ShellsuitZombie Magazine Issue 6 by ShellsuitZombie

THREE YEARS AGO A FRESH BUNCH OF CREATIVE GRADS STEPPED OUT INTO ‘THE REAL WORLD’ AND REALISED THEY HAD NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT THEY WERE DOING. AND GUESS WHAT? THAT STILL HASN’T CHANGED. THERE IS NO RULEBOOK FOR “HOW TO MAKE IT IN THE CREATIVE INDUSTRY”, AND ANYONE CLAIMING TO HAVE WRITTEN ONE IS FULL OF SHIT. THERE’S NO RIGHT OR WRONG WAY OF DOING ANYTHING. YOU’VE HEARD IT A MILLION TIMES, BUT THE ONLY WAY YOU’LL EVER GET TO WHERE YOU WANT TO BE IS BY TRYING AND LEARNING. EVEN PEOPLE AT THE TOP OF THEIR GAME, THOSE PEOPLE YOU LOOK UP TO, HAD TO MAKE IT UP ALONG THE WAY. CHANCES ARE THEY’RE STILL MAKING IT UP RIGHT NOW. WE WANT TO EXPLORE WHAT IT MEANS TO TRY, SUCCEED, FAIL, LAUGH, CRY, HAVE AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OR THREE AND FIGURE OUT WHAT JUST HAPPENED. NONE OF US HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT WE’RE DOING OR WHERE TO GO NEXT AND THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING. THERE IS NO PLAN. WE’RE ALL STILL LEARNING EVERY DAY. LET’S CELEBRATE THAT.

What is a shelled suits zombies? For years, we’ve tried to come up with a paragraph to explain what we are. Grad collective? Creative studio? Advice service? Weirdo gang? Band of mavericks roaming the infinite plains of the Sahara desert? It really doesn’t matter. Each project is a new lesson; a new adventure. ShellsuitZombie has been going since 2008, and we’ve done workshops, talks, parties, exhibitions, print magazines and a blog. But defining what we are and what we do limits what we are capable of, which is anything. We’ve been running SSZ since 2012; we’re a bunch of creatives who are still figuring things out, and having a bloody great time doing so. And if we can do it, anyone can.

What’s in the mag then? Free Hype – Alex Daish

Torn – Ralph Jones

Oh fuck, it’s 2007 – Daniel Humphry

Kate Moross interview – Sam Ailey

New (1) – Tara John & Zuleika Sedgley

Photo essay: Better halves – Nathan Perkins & Neha Shah

Take the red pill – Thea Thunderstone

It’s just a job – Gemma Germains

New blood, sweat and tears – Kady Potter

Fail your dreams – Amy Cecilia Leigh

Doing it yourself – Jay Chaudhri

So simple. So complicated – Theo Inglis

The five stages of coffee – Ash Billinghay

Sponsors

Visual feature: I still don’t know what I’m drawing

Career promiscuity – Sean Gilbert

I still don’t know what I’m doing – Naresh Ramchandani

Fraudulently creative – Brenda Wong

Andrew and Jonny interview – Alex Vissaridis

Who’s responsible for this?

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Free Hype Words // Alex Daish, Founder, Free Hype Illustration // Christina Button

“Is this a joke? Surely an industry that prides itself on prescience realises this is shortsighted?” I’d received my third reply from an agency willing to give me an internship but only pay for my expenses. My quest to get into advertising had hit a dead end. I had to pay rent next year and landlords don’t accept used train tickets and leftover sandwiches. I was angry that something could be so obviously flawed. Anyone with parents living in London who could afford to subsidise their child’s internships would have a huge step up in an already 4

predominantly white, middle-class industry—one that supposedly craved diversity. The system was broken. Practicality meant I had to give up on the dream of a summer in the industry. Instead, I managed to get work in a local pub. It was there, midway through pulling a pint, that I remembered something from an otherwise bleary freshers’ week. “We constantly have opportunities to work with dozens of charities, and if none of them suit, we love to support students in developing their own volunteering projects.”

I distinctly remembered rolling my eyes at John from the university’s Volunteering Services Unit (VSU) at the time, but now he had given me an idea. Why work for free for huge companies when you could volunteer your creative skills to small charities in need? Why don’t we just start our own agency? A few emails later and I found myself sitting behind a foldout table draped in fabric with the words FREE HYPE spray painted on it. Competing for attention next to charities people had actually heard of, my now-cringeworthy slogan “Don’t make tea, make a difference” somehow recruited a motley crew of filmmakers, designers and writers willing to give the idea a stab. The VSU agreed to add our details to their next mailout to charities. We offered creative services to anyone that needed them—for free. My inbox was never the same again. Free Hype was swamped with demand. At the end of the first year, I must have completed something like 300 hours of work. Running what was effectively a pro-bono creative agency forced me to learn how to manage my time—and fast. The idea had caught on though. Our first big campaign, involving the first and last stop motion animation I will ever make, helped an African medical training charity raise in just two weeks what they would normally raise in a year. After rebranding a local charity and overhauling their website, we were even awarded a £1000 grant from a certain over-generous international bank. The summer following Free Hype’s inception was amazing. My experience developing Free Hype and regularly cracking briefs for real clients meant agency assessment days were a breeze by comparison. I spent my days soaking up learnings at digital agency Rufus

Leonard, and my nights filling out the paperwork necessary to transition Free Hype from volunteering project to an official student society. Third year’s inevitable workload meant I had to take a slight back seat from Free Hype, but others stepped in and continued to grow our little collective. During interviews, all I was ever asked about was Free Hype. My three-year degree a mere footnote in conversations. Running Free Hype had inadvertently been entrepreneurial, charitable and creative; all those things that employers jizz their pants about. As I began working full-time at a charity fundraising tech startup founded by ex-agency folk, I continued to manage Free Hype from afar. When the startup failed (as startups sometimes do), Free Hype proved of interest to the Managing Director of a small digital studio— herself interested in working with more charities—and I was quickly accepted into a junior role. Now, a year after graduating, I will soon be joining AKQA, having never worked an unpaid internship. Free Hype continues to raise thousands of pounds for those in need while fellow volunteers continue to join agencies and production companies great and small. London is becoming increasingly toxic to anyone trying to be creative. However, finding a job is not impossible as long as you get out of your comfort zone and make a lot of noise. Give as much as you can, and you will always receive more in kind. You will never learn as fast as when you have something to lose or people to disappoint. The hardest part is often the beginning, but don’t wait for other people. If you start something yourself, others will join.

Torn Words // Ralph Jones, Journalist & comedy writer Illustration // Daniel Jamie Williams

I feel increasingly certain these days that I was born with two brains. I don’t mean I’m very intelligent; in fact, that there’s solid evidence to suggest I’m not. I mean that I am forever torn between the two creative disciplines in which I am immersed; journalism and comedy. As recently as two years ago I would have written those words in a different order. This evening, however, my finger was poised over the letter ‘j’ on the keyboard before I could do anything about it. This is a welcome development but also one that I am struggling to deal with. I don’t think I’m alone in yearning to be a polymath. The idea of being proficient in a wide range of disciplines is something that appeals to tons of people. Why wouldn’t it? What worries me is that I don’t think like sensible people. Sensible people realise that the polymath dream is just that, a dream, and that life might instead be best spent becoming great at one specific thing. I, on the other hand, want to have it all. I want to have my cake, eat it, then find out how to bake the cake so that I can bake it then eat it again. Quite why I am like this remains a mystery to me. Probably something to do with being an irritating only child. My first love was comedy. I fell utterly, madly in love with it about the time I became a teenager. To this day there is nothing that makes me as blissfully happy as watching comedy or being on stage and making an audience laugh. Even though comedy has never been my job, for over a decade I didn’t just think that comedy defined me, I knew it – it was woven into me. I was certain that there was nothing I would rather 6

be doing. Nothing from which I could possibly get more joy. But in 2012 this all started to change. A new passion of mine was emerging: journalism. This all began to take shape because of one man: celebrated author, critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens. Having learned of his death in December 2011, I sought out and became profoundly affected by his work. I found myself wanting to write at length about a lot of the issues Hitchens focused on: religion, free speech and language (especially the way language is used by those in power). On November 3, 2012 I had my first significant piece of work published: a New Statesman article about the need to publicly identify and mock those who hold bigoted opinions (in this case about gay rights). This piece was shared by Tim Minchin and Derren Brown among other people, and surpassed all of my expectations. It was, after all, virtually the first piece of journalism I had ever published anywhere. I was hooked. In the next few months, my plans to undertake a PGCE gave way to a desire to become qualified as a journalist. I began to do less comedy and started to write and read more articles. Of course, as I became more immersed in the world of journalism, this pattern only increased. I became a professional writer after completing my MA – in a strange coincidence, it turned out to be exactly two years after the New Statesman piece. Becoming a full-time writer meant that journalism took centre stage in a way that it never had before.

But this new direction does not mean I love comedy any less; and herein lies the problem. Will one passion have to give way to the other? For how long will I be able to keep the two running side by side? With one foot planted in each sector, it feels as though it must be only a matter of time before I fall down an enormous ravine of my own making. One of the reasons I decided to channel my writing skills into journalism over comedy was that it is a great deal easier to make a living as a journalist. This makes the profession seem to me more appealing as well as more addictive: there is an instant reward for one’s work, not necessarily true of comedians at the beginning of their career. There are, however, aspects of comedy that I wouldn’t give up for journalism: the adrenaline inherent in live performance is more immediate and tangible than the pleasures to be found in writing for the page or screen. I feel as though this internal conflict is unusual because I don’t want either of the objects of my affection to be relegated to the position of hobby. I am happy considering football and TV as hobbies but where writing is

concerned I become fixated: I want to throw everything I have into it. But is it possible to throw everything you have into two different things? Can’t you only be throwing 50% into each? My worry is that, instead of being good at both, I become good at neither – mediocre at everything. Polymaths aren’t just people who do a wide variety of things; they do actually have to be good at them. I think that, for myself and for anyone invested in the creative industries, I would recommend continuing with two (or more) of your passions for as long as you possibly can. One career path might win out, for practical or sentimental reasons. But – and personally this is my ambition – it might turn out that a conventional career path doesn’t exist: pursuing both options at the same time may be eminently possible. A careers adviser wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but if it is impossible to choose between the two, go ahead, do them both, and try as hard as you can to get the best of both worlds.

