Studio 8 - supplement

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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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Interview with Matt Willey

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.

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. 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.

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.

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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.

“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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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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Angus Hyland

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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 look-ing 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 computers to create profiles of suspects. It is still a com-posite 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 ma-jor 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 remem-ber 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, corporate literature, websites, and brand identities.

Find out more about the event at http://www.typocircle.com/events/studio-8/.

Non-Member tickets go on sale 13 May 12.

Become a Typo Circle member The benefits to all members are

_advance email alerts and booking for upcoming events_access to members-only events

_discounts with selected sponsors_discounted tickets for our events: £10 per ticket

_a free copy of the award-winning Circular magazineYou can now purchase membership online at http://www.typo-

circle.com/membership/.

Event InfoPlease note that you MUST purchase a ticket online prior to the

event to gain entrance. We do not accept cheques or payment on the door anymore.

Once your booking is confirmed you will receive an eTicket. Please print this out and bring it with you to the event. Each at-

tendee will need to show their ticket to gain entrace to the event. If you are a member you will be asked to show your membership

card as well.

Studio 8 05.13.12

Circular Supplement First Edition W/ Studio 8

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