. Interviews And Imagery Sourced From The Studio 8 Website and other online resources.