Oh fuck, it’s 2007 Words // Daniel Humphry, Editor, Off Life Illustration // Raj Dhunna

Graduation. Financial Crisis. Temp Jobs. For anyone who’s around my age (28 if you’re asking) and who wasn’t otherwise connected, that was pretty much the start of your creative career. We came bounding out of colleges and universities, ideas in our heads – only to find internships with no jobs at the end and freelance rates that wouldn’t feed an anorexic paperclip. Seriously, I was once offered £15 for a 4,000 word article in an established, national magazine. And I took it. Regional newspapers were paying experienced journalists in pats on the back and every temp agency was packed with out-of-work creatives. It should have been fucking depressing. At times it was. But it was also rife with opportunity. Because if even just a few of the amazingly talented yet criminally unemployed young designers, writers and artists felt as pissed off and creatively unfulfilled as me – well... what better time to reach out and collaborate with each other? 8

Around that same time social media was taking off and, along with it, the idea that people could connect without the need for using agencies or studios as middle-men. A whole world of creative talent was out there if you were brave enough to say hello. They sometimes even reached back, if you had something interesting to say. For me, those first few years out of university were a continual mish-mash. Short-term, underpaid creative gigs, temp jobs, poorly paid freelance, more temp jobs. But among it all were some amazing collaborations. I wrote short poems that first-time graffiti artists then sprayed across Bristol, created comics with now established designers who fancied a stab at the medium, and even tried some weird geo-tagging doodle thing with a group of would-be web developers. The idea would have seen people draw faces and leave them in public places, building a huge collaborative street gallery around our cities. But like collaborations often do, it didn’t take off. And that’s no bad thing because, looking back, most of the work was rubbish. It was learning to reach out and get people excited about your ideas that was important. I ended up bailing on the UK and moving to Melbourne in 2011. Four years of bit-jobs and moneyless collaborations had killed me financially and it was time to find properly paid creative work, which back then Melbourne was oozing with. Something to do with China, coal exports and the redistribution of wealth apparently. As a tip, temporary

Australian working visas are super easy to obtain for anyone with a creative discipline. I made the decision in January and was gone in February, bags packed for sunnier, wealthier climates. On returning to the UK a couple of years later, I had rekindled that collaborative spirit, feeling inspired by what I’d learned from working around Melbourne’s amazing DIY publishing scene – where creatives find a niche, bring the right people together and simply make something. No endless development, no searching for funding, just making. It led me to start OFF LIFE in Bristol in late-2012, and a string of self-initiated projects ever since. There’s no way that would have happened if I’d have walked out of university and straight into a comfortable staff job. I wouldn’t know about the all-consuming urge to simply make something and put it out there – or about how to reach out and team up. That money-ravaged period has heavily informed our current creative industries. It shaped and gave us the amazing talent that we now see being commissioned by household brands or exhibited in huge galleries. It taught us how to hustle and the purity of DIY. 2007–2012 sucked balls. 2007–2012 was the best.

Interview // Sam Ailey Photography // Mudi Chris Eghweree Illustrations // Kate Moross

Since founding Studio Moross in 2012, Kate has been leading the team responsible for making the music industry look cool. The studio’s constantly-growing project list does a great job of leaving us drooling into our keyboards, boasting album covers, live visuals, videos and art direction for the likes of Disclosure, Jessie Ware, and Simian Mobile Disco. And while we probably wouldn’t call ourselves Directioners, it’s kinda hard not to lose yourself imagining what it’s like to design a world tour for what is arguably the biggest band in the known universe.

Kate herself encapsulates the DIY culture that we’ve seen flourishing in the industry in recent years; an ethos that is a core theme of her 2014 book Make Your Own Luck. Rather than following a straightforward career path to becoming a ‘graphic designer’ or an ‘illustrator’, Kate’s career has seen her journey into many different mediums. Often learning on the job, she’s built an impressively diverse body of work that is impossible to pin just one label to, but is still tied together by her colourful and energetic personality. 11

It’s mid-May and summer feels like it’s starting to settle in as our photographer Chris and I hop off the tube at Stockwell and make our way down a leafy side street to Studio Moross. There’s a refreshing calm here that feels far removed from East London’s densely packed creative hotspots, and the building itself is so neatly tucked away into its residential surroundings that we walked straight past it on our first approach. We walk through the grassy courtyard into the studio where we are enthusiastically greeted by Ebi, one of Kate’s magnificent golden shiba. This is already turning out to be a great day. We say our hellos to the small but busy team and reconvene with Kate at a garden table outside, once she’s armed herself with a brightly coloured bomber jacket and an iced coffee. She makes a rollup and we chat while a crew of delivery guys unload gear for the new Disclosure live show that’ll be premiered at Wild Life and Parklife festivals in a couple of months’ time.

So, you’ve got back from Florida, what happens on a Kate Moross holiday? Well I was at Disneyworld, so that happened! It’s definitely nostalgic, I think that’s why everybody goes; for the nostalgia. I think it’s nice that you can kind of switch off from being a grown up and just be a kid again. In your book you said there’s nothing wrong with being a jack of all trades. Do you think young creatives are encouraged to specialise too much? I think it’s important to specialise in the sense that you pick a specific course to study at uni, because it’s like you’re experimenting with a focus. I don’t think anyone feels like there is the perfect course for them to be on. You just have to do it for three years and hope that there’s scope to do different activities within your course structure, which I think is really important. I’m hoping that education moves more towards multi-disciplinary behaviours and encourages people to try different media, move around between subjects and have an understanding of photography or print or moving image, for example. Even if you don’t become an expert at it, it’s good to just know and understand things, so when you collaborate with people you can communicate with them better. Throughout your career you’ve carried with you a desire to always be learning. What’s the most recent thing you’ve learned? Yesterday I actually did a course on a new piece of video kit we’re using called D3 which is developed by United Visual Artists. But there’s always something new; whether it be software, plugins or printing techniques. If you just sit and do the same thing every day you’ll never

realise what your potential is. I don’t think you should ever stop picking up new things. And that goes for everyone, not just those in the creative industries. What would you say is the most challenging skill you’ve had to learn? Oh, god knows! I think… managing people? It’s not necessarily something you learn, it’s just something you gain from experience. I think I’ve always been quite bossy, so I’m quite good at running the studio in the sense that I have the ability to delegate tasks and communicate with everyone who’s involved on every project. But the hardest thing is having to compartmentalise your brain, so you’re not just working on what you’re working on, you’re also overseeing what everybody else is doing. Is there anything you felt you had to say no to? I’ve never said no to something because I thought it was going to be difficult, or that I didn’t think I could get together the collaborators or skills to do the job. Sometimes I say no to things because I

don’t have the time to do them justice. And that’s something that I’m still learning how to do. Like right now I should have probably said no to about five things we’re doing, but we’re doing all of them at the same time. And that means I haven’t been to sleep for a few days. That’s probably not healthy. What would say is your favourite career fuck up? Oh dear. I think everyone will have moments in their life where there’s a project that was such a big fuck up that they don’t want to talk or think about it. I remember this car company asked us to design some lighting for an event. I just didn’t really know what their expectations were, and the electrician I hired didn’t have the knowledge of the lighting I needed for the event. The client was a bit angry, and obviously I apologised… I think I just took the cost for the materials and not the work. I think you’ve got got to be frank and fair with people if you do make a mistake. It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience but it’s only really happened once or twice in my life. 13

Many who follow your work admire your confidence, as it’s something a lot of young creatives struggle with. Is that something you’ve always had or has it developed over time? I’ve always been very confident. And that I think comes from your family and the environment you grew up in. I don’t think it’s about skill at all. People are precious about what others think about them and their work – they don’t want to be judged. But it’s better for you to show your work and talk to people about it, than it is to be like “I’m not gonna show you this, I’m not gonna show you this…” A lot of the time here with people in the studio, I’ll encourage them to show me something that’s unfinished, because it’s much better for us to decide it’s not a good idea before they start doing three days of work, than for us to realise at the end of that process that it’s not working.

You’ve gotta be confident with communicating your initial ideas. I think that’s integral to being a good designer. That’s definitely something I had to learn; about pitching, developing moodboards, describing your work. And that’s what school kind of helps you to do when you’re presenting in a crit or when you’re submitting coursework. It feels like it’s useless but it’s not, because you’ll have to do that every day at work. Right, so it’s like a condensed version of that when you’re in the ‘real world’. Yeah, I’d say every project that I do is like a condensed version of what you learn at university… plus a lot of what you don’t learn. For me, art school wasn’t the best experience, and I don’t think anyone really walks away from a BA and goes “that was amazing”. You might walk away from a Foundation and go “that was amazing”, but usually you tend to walk away from a BA going “I can’t wait to do some real work”.

Do you get creative block at this point and if so how do you move past it? I don’t. I don’t really think it’s real. That’s actually another skill that I did learn at school which is quite useful: do something a hundred times and then pick your best idea. Again, a lot of people are afraid, especially if you’re working in a group, to say ‘these are my ideas’ because nine of them might be shit, one of them might be good, but it’s always good to put ten of them on the table. That’s what’s great about working with other people. Even if you’re freelancing or working in isolation, it’s always a benefit to have a group of peers that you can chat to about your thoughts. That was actually going to be my next question, about freelancing being an isolating experience a lot of the time. Yeah! I mean, that’s kind of why I stopped freelancing. I enjoyed it and it definitely gave me lots of confidence in

doing things by myself, but I’ve always really enjoyed working with other people, so starting my own studio gave me the best of both worlds. Right, because a lot of people get into that ‘in-between’ phase after uni where, maybe having moved back home, you end up doing a bit of freelance anyway in the first couple of years. It can be quite hermit-crabby. Yeah, I think so, and moving home is difficult for anyone after uni. That’s why I always recommend freelancing while you’re still at uni; because you’re around other people all the time. I use the term ‘freelancing’ very loosely here – it may be designing a logo for your friend’s dad’s plumbing company – it doesn’t have to be cool or lucrative. Actually, I always get asked if people should work for free. And I say, why not while you’re at university? You’ve got nothing to lose, it’s basically like free

education. You get the chance to test out your skill set. People shouldn’t be afraid of doing semi-rubbish jobs while they’re at uni to just get them under their belt. Yep, definitely done a few of those! Exactly, so have I. I mean I’ve got probably three years of really old work like that, and I wouldn’t show it to anyone now! I’ve done so many favours and wedding invitations… Actually, I still do them today because I’ve now got into a routine of just saying yes to pretty much anyone I know, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, working for free. How relevant do you think university is right now? …I’m not sure. I think university is relevant for some, but I don’t think it’s the only way to get into the industry. If you have the drive then save yourself some money! You’ll know in yourself if you need it. Some people just need it for the social experience, and that’s also really important. If you don’t go to university, you still need to have a group of peers. University is basically 16

an opportunity to get access to that network, so if you don’t go, you need to find it somewhere else. How much do you agree with the phrase “it’s not what you know, but who you know”? Hmm. I almost feel like that sounds so… ‘business’? I feel like it’s quite old school, quite 80s-businessman-schmoozingwith-his-business-cards kind of thing. And I don’t think we should look at networking or meeting people in such a boring way. I remember the connections I made when I’d just started freelancing – it was always was though people that I’d met at a party or through chatting to a friend of a friend. It’s all about who you know but it not in that sense of who you know ‘in the business’, it’s literally what connections you’ve made. And you have to capitalise on the connections you make. I met our last intern at a talk and she was one of only three people that stayed behind and had a little conversation with me for five minutes when everyone else had left. Joe, who’s the motion designer

here, emailed me asking if I needed any moving image people, and at the time I was looking for moving image people. He didn’t even know I’d put out an ad. And Guy, one of our designers, just showed up on my doorstep! Getting your work out there is a big deal for young creatives. Where would you say you’ve had the most success in self promotion? It’s really difficult to compare my experience with current graduates’ because it’s already kind of out of date. I was online, I had a website and I was quite active on social media, but this was when like nobody had websites. There were no templates sites—no Cargo or Behance—there was MySpace and HTML and that was it. Having a URL of my name was seen as very professional. If you don’t have your work online pfff… I find it really frustrating when you go to someone’s website and it’s just like a blank page with an email address. If I can’t get what I want from looking at someone’s work in three seconds then I’m not going to hire that person.

Yeah it’s frustrating trying to find someone’s work when it takes more than a few clicks. Absolutely! It’s basic marketing: give the people what they want straight away. Instant gratification. If they like it, they’ll ask you to do something and if they don’t they won’t, but at least they’ll have made that decision themselves. In a world that’s almost constantly online, how much internet is a good amount for a creative career? What kind of internet? More in terms of social media and stuff. Obviously it’s really important to get your work out there, but I think it can skew your perception of ‘success’. That’s a good way of looking at it. I think too long is spent looking at other people’s work, too. There’s this real hangover from GCSEs where you sit and paint Van Gogh paintings at school and copy stuff. People still do that; they’ll just emulate work that they’ve already seen – that I find really unhealthy.

I think it’s fine to do it behind the scenes if you really want to try out a technique, but it’s important for you to then take that stuff you’ve learned, develop it and make it your own, and that’s gonna be quite hard if all you’re doing is looking at other people’s things.

In terms of social media obviously it can get unhealthy for people who are just sitting there not doing any work and just going on Facebook, but there’s nothing ‘bad’ about the internet. It’s an amazing tool; I couldn’t have my company or any of my achievements without it.

Okay, I’m going to ask you some quickfire ones now. What’s your official stance on pineapple on pizza? It’s my favourite thing. My favourite pizza is pineapple, pepperoni and sweetcorn. That’s my special. Everyone here has to suck it up! You know what doesn’t belong on pizza? Baked beans and tuna. Baked beans on pizza!? It’s disgusting. Or in shepherd’s pie. Don’t do it! It’s not the one. What are your top three pick ’n’ mix items? Good question! Uh, cherry cola bottles, foamy bananas aaaand… the sour red roll up cable things? What are they called? Laces? I liked the old red laces when they were just sugary red liquorice. But now they’ve made them into strawberry ‘flavour’. So, who do you want to see on the Iron Throne? Brienne of Tarth, for sure. It’s a cliché interview question, but can you tell us where do you see yourself in five years? God, uh, probably with darker rings under my eyes. I’d like to have a family at some point, to be honest, if we’re going to get really personal! But I’d love to develop the studio further. I don’t feel like we’ve made any groundbreaking work... yet. But I also don’t want to build a studio on groundbreaking work alone because I don’t think you can do it if that’s your ‘goal’. I think you’ve just got to make stuff and hope it’s well received. I’d like to do some really big tours and work with more exciting musicians and just make sure that everybody here is happy and feels creatively satisfied!

Okay, last one. There isn’t one clear route to any creative career after university. What advice would you give to the recently and not-so-recently graduated who feel like they still don’t know what they’re doing? Keep going. Even if you’re not really sure, don’t let that insecurity stop you doing what you’re doing right now. Keep reaching out to people, keep making connections, keep learning about the industry that you’re in. You’ve just got to think about what you’re good at, target jobs, situations or freelance projects in that way. And as much as you’re thinking about your actual skill set, think about your personality, too. You might be a really talented video editor, let’s say, but you don’t think you can do that as a freelance role, so maybe you should work at a company. There’s a job for everyone. You might not be confident with clients but you’re really good at coming up with ideas – there’ll be a place for you in a business that doesn’t want you to sit and explain things to a client but they want you to be in R&D coming up with cool ideas and working with the rest of the team to realise them. Yeah, I felt a huge pressure coming out of uni to be technically really good at a select few things, but now I feel that I’ve learned so much about myself and what makes me happy by putting that out of mind and just doing stuff. Even if it’s not the greatest work that I’ve done technically, it can bring me a lot more satisfaction. Yeah, absolutely. I think people ignore their ‘emotional creative’ and think too much about practical skills or where they can make money and don’t think about what path is right for them in a wider sense. Appreciating and learning about the path you’re on is going to be crucial. 19

Kate invites us for another peek into the world of Studio Moross before we head off. Displayed on the wall behind a central bank of workstations are vinyl sleeves, gig posters and merchandise the team have designed, surrounded by an endless stream of colourful stationery collections, office gear and curious artifacts. Everything in the room has personality; even the extension cables are an electric shade of pink. This is work, but it looks, and feels, like play. I get chatting to director and animator Anna Ginsburg who’s working with the team on a music video for reggae artist Cadenza. She describes the project as a “big collabo” and shows me how she’s been looping drawings by in-house illustrator Guy, who’s sat opposite us. As we talk about the video it’s clear that collaborative working is one of the studio’s great strengths, and a major part of how they’re able to consistently deliver unique work in a competitive industry. During the gaps in the conversation you can pick up snippets of other projects being worked on simultaneously, as well as chatter and laughter as stories from a recent night out are shared. Chris and I briefly stop to give Ebi a well-deserved scratch behind the ears before saying goodbye and making our way back to the Tube. For many creatives, a chair in Kate’s studio represents an oasis of ‘cool design’, swaying hazily on the horizon of a desert of jobs we have the skillset for but don’t really care about. We place these jobs on a pedestal and make them unattainable in our heads, when the reality is just the opposite.

We live in an era of creative accessibility unlike anything that has come before. The conventional labels of ‘graphic designer’, ‘illustrator’ or ‘web developer’ and so on, are becoming irrelevant in a time when you can teach yourself to design a magazine, draw in any style or build a website, for free, simply by typing the right words into Google. But even though we’re not waiting for our video tutorials to buffer any more, the process of developing yourself as a creative is not instantaneous - an illusion all too easy to get caught in when we’re shown another one of our contemporaries getting their ‘big break’ every time we sign in to Twitter. Kate has propelled herself to where she is through her desire to always be learning, while also nurturing the connections she’s been making since she was a student. Those are things we all have the capacity to do. One thing we don’t have unlimited access to is time. So make a zine with people you’ve met online, design a flyer for your mate’s tropical house night or start a collective with your course mates. Yes, it’s going to take some time, maybe even a lot of time, but if you start making your own luck now, you might just end up making your own dream job later.

New (1) Words // Tara John & Zuleika Sedgley Illustration // Jessica Procter

There is a large group of exceptional individuals within media who knew what they wanted out of life at a young age. Tavi Gevinson, the editor of Rookie Magazine, for instance, was creating full-page editorials at the age of eleven. Before her, the goddess of op-eds, Caitlin Moran, became the Observer’s Young Reporter of the Year at the wee age of 15 and Nicolas Ghesquière wanted to be a fashion designer at 12. Unlike them, our younger years was spent nicking booze from our parents and attempting to cop a feel from our disinterested peers. We met at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2007, where we were both studying History & Politics; a course that had little relevance to our future careers, let alone our daily lives. For some reason during our second year, a flat-cap toting classmate enlisted us to his fledgling news broadcast on SOAS’ OpenAirFM.

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Tara John wrote: Meet me underneath the stairs in the smoking area. I’m hiding from flat-cap. He’s being a maniac. Who knew that he would turn from a happy-go-lucky pseudo-Scotsman into a megalomania drill sergeant. I run and hide when I hear his voice. The other day I heard him and accidentally joined a die-in protest for donkeys in Tibet. I mean I get why he’s angry. We are always late to read-throughs, rarely fact-check our scripts and almost always interview people who agree with us. But come on, who’s really going to listen to a news show made by amateur undergraduates instead of the BBC? In essence, we’ve created a left-wing version of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, with the only differences being that we aren’t based in the US and have approximately four listeners. It needs to be stopped.

After this first taste of mighty media and in a state of panic about our still undefined futures, it was failure that brought us to our next ‘a-ha’ moment. Zuleika, having ended a tumultuous five-year long relationship, and Tara, who had to take an 22

enforced ‘sabbatical’ for failing a year of university, decided to do what any self-serving explorer had done before them, and go East. Heading to Hong Kong and Singapore respectively, we decided to forego spice roots and other orientalist clichés, and settle into the glory of unpaid internships in the media industry.

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 17:01 PM, Zuleika Sedgley wrote: I’ve been put on the bovine beat. I mean this literally. My beat at the moment focuses on buffalos. Gone are the dreams of writing about social justice, the mistreatment of South-East Asian workers and the illegality of shark’s fin. My day begins with taking the ferry to Lantau Island, then renting a child’s bike and chasing buffalos around in 30 degree heat, in my suit jacket (that I’m insisting on wearing in some misguided attempt to ‘dress to impress’). During these cycles around the island I look for buffalos (who despite their size are incredibly hard to find), and once I find them I look for evidence that that the government is ‘culling’ them (which is rare). I then visit my tipsters’ home, a group of retired angry Reuters workers who offer me tea whilst expressing their exasperation that I can’t find those pesky buffalos faster. I’m not sure when I’m coming home, but when I do, I’m sure nothing could moo-ve me to write another word about a buffalo again.

Having returned to London with the hope of slipping effortlessly into a role at a national newspaper, someone suggested we attend the once-reputable journalism school in Clerkenwell. Once-reputable because soon after we handed our cheques to its slimy proprietor it became apparent that ‘No Sweat Journalism’, which had Laurie Penny in its alumni, had lost its accreditation, was filing for bankruptcy and replaced most of its teachers with clueless journalists acting as tutors. Two grand poorer with prospects of being able to afford another journalism accreditation programme dashed, Zuleika decided to try to make a go of it in London, by making podcasts for Monocle 24, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, having a spell as an Olympics correspondent for a Malaysian newspaper. Work was steady, but scattered and thwarted by a combination of Asian guilt and a distaste for spending time alone, she decided that freelance journalism was not for her. 23

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 7:34 AM, Zuleika Sedgley wrote: I can’t do it. I’m not made for endless pitches, working from home and battling between my desire to work and my desire to watch television. I got in touch with my recruiter friend, who’s put me onto an architect’s firm to work in their comms team. I’ve met the Head of Business Development, and I think she sees something in me. What, I’m not sure yet, but it must be good to stick with someone who sees you as a project. Although I feel like I’m meandering, I think I have to take what’s presented to me. Perhaps the directionless need to just follow whatever the universe (and the promise of being on a payroll) gives them.

Fed up with the bureaucracy of extending her visa to stay and work in the UK, followed by the blow dealt by the sham journalism school and publications that rarely paid her on time for freelance work, which included her coverage of the London riots, Tara thought it was time to head back to the country of her birth, Singapore. In a blind panic, Tara applied for every job in every sector imaginable, which included NGOs, art galleries, medical companies, the civil service even a hedge fund (who have yet to get back to her). As proof that fortune favours the desperate, Reuters hired her as a Sub-Editor on the Global Pictures Desk soon after Tara blew the remainder of her savings on a fuckit-i’m-effectively-unemployed-but-I-will-spend-money-I-don’thave-on-a-five-day-beach-holiday-in-Malaysia.

On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 03:00 AM, Tara John wrote: I’m on night shift as I write to you. It’s 3am and Google has told me that a life of obesity, cancer and depression awaits if I continue working these sort of hours. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ‘living-the-dream’, I think. Creating newsbreaking content that gets sent out to over 50,000 clients around the world is life affirming. In the last couple of hours, I’ve worked on the Syrian uprising, M23 rebels in the DRC, and a film premiere in Hollywood. However, Journalism for Dummies never prepared me for colleagues who insist on discussing the plot points of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills for HOURS while Green Day plays on loop. In that respect, I feel like I am in the seventh circle of hell.

Zuleika, in recognition of the values inculcated during her time as a socially-minded politics student at SOAS, left the architecture firm to work in communications in the third sector, before returning to the design world with Pentagram.

On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 8:44 AM, Zuleika Sedgley wrote: I feel like it’s all coming together. Working in the third sector completely changed how I approached creativity. It was all about creating the maximum impact, in the shortest amount of time possible, with the smallest budgets imaginable. It taught me to rely on myself, to trust my ideas and to go with them doggedly. I mean, I’ll be real with you, hiding from the BNP during that anti-racism pop-up shop didn’t feel like a growing experience at the time. But I’m pretty sure it’s made me more assertive when faced with different opinions – or at least better at ducking behind chairs in an emergency. I feel being here, at Pentagram, is teaching me to question my ideas, to improve them and to always always speak up. I feel like all this meandering and wandering has built up this Jenga board of experience, which although sometimes unsteady, creates a captivating whole. I’m still not entirely sure what I’m doing, but I think I relish in that now. I think there’s an excitement in not being sure, in taking risks. Ok, enough positivity and Oprah talk now, I’m running late, as always. Lord help me to learn how to make it to work on time.

After close to two years at Reuters, Tara snagged the role of Web Editor at Time Out Singapore, which came with normal working hours, free food, free movie tickets, free entry to a variety of events and the added perk of fleeing the bureaucratic confines of a large multinational. While career progression is undoubtedly important to any self-respecting woman in her twenties, Tara’s partner clinched his dream job in London, which heralded her return to the big smoke.

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 21:13 PM, Tara John wrote: I have come full circle. From leaving London as a penniless freelancer, I have come back to this city as a slightly wealthier one. It will be sad to leave Time Out Singapore as I really love my role. Yes, the job has caused many sleepless nights over the sheer breadth of my new responsibilities. And yes, I did spend an extortionate fee on a career coach, who told me that if I ever wanted to kill the beast known as work-related anxiety, I had to perform a series of bizarre poses in front of a mirror every morning. Thing is, my boss at Time Out, Tahmina, is incredible. We hit it off during my interview and I can only hope the same will happen with future bosses in the UK. I didn’t have much of a background as a subeditor before joining Reuters in 2012, but the Deputy Editor believed I would provide value to his team. While skill is an important factor to the hiring process, the magic sauce is in personality. It’s a person’s personality that drives interviewers to make that leap of faith, which makes a lot of sense when you consider why Dan Bilzerian doesn’t have a real job. At Time Out, Tahmina once mentioned that her reason for hiring me was due my ‘gobby’ nature. I’ve decided to take that as a compliment. Do you remember when I attempted to write a positive piece on the Roma community in Hackney, but was instead called ‘Paki’ and chased out of their campsite? Well, I have a good feeling that this move back to London won’t be as disastrous as that day.

It’s been six years since we embarked on this haphazard journey of cultivating a ‘career’, and while we can’t actually define what got us to this point, there is one thing we know for sure: having direction may have worked for that shining few in the creative industries, but it was our lack of one that took us down this path. We might still be a couple of bumbling idiots who annually lose our P60 forms. But, the difference is we are no longer panicked by the unknown and undefined. In fact, on a good day, we are excited by it.

PHOTO STORY

Better halves Photography // Nathan Perkins Set design // Neha Shah

Take the red pill Words // Thea Thunderstone Illustration // Planktn

Santa isn’t real. It’s not butter. Rolf Harris is a paedo. Sometimes, the truth is the hardest pill to swallow. But who wants to live in the land of lies? Not me. I choose the red pill every time. One day I was sitting at my desk in an advertising agency – the fucking worst time to take a red pill – when a question popped into my head: “is advertising evil?” By that I suppose I meant “am I evil?” or “is the contribution I’m making to the world good or bad?” This felt like a question worth asking. So I opened Google, typed “is advertising evil?” and hit enter. The answer wasn’t “yes” but it wasn’t “no”. I realised that I’d just taken the work version of the red pill and nearly chundered all over my keyboard. I spent the rest of the day reading through the Google results and as I did I fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. I’ve had my fair share of red pills before. I once caught my mum taking the tooth from under my pillow – a truth bomb I was happy not to drop on my younger brothers if she agreed to a pay a premium for my remaining teeth. But this pill was different. It was bigger. Purer. My head felt like it was going to explode. I looked down at the client brief on my desk. Where once I saw business objectives, I now read “SELL PEOPLE SHIT THEY DON’T NEED”. I knew that I needed to get the hell out of there. I needed the time and space to reflect on what I’d learned and to think about what to do next. So I quit my job. That was October of 2014. The other day I was having a conversation with my brain. Turns out my brain is all kinds of confused. I’m learning to be OK with that. There’s this thing called the liminal space and I’m in it. It’s a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing. It’s where you’ve left the tried and true, but haven’t yet been able to replace it with anything else. There are other people here too, in the liminal space. I see them in coffee shops. Meet them at events. They’re the only people for me. The mad ones. The good ones. The red pills.

It’s just a job Words // Gemma Germains, Co-founder, Well Made Studio Illustration // Tim Parker

We think it’s time you knew. Creativity? It’s just a job. Isn’t it time we all started treating it like one? Seven years ago, bailiffs turned up at my house because I couldn’t pay a £180 bill. Two summers ago the studio was so skint my mum had to buy my kid’s school uniform. Last month my fridge, freezer, garage door and car’s clutch disastrously died within days of each other. Money never stops being an issue. Nor does getting it. Especially if you’re gifted (cursed) with the desire to generate money using only the power of your mind. It’s hard. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it just gets harder. Once upon a time, our business expenses barely tipped £100 a month. Everything we earned was split between wages and tax. We put roughly £80 of every £100 we earned straight into our pockets. Today, we have to generate three times that amount in order to stuff £80 in our pockets. These days, we pay tax and studio rent and the accountant and put money aside for our training budget, and pay for train fares and hardware and books and conferences and subscriptions to user testing software and notebooks and standing desks. And wages. Healthy wages, commensurate with our decadeand-a-bit experience working in the creative industries. Wages that make the rest of it worthwhile. I promise I’m not writing this to scare you. I don’t want you to run screaming into accountancy. I’m writing this

because I want you to stay in the creative industries for the rest of your working life. I don’t want you to get to 33 and realise it’s not all hand-drawn type and coffee shop branding. The creative industry you see on Instagram is a filthy lie spoiling it for everyone. It’s a job. A proper job; using the best bits of your brain to build an audience, sell stuff or change people’s behaviour. The difference between us and the plumbers and the doctors is that their work isn’t photogenic. Ours is. Bus drivers and brickies don’t get paid to write, so tend not to produce insightful articles about their working day. We’re practiced at making and selling the idea of The Creative Industries. We’ve made it look great and now everyone wants into something that really doesn’t technically exist, at least not for the people doing the making and selling. Don’t be shocked by the Creative Industries selling an idea of something. That’s our job. The problem is that young talent (that’s you) are all downloading the same messages as our clients. Clients get the pretty because they pay for it. They get the cool workshops and the foil print deliverables because they give us their money. That’s how it works. Clients don’t see us weeping into a content matrix or churning out logo variations, because they pay us to take that stress far far away. By consuming the client’s messages, you’re absorbing a version of the Creative Industries not meant for 37

you. Which must confuse the hell out of you when you’re learning what a content matrix is and churning out logo variations and wondering at what point the pretty kicks in. For a long time, I thought I was doing it wrong. I imagined a better Creative Industries where everyone was having a lovely glass of prosecco in Ibiza. Yes, that does happen, but it’s usually pre-empted by three weeks of spreadsheets and list checking and ridiculous equipment demands, and hiring a car to collect equipment JJ Abrams would struggle to find a use for. But there’s budget and dammit if the film crew are going to spend every last penny, and actually you’re going to Garston, not Ibiza and it’s a miracle you’re not sobbing into this warm can of Red Stripe. This is hard work, deserving of good pay in exactly the same way as doctors and plumbers and solicitors. Because just like doctors, plumbers and solicitors, we’re fixing someone’s problem. #designporn delivers a false sense of industry. One assumes, when smashing out Facebook ads for £100, that the #designpornographers, busy handcrafting coffee shop logos, are doing it better and different. Or that the pretty jobs are fewer, and harder to come by. That we need to work harder, and cheaper to win these hen’s teeth briefs. So when a juicy one does come along, we do everything to bag it. We drop our prices and our value. We deflate our worth and defer our needs to that of the client. We offer, and the client learns to expect great work for low pay.

But low budgets come at a price because a woman cannot live on pretty work alone. Great jobs don’t get the necessary head space because we need three low paid projects where one fatty should suffice. And the client is disappointed because we promised pretty and delivered pap. All because someone somewhere posted a great looking job to Instagram that we pray will come our way if only we build our profile big enough. Well Made’s best work; our very best, prettiest, most Instagrammable work is the work we do for a client who has, for the past five years paid us the amount we are worth. They don’t ask for freebies in exchange for profile. They don’t ask for a discount. They treat us like faithful employees and we behave accordingly. And our work is fantastic because of it. We do this because we’re good at it and yes, we’re talented but it’s still a job, not a lifestyle. We do it to pay our bills, to fix the garage door and buy the kids their school uniform. If we didn’t get paid, there’d be no point doing it. It’s hard to tell someone their budget is pointless but we need to start saying exactly that. We need to increase the value of our work. Creativity is hard and it should be rewarded accordingly. Because as soon as you begin to respect the work you do, you start doing fantastic work. Any job can generate 100+ likes if you’re given the time, energy and money to make it so.

ShellsuitZombie As well as having an open call for submissions to this issue, we also asked some of our very own zombies to respond to the theme. In this section, we look at mental health, coffee, how to put on an exhibition, the affect that the internet can have on a young designer, and we chat to seven creatives who are forging their own path.

New blood, sweat and tears Words // Kady Potter, Freelance copywriter Illustrations // Tony Johnson

The National Advertising Benevolent Society (NABS) did a survey of creatives in 2013, and the results are pretty appalling to read. Almost two-thirds said they’d reached a point where they were unable to cope with working in the industry due to stress. Two in three people are on the verge of packing it in. Doesn’t that scare you? Look around you – got two mates trying to get on placements too? Statistically, only one of you is going to hack it. In an agency right now? Expect at least two of your fellow creatives to be gone in about six months’ time. So what the hell’s going on? All of the quotes in this piece are from people who work or have worked in the creative industries. They’ve been kind enough to let me use their stories. “It all seemed a bit too good to be true, to get the chance to work for such a well regarded name in the industry, so I would have been mad to turn it down.” It’d be easy to blame the rose-tinted glasses that lots of grads wear on the popular, almost dreamlike image the world of advertising has. In a nice meta nod to the whole industry, advertising is advertised as this thing you really want but didn’t quite know you needed. That hasn’t been helped by the ‘glamour days’ presented in shows like Mad Men. Light a cig, throw a few slogans at the client, and then everyone decamps to 40

the pub for an afternoon of rum and aggressive flirting. Right. Because that sounds completely like real life. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)’s guide to getting into advertising is deliberately vague on the pros and cons, but notably points out that the industry isn’t anything like Sterling Cooper any more. The advice from ad agency Beatty McGuinness Bungay boss, Andrew McGuinness, is to be “tenacious”, and that “working in advertising isn’t just huge expense accounts and long lunches”. “I used to browse news websites on my lunch break. I was told in a performance review that if I worked instead, I’d achieve more. My boss also claimed I was leaving too early – but it was okay to arrive even earlier to prepare for my day.” In the NABS survey, stress and pressure come up an alarming number of times. 84% of people who work in advertising and media said that the demands of their job had increased in the last year. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that those jobs were demanding enough to begin with. A quarter said that creative agencies are a stressful environment ‘most of the time’. How many people said their workplace wasn’t stressful at all? 4%. Often, it’s hard to see the increased workload creeping up on us until it’s 9pm on a Tuesday and we’re still at our desks. Ever been there? I sure have.

“I was as excited as I could be in terms of where my life was headed – I was going to work in London in a creative social media agency.” I suppose that begs the question – if the reality of ‘adland life’ is one of stress and anxiety (particularly in London), why are so many people still clamouring to get in?

“It was in the fifth month that I found myself stood on an Underground platform, thinking just how easy it would be to end all my problems.” In Scotland and several local authorities in the UK, the arts and creative therapies are used as treatments for mental health problems. And yet, if you do this as a job, your mind is going to suffer. Putting in 12-hour days for a week means your sleep suffers. And you’re typically expected to get in early, leave last and answer emails at all hours of the day. You’ll never switch off. The client will be happy that you put so many hours in just so that they can launch one new web banner. The higher-ups might take you out for drinks (alcohol’s another creativity enhancer), you’ll get back late, and your sleep will be shit. Then you’ve got to do it all again next week. And the week after that, and the one after that. Stories of heart attacks and nervous breakdowns don’t seem as hard to believe when you look at it like that. This industry puts you on the treadmill like a little hamster powering its own ideas light bulb. As soon as you stop running like the clappers, you’re no longer useful.

Creative industries are some of the fastest growing in the UK. At the last count, they were keeping two million people employed and contributing six percent to our GDP (which, at £71.4 billion a year, is huge for a relatively small bit of UK industry). The sector grew by 10% in 2012 alone, outperforming the growth of every other industry. Government data claims the creative industries are worth a whopping £8 million an hour to the UK’s economy. Students and recent grads are given the hard sell on moving into creative. It’s positioned as one of the best careers to have, for the growing opportunities and the ability to make a stonking load of cash if you’re lucky. With a line of new faces elbowing each other to get on competitive placement schemes, why would agencies bother trying to retain their existing talent? Nobody is really irreplaceable, but knowing there are literally hundreds of teams who’d take your job without complaint makes it harder to admit you’re unhappy. “...being in London has made me question lots about who I am, what I want and if I deserve any of this.” The ‘moving to London’ debate is a whole other book in itself, but do you have to get into an agency and slog your arse off to be successful? Short answer: nope. Long answer: noooooooope. 41

If you’ve decided it’s definitely, thoroughly not for you, there are other ways to be creative that don’t involve placement bingo. Or paying over the odds for a glorified cupboard in zone 4.

BBDO. It’s 32nd on the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For this year. David Abbott’s intention (may he rest in peace) was to always make sure employees felt supported and included.

The difficulty is that there’s still a lot of respect and awe given to those who make the leap to a city like the Big Smoke. Even if it’s a bit misplaced. When folks from back home talk about my life in London, it’s like I moved to the moon. They think the streets are paved with laminated £50 notes. There are people I went to school with who pay less for a 3-bedroom house outside of the M25 than I do for a studio flat here.

Another example is creative agency network Iris Worldwide. Impressively, their approach to employee well-being is as global as their network. Iris’ Project 72 splits hours spent on pitches between their offices in different time zones. The work gets done in seventy-two hours without anyone losing sleep.

“...and I can say today she’s happier than ever with her life choice of never going back to an agency...” Grads in creative disciplines are increasingly looking to startups for a new way to make a difference and accomplish things more quickly. And the big brand names that agencies are itching to work on are taking more and more of their own creative in-house. Independent arts charity Nesta is offering grants to students to help them start their own businesses. I could go on. Making it in advertising and other creative disciplines like branding isn’t impossible. It’s just not the only choice you have. And it doesn’t limit you to an expensive life in the capital, either. “Had a bit of a ‘wake up call’ when I fainted at work. I was honest with several regular clients and they were understanding.” The issue isn’t universal, of course – there are agencies and companies prepared to, you know, look out for the people in their offices. Like any good employer should. Take ad agency AMV 42

That said, the solutions aren’t universal either. There’s a real and uncomfortable reason why so many agencies have a revolving door fitted. “...have achieved more of a balance since. Think I’ve been lucky.” Clearly, something’s got to give. When an unstoppable creative meets an immovable agency, one of them is going to buckle eventually. The government even has a document on workplace interventions for when it all gets too much. It uses a London creative agency as a case study – when they introduced flexible working hours and made their staff targets more manageable, employee sick days plummeted. Introducing well-being and health programmes is just as good for companies as it is for employees. The ‘Well Fit Iris’ exercise plan, nutrition talks and health screenings at the London branch of Iris are such a success that they’re being rolled out globally. When AMV BBDO put their new wellbeing plans into action, the agency found it “encouraged collaboration and created an environment that fosters creativity”. Doesn’t that just give you warm and fuzzy feelings in your tummy?

There’s also something to be said for well-designed offices that don’t feel like claustrophobic cubicles of hell. A 2015 worldwide study has linked employee happiness to offices with more natural light, plants and bright colours. You’d think creative companies would have that kind of thing down. The agencies mentioned above which implement these projects have made it onto Best Places To Work For lists ahead of the competition. Repeatedly. It feels good, it looks good, it does good. Everyone should be on board with an approach like that.

awake at night and making you sick, how perfect can it be? You don’t have to put up with that. Don’t believe the hype around where you ‘should’ be at your age. As long as what you’re doing isn’t putting your health at risk, you can do anything anywhere – it’s better to try new things and see what makes you happy while you can.

“Life is maybe messier than it was in an agency, but perfectionism gave way to something with much more value – empathy.” And while it’s easy to blame companies for their lack of support, if you’re not happy then say something! Sure, over half in the NABS survey were afraid to do that in case they’re seen as weak or easily replaceable. But 77% also said they wouldn’t look down on a co-worker for doing the same thing. Your office buddies have got your back. In time, it gets better. Yeah, people will tell you that all the time, and the benefit of hindsight blah blah blah, but it does. Whether you get through it like me, by chucking the full-time gig in for a freelance one, or like some of my sources who found better jobs. You already know it’s not going to be an easy ride, but most of us quoted ultimately haven’t left the industry after all, which I hope gives you a little glimmer at the end of the tunnel. There’s no right or wrong in terms of what job you have and where you work. But if your ‘perfect job’ is keeping you 43

Fail your dreams Words and photography // Amy Cecilia Leigh, Designer

I consider the past few years of my life as my ‘face with open mouth and cold sweat’ period. It’s 00:38 and my boyfriend is asleep because it’s the second day of his new job tomorrow. He’s making an intelligent move to a better company to further his career and I just want to chain smoke in the hope that something compelling will enter my brain. But where did all these emotions come from and where can I put them? The one thing keeping me sane is the glow of my Macbook. You have to stop looking at pictures of attractive people having fun without you on Facebook and actually leave the house to meet people, because when you get a group of people together that you actually like, you can make great things happen. I’ve been part of quite a few exhibitions, but who even knows how exhibitions happen anyway? Everyone I know turns up drunk and eager-looking, and after a few more glasses of nondescript liquid they say they had a good time and that your work isn’t shit and you go to bed thinking you’re a human being with skills. I was part of an exhibition titled ‘ILLUMINATE’ a few years ago featuring multidisciplinary work from Wigan artists in an attempt to make something exciting happen that wasn’t in Manchester or London, and you know what? It was one big fuckbomb. So here are some exhibition pointers to make sure that you have a totally stressful set up and end up questioning what you’re doing with your life again. 44

BE LATE, BE VERY LATE Obviously you just have to be late to your own event because there are other important things happening like trying to publish the magazine you promised three years ago, or just generally having a life crackcident, comparing yourself to people you used to know.

DON’T OVER DO IT You never make enough work to cover the place you’re showing in, and you certainly never expect half of your makeshift gallery to turn into an obnoxious bar. Also, when did people stop having functioning combi TV DVD players? Is that not a thing anymore? How are you supposed to show your 10-minute video of nothing?

BUY WEIRD SHIT TO BULK IT OUT There’s something wrong with the world when you can’t just leisurely walk down your own high street in search of a DVD player and 20+ Barbie dolls without being questioned. Yeah, we used to know each other in high school and yeah, you’re probably doing way better than me in the monetary sense but why are you confused about my pursuit for a thinly-bulbed set of fairy lights? The smaller the bulb, the easier to poke through the newly cut nipple holes of a plastic doll, and let’s face it – I’m having more fun than you are at that call centre job I declined. Apparently if there aren’t enough Barbies in Poundland and you already have 20 between you and your boyfriend then it’s “a bit weird” and the shop assistant “won’t ask what you’re

doing with them” – srsly grrrl what DO you think I’m doing with them? Maybe I don’t want to know what you think I’m doing with them. Maybe YOU’RE weird.

GET STRESSED OUT, HAVE A CIG THEN ORDER SOMEONE ELSE TO DO IT If you smoke enough cigarettes then you can actually miss the entire thing. Time is running out and people are actually turning up to the event but I’m still ordering my boyfriend around and insisting fervently that we can’t just stick the dolls to things, we must dismember them. I had to join in eventually and help to dissect Barbie faster. The whole thing is reminiscent of that ‘antique’ Joey buys in Hellraiser 3 that is quite obviously just a collection of abused infants and dead people stuck to a podium. Although with the pink lighting it all just looks a bit brothel-y. We all love a good bit of red light district lighting though. And look, it’s great that you came, but you’re not actually supposed to be on time to these things.

Not only was my life ruined that night, but apparently those thrillseekers were married. But who am I to judge? Maybe twenty years down the line i’ll get really excited about a Cabbage Patch doll and only then will I know the feels.

FAIL YOUR DREAMS (AND IN THE PROCESS DISAPPOINT YOUR FAMILY) Hire me to complain about the onset of arthritis in my knees and weep uncontrollably about my future at your next party, because under time constraints and pressure, I actually make some of my best work, and so will you. And if you’re sad, don’t show it because signs of weakness will now get you thrown into a work camp thanks to our current government.

HAVE A GOOD SOLITUDE! (I mean weekend)

GET PROOF YOU WERE THERE Obviously you need photographic evidence of the fact that you were actually there and participated, but if you’re anything like me, you have to rely on the punctuality and commitment of others. This time however, I managed to snag a camera and document the night myself, leaving the famous Barbie Brothel til last. BIG FUCKING MISTAKE. I can deal with overcrowding and I can allow for people to enjoy the live music, but what I cannot forgive is the physical inability to capture the installation due to middle-aged people fingering. Come on guys, fingering is so 90s. Not only are you blocking the bar but you’re blocking my fun. Also, there’s nothing sexy about mutilation, okay guys? 45

Doing it yourself Words // Jay Chaudhri Photography // Respective artists

We had a chat with six creatives who did and didn’t go to university and had no idea what they really wanted to do, but did something anyway. Not every one is a Cinderella story, but slowly and surely they’re all making their mark. In each of these stories, there’s something to think about next time you catch yourself watching cat videos and putting off that side project you said you’d start last year.

Carina Dewhurst Post graduation, Carina worked on a range of different projects before starting her own. Weeds is a collection of hand-drawn temporary tattoos based on plants and flowers found in urban spaces. What led you to start Weeds? I’ve designed a few tattoos in the past and thought “hey, I like doing this”, however, me armed with a needle isn’t a good idea, so I stuck to the idea of being able to temporarily wear my drawings. Living in a big city, I think there’s something to be said about the little spindly flowers and scruffy plants you see growing next to the pavement. I wanted the designs to look more natural and free, as if someone had grabbed a pen and drawn them straight on you. On a personal level, I was keen on having complete control of the design, branding, packaging and website for a project. Staying motivated when work’s quiet can be difficult. Can you give us some Post-it note worthy advice? I always harp on about the three Ps; Persistence, Patience and Positivity. Fear is far worse than failure – that advice is definitely something I should tell myself more often. Also, keep being playful when approaching creative work. Have fun, because it definitely comes through in your work when you do! carinadewhurst.com Instagram: @weeds.tattoos

Calum Hall & Alex Rollings

Nick Booton

Calum and Alex are the founders of Creative Debuts, a platform that showcases emerging artists and designers through free exhibitions, renting out members’ work, and providing online portfolio hosting.

Nick set up Bruï, a design and print studio, after graduating. Operating out of a Liverpool warehouse, it uses hand-built equipment for all its printing.

How did you start Creative Debuts? Was the process difficult? We were both incredibly aware of the constant hurdles that emerging artists and designers face. Once we put our heads together and decided that something needed to be done, everything escalated so quickly, as it was apparent that there was a genuine need for Creative Debuts to exist. There’s no denying it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster but we truly believe that art needs to be way more accessible and Creative Debuts is the platform to make it so. The financial and time demands of starting a new company can be offputting, how did you figure it out? We both have day jobs so we’ve become professional plate spinners. I don’t think there’s a minute of the day when we aren’t both thinking about Creative Debuts. Although we’ve both gotten a lot better at balancing our time, in these embryonic stages it’s go go go. creativedebuts.co.uk Twitter/Instagram: @creativedebuts

Tell us more about Bruï – was it difficult setting up a new business? It’s a platform for me to showcase my work as well as providing design, printing, events and workshops. It definitely isn’t easy building your own studio; I use reclaimed materials to avoid burning a hole in my pocket. For me, this DIY attitude goes hand in hand with the screen printed aesthetic. If you could, would you have done anything differently? It’s been a learning curve; trial and error is expected – it’s a part of the process. You shouldn’t focus too hard on what you could’ve done, but constantly push yourself to do it better next time. A piece of advice for those dreaming of setting up their own studio? It’s worth taking advantage of arts funding; it can be hard when all the money is coming from your own pocket. Apart from that, it’s really a case of believing in your project and dedicating the hours to it. Follow your gut. bruistudio.com 47

Michael Lester

Josh Harris

Snagging a D&AD yellow pencil led to to an internship at a prestigious Paris marketing agency for Michael, but a year later he returned to London to follow his freelance design dreams.

The self proclaimed ‘Board Dude’ created a name for himself with his hand-drawn typography skills and his inventive way with words. Josh decided university wasn’t for him and followed his Posca pens to the next blank A-board.

Post-internship, what made you decide take the plunge and go freelance? When I started my job I was terrified. I’d spent a year at Ogilvy working on some amazing brands, and I wouldn’t change it for the world, but I hit a point where that initial feeling wore off and I think you can fall into a trap if you’re not careful. I guess I wanted to scare myself a little once again. Freelance is the dream for many people, but we’re also apprehensive about it. What have you learnt so far? The main thing it’s taught me is that the creative world isn’t a straightforward ladder. It might feel like you’re heading towards the top but there really isn’t one. You can venture upwards, hang around halfway or have just as much fun further down. As long as you’re making good work, you can be as versatile as you want. That’s the best thing about freelance; waking up and knowing that if you want to reinvent your practice, you can start right after breakfast. michaelwilliamlester.com Instagram: @michaelwilliamlester 48

What led you to leave university? I found I lacked tenacity and focus at uni. My enthusiasm waned as the years flew by and I concluded that I hadn’t been pragmatic enough with my study. It just wasn’t the right time for me and I wasn’t getting the results I should have. Do you have times where picking up work is slow? What keeps you going? Self-employment is a constant flux of income and loss, but sometimes you get a big hit that keeps you going. I have to be quite methodical when balancing the cost of my equipment so I don’t leave myself in the shit. I do try to be realistic with my income. If you could meet yourself from five years ago what would you say to him? I’d tell him the scores of every World Cup match and get him to invest in an app called Snapchat. Oh and to get a decent haircut and scrap the god-awful attire. theaboarddude.tumblr.com Instagram: @theboarddude

Sam Curtis

Jess Warby

Sam is the director of Coast Design Studio, specialising in the design and production of vinyl graphics. He started Coast in his final year and runs it alongside his full time design job.

After studying illustration in Bristol, Jess moved to London and set up her own studio creating illustrated patches.

Hey Sam, so Coast all started with a vinyl cutter which is a pretty niche piece of equipment. How did you end up acquiring one? Well about seven years ago I helped out an old friend with a few vinyl jobs making some not-very-good “home sweet home” signs and other things like that and saw great potential in this odd medium. A few years later she had to move away and needed to get rid of the cutter so I borrowed some money and just bought it on a whim. Living in London can be a bit of a challenge. Was Coast generating enough for you to survive postgraduation?

Was it a slow start forming your studio? How did you stay motivated? It was quick in terms of setting up. I began making riso prints, comics and paintings, keeping me and my website going. But having spent some time doing digital embroidery at uni I knew I wanted to include it in my process. The machines aren’t cheap and you have to buy special software, so that took a little while. Once I got it I was away and just over a year later it’s becoming a small business. If you were to meet graduate Jess right now, what would you tell her?

Just as I left uni I managed to get a part time job that paid quite well. It just about covered rent and a few beers. Being able to live off a part time job was so important – it gave me time to develop Coast Studio and work on my freelance design. It still isn’t enough for me to live off full-time, but hopefully it will be soon.

To be more open minded. I was lucky enough to do the D&AD Graduate Academy and loved it, but it was mostly advertising-based. If I wasn’t so stuck on illustration I might’ve got more involved in internships and collaborating. I’d say do as many different things as you can, work with people, make as much as possible and watch Ira Glass – Mind the Gap (and maybe Yes Man, even though it’s a bad film). Illustration can be quite a lonely game and might not be what you expected, so have your options open.

coastdesignstudio.co.uk Instagram: @coastdesignstudio

jesswarby.com Instagram: @jesswarbybadges 49

So simple. So complicated. Words // Theo Inglis, Graphic designer & writer Illustration // James Clapham

“Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” So said Paul Rand during an interview in 1996, and he certainly had a point, but also no idea of just how much more complicated the internet was about to make graphic design. As a designer I have found the internet to be both a blessing and a curse, simultaneously a constant companion and incessant distraction. But would I have followed this career path without it? For sure it increased my exposure to graphic design, making it more accessible to my younger self. Yet at the same time my love of books, magazines and reading about design history partly stems from a running away from the internet with its infinite images, to the safety blanket of the library or bookshop in the naïve hope of finding more coherence and some sort of deeper meaning. During some recent, and distinctly noninternet based research, I came across a few poignant anecdotes from the early days of graphic design education. Even the term graphic design itself was first used in an educational context in Britain in 1948 when the RCA heatedly debated what to rename what was then outdatedly called ‘Publicity Design’, proving that the current state of flux is not so much a blip as a permanent condition. Although offputtingly expensive and often lacking diversity, contemporary design education has far fewer barriers to entry than it once had. In 1963, prior to even getting an interview for Edward Wright’s graphics course at Chelsea, 50

applicants had to undergo a life drawing test, a three hour art history written test, an hour of art history slide-tests and an entire day’s graphic design test. Despite being often guilty of nostalgic idealisation of the past, I really wouldn’t have fancied having to go through all that just to get into university. Yet this was the same Edward Wright who, along with many other leading art and design practitioners, in the early 50s was teaching free evening classes at the Central School. Legendary classes which helped to launch the careers of some of Britain’s most important graphic designers (such as Pentagram co-founders Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes and Theo Crosby, as well as Ken Garland and Derek Birdsall) all with no fees, a situation unimaginable today (IRL anyway). Luckily there is a wealth of free education to be had online but it is not quite enough by itself is it? Not knowing what the hell you’re doing as a designer is nothing new either. John Lewis (not that one, good luck looking him up), who was once head of the aforementioned RCA course, writes about one such case in his biography. During his time as an external examiner for an Irish graphic design course during the late 1960s, there was a struggling student, producing no work. Failure seemed the only result possible, until a last-ditch plan was formed – a trip with his tutor and two other students to Paris for a fortnight. It worked a treat and he found his design mojo, so to speak, and became prolific, passing his final examinations with ease.

In the contemporary world of education funding cuts and larger class sizes (thank you, Tories) it feels like the internet can act as our trip to Paris. A surrogate of something lacked, acting as the font of all knowledge, the source of inspiration and your saviour when you think “Oh fuck, I have no idea what I’m doing”. The good news is that the internet can be all of those things. That’s a sigh of relief, eh? But with great power comes great responsibility. Information overload was a big problem for me as a student. The harder you look, the more you find, but not all of it is positive or helpful. Cue the modern phenomenon of FOMO (fear of missing out). Your time as a student or recent graduate is limited, so any time spent doing one thing eats into the time you could be spending on something else, and there is always more you could be doing.

You could easily spend so much time reading well-meaning online advice for designers that you never manage to do any work at all. Online, a consensus is rare, contradictions abound and one designer’s “wish I’d done that” is another’s clichéd worst nightmare. The same goes for job and internship advice: be yourself but fit into the ‘studio culture’, make the tea but don’t look like a suck-up, make an impression but your work needs to speak for itself, don’t work for free but do an internship for less than minimum wage and work just as late as everyone else. Always ‘Work Hard and Be Nice To People’ but in a system that might not be nice back. With the amount of conflicting advice on offer it’s easy to get into a rut of anxiety and uncertainty. When using the internet to try and grow or improve as a designer, along with FOMO, there can be a growing 51

sense of dread, an unravelling of the world of graphic design, a fear that you don’t know half as much as you should. The three-year tiered setup of design education is a bit of a safety blanket – letting you work it all out slowly and surely, but the internet throws you in at the deep end (mentally at least). Words like fear, dread and contradiction aren’t the sort you ever want to use in relation to graphic design. In a creative discipline where confidence, creativity, spontaneity and lateral thinking are key, the last thing you want to be is anxious or second guessing yourself. Employers all want creative thinkers, but hey, don’t over-think it. Personally I never appreciated the positives or skills I had as a student approaching graduation, or celebrated the interests that made me who I am. I was too busy freaking out about my practical skills, or the fact that I felt I didn’t really get Adobe Illustrator. But the good news is this article has a positive end; it’s not all doom and gloom. Upon graduating, and after a few interviews and positive emails, I started to feel a little better about the situation. I thought maybe everything would be ok after all, but niggling doubts and anxieties remained. In the end I was lucky to be offered a job by an agency without having to do an internship there first, which was the part of the puzzle where I feared I would be found out as rubbish or clueless. Dropped into the real world, I realised that I couldn’t be everything that I thought I needed to be, nor did anybody expect that much at first; a bit of potential and enthusiasm go a long way. Best of all, Adobe Illustrator skills can be picked up as you go along.

By chance in my first interview there, I had a bit of a wait for the creative director to be free, and 20 minutes or so of small talk on the subject of design history with the other director ensued. Some time afterward it dawned on me that all the hours I spent geeking out about design history and theory at university wasn’t as I had previously thought just a form of procrastination. It was what made me a bit different and helped me land a job. Ever since I’ve been slowly coming to terms with what interests me and what I actually enjoy doing, as opposed to thinking that I liked every single thing about graphic design, and that becoming a designer was some sort of box-ticking exercise. I think this could be another symptom of the internet age; in a good way it brings designers together, but in doing so it can strip away the space for individual taste and quirks. First and foremost I’m a graphic designer because I do graphic design. Viral posts that reduce designers to Helvetica loving, Comic Sans hating, coffee drinking Photoshop drones with OCD (or whatever the current stereotype is) are a load of bollocks. Just as design isn’t an ABC kind of predictable process, neither is being a designer. It’s all subjective, so individuality should be embraced. There are a lot of clichés on the internet, especially in advice to designers, but as a designer I generally have a natural aversion to both clichés and the predictable. However, I’ve found that some of them ring true; there really is no substitute for time and experience, two things that you won’t find online, but luckily do occur naturally.

The five stages of coffee Words // Ash Billinghay, Writer Illustration // Bruce Mack

Once upon a time I was younger than I am now, and with that youth came naïvety. This naïvety brought with it the idea that coffee would not play a prominent, and at times imposing, role in my career. Back then, coffee was my friend. This is the story of how it became my enemy and, more recently, my accomplice.

day you’re a senior figure. Nah, it’s to do well enough so that you can end up somewhere better.

1: The first job – Punishment

Back then it was shit because I had no work to do and my boss was an obnoxious, self-important dickhead who believed the world revolved around him. Now it’s shit because they promised to pay for my Master’s degree, never did and have left me with a lot more student debt to pay off. Bastards.

There’s something about your first step into proper employment that takes a while to realise – it only serves one purpose. That purpose is not to secure the role for the rest of your life, it’s not to rise steadily up the ranks until one

For me, that first job was a shit 3-month placement in a very small design studio. At the time I knew it was shit, but that was for different reasons than I remember now.

However, I was young, foolish and keen to impress. I couldn’t do this with my work because there never seemed to be any. So, with work creds off the table, coffee creds came into play. I’d always offer the whole office a drink – there were only a few of us, and after a while I’d learn who was likely to say yes and who never would. I also learned who it was important to get right. The nervous web designer, for example, would never complain if you gave him a really milky tea when he’d actually asked for a strong coffee. But, because he was nervous, I’d always try and get his right. I felt good giving him something nice. The dickhead boss, however, would quite literally spit it out as a show of his petulance if you dared make him a coffee with one sugar rather than two. He’d ring up in advance if he was out and say, “Has Ash made any coffees yet? What’s he there for if not?” He had a point. Coffee was the only reason I was there, ultimately. I wasn’t a copywriter; I was a coffee bitch.

2: Moving up – Making friends There comes a time in everyone’s life where they think that a career in the cultural sector might be for them. Admit it; you’ve all been there, applying for a placement at your local art gallery because, in your head, writing about other people’s creativity is just as vital as writing about your own. While at first that might seem like a good excuse to offer your judgemental peers, after a while of working there you realise it actually might not be that bad. After using the line ‘I see a job of Online Media Executive as an ideal link between my on-going Masters in Creative Writing and my aspirations to learn more about what is truly a fascinating industry,’ in 54

your interview, people would be forgiven for thinking of you as a massive bullshitter. But soon you learned that it had some truth in it. For a start, it really is a fascinating industry. Working in a museum and art gallery was probably the most fulfilling part of my career to date, and if you get the chance I’d recommend you do the same. Who wouldn’t enjoy helping school children make a scale replica of a Roman city out of cereal boxes? Coffee started to mean far more to me. This was a job that I could quite happily have stayed in forever, had the money been enough for me to afford my rent. Every time I made a coffee I was doing it to try and befriend people. I was doing it to learn about what they did. Because I wanted them to like me and keep me around for longer. Mate, I got to create the Twitter persona for a prehistoric underwater dinosaur – I could have done that for a lifetime.

3: The big break – Fear When you get that first big chance to impress it can fill you with incredible excitement. It makes you think that everything you’ve worked for has finally paid off. You walk into the doors of a big agency and feel like a king amongst your group of uni mates who have yet to make it. Amidst your new colleagues, though, you’re nothing more than another face to tell what to do. On Facebook you tell people that you’re loving your job, that you are relishing the challenge of making a name for yourself and creating fantastic work for the wonderful clients you’re now hired to work on. In reality you’re bricking it. You can’t sleep for fear you’ve done something wrong, you can’t ask for help

for fear you’ll be seen as being weak, and you can’t make too many coffees for fear you’ll be seen as being lazy. In short, coffee stops being your friend here and starts being your worst nightmare. You doubt every decision you’re making. You count how many times you’ve made one in a day. You start asking specific people if they want one, purely based on whom you want to impress. It’s arse licking at its worst and you’re not even doing it well because you’re shaking. Go thirsty. That’s the best bet.

4: Freelancing – A distraction Oh hey guys, how are you? Me? I’m a writer, doing a bit of freelance stuff at the moment, you know? A few magazines here and there, lots of blogging. Have you heard of Twitter? I’m all over that. Being a freelance writer is fantastic when you have some work coming in. You get to write stuff without getting dressed, you can manage your own time and you can, in theory, work only for the clients you want to work for. Outside of your pathetic dream world, things work a bit differently. You can write stuff without getting dressed, but you lose all sense of schedule and find yourself not writing at all. You can manage your own time, but most of it is spent watching Desperate Housewives and hoping that the sarcastic poems you cold-emailed some prospective clients will turn out to be the jackpot you were looking for. And sure, you can only work for the clients you want to work for, but if you wait for them to come along you’ll never be able to afford to eat. Going freelance brings with it distraction after distraction after distraction. You

have to be very strict with yourself to achieve any success, and even stricter with how many times you say yes to a coffee invite with your friends. “We can write together, over coffee!” they say. “Wonderful!’ you reply. “We got nothing done, did we?” you say a few hours later.

5: Being part of a drinks round – Bliss Throughout every stage of your coffee career you’ll long for one thing more than anything else. Being part of a drinks round is the ultimate sign of acceptance. When that finally happens, you know something’s changed. Suddenly the world seems different; you don’t feel so alone and you’ll never be thirsty again. When you’re in a coffee round there’s always a drink on your table. A coffee round is a friendship group that does not exist outside of the office. It’s one that you wouldn’t tell your secrets to, but you would tell an inappropriate joke to. It’s one that you’ll never bond with over emotional issues, but one that you’ll become very close to at 9:00, 9:30 and 15:00 Monday–Friday. A coffee round is a group of people you’ll never know a great deal about, but you’ll know, with immaculate accuracy, whether or not they like milk in their coffee, whether they prefer tea, and whether they’ll notice if you get it wrong. Friends, when you find yourself in a coffee round, it goes from being something of a chore no matter what stage of the journey you’re on, to being something of a bloody privilege. Coffee? Hell to the yes. 55

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Simon Harle and Liberty Blue Worldwide are the reason you’re reading, touching and smelling this magazine. Without their financial support, it would only exist as a PDF on Dropbox. And PDFs don’t smell of anything. Believe us. We sniffed one once. Nothing. Anyway, Simon’s been a headhunter for 10 years and is now a partner at Liberty Blue Worldwide, who find and place future leaders (that’s you) into the communication and creative industry. Simon and Liberty Blue Worldwide are supporting ShellsuitZombie because they believe in what we’re doing. They understand that investing in future talent is the best way to better our industry. So if you’re feeling a little disillusioned, confused about where your career’s going, or feel like you still don’t know what you’re doing, give him a call. He’s approachable, he listens and we trust him.

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This is the second time in a row we’ve had our mag printed with the guys at Ex Why Zed. There’s a reason for that. They’re not your usual, super-corporate kind of printers. They won’t reply to your emails with one word answers. Your project isn’t “just another job” for them. They’re genuinely interested in what you’re working on. They ask questions, interrogate your brief and figure out the best way to present your work in print. And they’re transparent about all your options, always trying to help you save money. Best of all, they’re on hand to help if you don’t know what you’re doing. Ex Why Zed print all manner of things, but they specialise in mags, zines and degree show catalogues. So go ahead, give ‘em a shout.

exwhyzed.co.uk hello@exwhyzed.co.uk 01206 766647

We asked some of our favourite illustrators and designers to respond visually to the title of this issue. Prepare your peepers, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what they came up with. 60 61 62 64 65 66 68 69 70 71

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Jamie Tobin Jay Chaudhri Madison York Oli Rogers Pete Murgatroyd Marja de Sanctis Rhys Jones Thomas Hedger Alex Gamsu Jenkins Alice Bowsher 59

Career Promiscuity Words // Sean Gilbert, Curator, The Lost Lectures Illustration // Ollie Hoff

“I am wasting my time.” A simple epiphany, revealing a banal and self-indulgent truth. Perhaps this is why mid-twenties angst is so isolating; it’s a passionless grief that you secretly feel guilty about. The sudden disillusionment with what you’re doing is like an air raid siren; the world you comfortably inhabit becomes strangely alien, something at risk of caving in and enclosing you. In short, something to be escaped. My CV reads like a laundry list of old, weird lovers. Some of my previous jobs are fondly recalled, others remain hard to rationalise. A lot has been written about ‘millenials’; a label that’s always felt jargonistic, concocted to sell marketing magazines or consumer reports. Reading about them from the outside, one gets the image of a perilously sexy generation; citizens of the world, whose offices comprise the lobbies of trendy hotels, inspiration hubs and concept cafes. An army of breezy self-promoters, multi-platformed, happy to undertake a slew of careers in a range of industries. What these sexed-up generalisations don’t convey is the angst: with great existential freedom comes great anxiety. I graduated from uni as the recession reached its crescendo. I had no idea how bad the situation really was until a local bar manager showed me his stash of CVs, a towering pile of sheets; a strange magnum opus of iterating jargon and vague false claims. He told me that he posted a vacancy a month ago and now couldn’t stem the flow of applications; people from across the city, people from beyond. It was like London was taking 72

its cues from a Steinbeck novel; the rumour of a minimum wage job inspiring extravagant pilgrimages, like the rumour of farmhands needed in a dustbowl. I had spent the summer reporting on European cinema for an LA based film journal. Midway through the London Film Festival, my publication went bankrupt, my editor fled to Iceland and stopped replying to e-mails. Baffled by the situation, and scared by the world awaiting, I still showed up to the press conferences and took notes, like one of those stunned and dislocated soldiers you read about, who dress in full uniform and report for duty years after the war’s been lost and the regime toppled. I realised that beggars couldn’t be choosers and I needed to compromise on my artistic aspirations if I were to get paid. To this end, I eventually secured a job as a fashion head-hunter. Testament to my desperation, I considered this a triumph and told all my friends. Sadly, my boss was a twenty-year-old megalomaniac, who’d spent the years following his GCSEs refining his talent for corporate espionage and sexual harassment. Two months down the line, he had defrauded me of what remained of my student loan, then fired me on the grounds of professional misconduct. Some of my most ambitious friends comprised a group of out-of-work actors and models, who remained obstinately unemployed. They had started Unemployment Club in a cafe in Camden, which commenced at random times in the afternoon (essentially when they woke) and was set up as a way of

channelling their creative instincts into something more entrepreneurial. We’d sit around a table for hours on end drinking coffee and pitching ideas for TV shows, food trucks, YouTube channels... It was a frenzied and unproductive atmosphere, but I think the group’s real purpose was to reinstate some sense of hope and autonomy during a grim time (even if this was half-baked and probably futile). By now, The Guardian, who seemed to be on our side, was using the term ‘Doomed Generation’ as shorthand for twentysomethings. It was backhanded support. After a certain volume of fruitless applications, dead ends and improbable setbacks, you cross a tipping point. I remember the night clearly. I was staying with a mentally unstable family member who, for reasons that remain unclear, hurled my belongings out of the apartment and asked me to leave. Freshly unemployed, I was now freshly homeless. I was seriously worried about where I could live, where I would get money and where it was all going. Simultaneously, I was bored and exhausted by these worries, which raced through my mind with hypnotic regularity. In short, I was poor, and couldn’t bring myself to give a shit anymore. I saw a job teaching English Literature at a school in Hong Kong. I wasn’t quite sure where Hong Kong was, but it was the only thing I applied to that day. This marked the beginning of a new direction; a more thoughtless and instinctive mode of job hunting. Three days later, after a brief phone interview where I professed my enthusiasm for the arts, Asia and teaching, I had a flight booked and was leaving indefinitely.

In Hong Kong I moved into a room that was furnished with a TV, a microwave and a bed. One day while at work, my landlord emailed me to inform that he had taken my (reasonably small) bed and replaced it with a smaller bed, in accordance with their new rent structure. A box in the truest sense, you could touch each of its four walls from any point in the room; if you were bored, you could scale it like an insect. Oddly, none of this bothered me and I sort of romanticized the destitution. The fact that I was sleeping somewhere unlivable yielded the hopeful impression that I was constantly on the brink of a change; that this whole situation would collapse and take new shape. Whereas in London, one feared stagnation, in H.K., one constantly anticipated grand movement, as if you could take flight at any moment. This was the spirit of the times, Hong Kong was a city of rabid dreaming and constant transition. The streets teemed at one in the morning. The cafes never shut. Shops and bars launched, closed down, launched again with such frequency that you felt you dreamt them, that you were only ever sleepwalking through this fluid city of ever shifting faces and restless edifices. Overlooking every corner, angelic-faced models surveyed the landscape with indifference, preaching Gucci, Rolex, Patek Philippe, on billboards twenty feet high; the moral compass of a city where your dreams are your reality. “What next?”. Cities that dream big are flanked with existential casualties; I was soon to become one of them. During the day I helped rich students get into 73

Oxbridge. I was essentially an intellectual concubine, ‘editing’ the personal statements, essays, course works of the city’s financial elite. When people asked me how I felt about prostituting my knowledge for such dubious causes, I said it didn’t bother me, but I was looking for new opportunities. My local friends were always hustling. One of them ran a bar and told me his mother was making him take a night course. “In what?” – “Anything, she just says I should be moving forward”; sometimes the progression was objectless. 74

I met the editor of Time Out in a bar and pitched at him relentlessly through the night. As he got drunker, my pitches sounded better and I was soon interviewing former Pussycat Dolls or minimal psytrance DJs for the nightlife section; another notch on my CV. My other employers promoted me and had me in charge of teaching law. I was working six days a week and writing on the seventh. I went to parties and took cards. I started a blog. I started editing scripts. I caught myself Googling masters courses in my spare time. When people

asked me what I do, I said: “tough question”. It was to remain my answer for the next five years; the career-chat equivalent to “no comment”. This was normal. In Hong Kong people either moved or they drowned. Some of my friends lived on the city’s surrounding islands; Discovery Bay, Lama, and had become marooned; sticking to the same job for years, they found their prospects shrinking around them. The rest of us were moving fast, as if we’d all started unconsciously running, surprised when the signs of exhaustion crept in.

A fashion editor called K became my best friend. She liked me because I had a basic understanding of Sartre and read introductions to Schopenhauer in the public library (a clear sign that something was amiss). I liked her because she was one of those casualties I mentioned before; wildly successful, but fascinated with the meaninglessness of her own toil. We attended parties at extravagant hotels in order to eat economically. Personally poor, we watched the proceedings as you would a strange, arthouse movie, with an admixture of 75

awe and incomprehension; pool parties with pumped up men in $500 swimming trunks, who knocked back glasses of champagne and oafishly courted. At night, we’d get drunk and talk about our souls. During our long and sinuous conversations, it seemed half the time we said things simply to test what they sounded like, to see if we could convince ourselves of our beliefs. On our last night together she told me that she loved me and that I understood her more than anyone she’d ever met; she explained this through a metaphor whereby she followed me down a beach, casting her belongings into the sea as she progressed. Then she told me she was married to a man in Wales. My friendship with K clarified something. Or at least demonstrated a general lack of clarity that seemed endemic to everything. Despite what job hustlers tell themselves, what you do is central to your self-conception; to how you forecast your future. The quick-footed shuffle from industry to industry eventually takes its toll. By this point I was teaching law on a regular basis and couldn’t keep up with the magazine deadlines. There comes a point where the mind is stretched past its elastic limit. I’d tried to right the course, find authentic direction, looked deep into myself to discover what it is I wanted to do... The only thing I could determine was a series of eventualities I wanted to avoid. I wanted to avoid living at home, wanted to avoid the riots, wanted to avoid that moment when you introduce yourself at a party and find yourself circumnavigating the topic of careers.

I returned to London after a year or so but my perspective had shifted. From the outside, I seemed industrious and almost entrepreneurial. On the inside, I felt like an imposter taking the job market for a ride. I applied for jobs with a spirit of absurdity. I found myself writing copy for family law in basements in Chancery Lane (one of the worst and shortest posts I’ve ever held; a pressure cooker so extreme that my lasting memory of it was watching the financial director weep in the basement while performing maudlin renditions of Les Miserables to himself). Later, I found myself living in a luxury hotel, helping a startup in Dubai. In the space of a year and a half, I’d shifted from interviewing fading popstars in Hong Kong to being interviewed in the United Arab Emirates, having repositioned myself as a ‘super tutor’ of the Middle East. The coherency of it all was slipping. My stints grew shorter as I grew increasingly footloose. My cynicism hardened: I undertook a career in PR. I started applying for jobs on the most arbitrary motivations, watching my salary ping-pong with vague disinterest. This is promiscuity in its truest sense, when you give up on a type and play the field with reckless abandon. You’re not sure of your motivations; whether you’re looking for ‘the one’ – that career or lifestyle that perfectly encapsulates you, or whether you’re doing the opposite; scorning the concept of a meaningful career and playing fancy dress. At uni, I wrote papers that presupposed a purpose to all human endeavours; three years of writing earnestly about earnest epochs, led by passionate, well-meaning

individuals. But I graduated into a bored, post-modern job market, where the most successful seemed not to believe in anything but success for success’ sake. On the other hand, the earnest lacked viable objects; they described themselves as ‘passionate about SEO’ or ‘Facebook gurus’ on LinkedIn; sentences that strained credulity and made the word seem lunatic. Our ‘upstarts’ and ‘disrupters’ were those who created apps devising innovative ways of linking consumers with services. Our rebel idols took to the pulpit to encourage apathy and not voting as a form of dissidence. In this context, who can blame our generation for adopting a baffled and disinterested state of mind; for looking at jobs on clearly opportunistic level, because the immediate gains are the only thing that make any concrete sense. To me, hipsters or ‘millenials’ are an odd hybrid between 60’s hippies and 80’s cutthroats. Often conflating liberal, vaguely anti-capitalist values with an appreciation for nice things and a refined self-concern. It’s a confusing generation and one with dissatisfaction built into its DNA. It’s true, our generation has a particularly fickle relationship towards careers. We blame it on the recession, which bred us into hustlers quick to seize opportunity; or on opportunism, which is the defining characteristic of our age. But I think there’s a vulnerable idealism that underlines it all. Some of the most promiscuous freelancers I know are also the hardest working individuals I’ve ever met; the sort who take their laptops to the pub and go dark for weeks on end while they complete projects. Beneath the hustling is a childlike belief that out

there is a project that is right for them, that needs discovering and doing. “I’m your psycho fan” I told the frontman of my favourite band when I met him in New York “I know all the words... I’ve probably wept to your music actually… the green room’s this way”. I’ve now been working as a lecture curator for two and a half years. An improbable career and one that I didn’t know existed when I was studying. One rewarding thing about the job is that I work in close proximity to dreamers; my colleagues, the talent we bring in, the runners we use. It’s a community of people who dedicate their lives to grasping at this arbitrary thing that is never concretely explainable. After each event we collapse and start planning afresh. New concepts, new programmes, new cities. When I told my idol how I felt about his music, he looked uncomfortable. This is partly for obvious reasons (self-proclaimed psychos are difficult to handle politely) but it’s something I’ve noticed continually when artists meet their fans. Fans have a way of looking at their heroes and their work as a finished product, with a sense of completion. To the artist and many others of our generation, the idea of completion seems a horrifying anticlimax; they’re listening for their next call to arms.

I still don’t know what I’m doing Words // Naresh Ramchandani, Partner, Pentagram Illustration // Sam Ailey

The way I see it, there are some things I can already do, some things I can maybe learn to do and some things I will never be able to do. I’m always going to be a little less excited by the things I can already do, mostly because I’ve done them before. For example, I’ve created a bunch of reasonably good advertising campaigns. If I was a super-smart businessperson, I would work out the formulae for those campaigns, name those formulae, write a vainglorious book about them, do speeches about them ad nauseam and create an international agency full of cookie cutter munchkins to replicate them around the world. But to do that would be so dull. I would learn some things but they would all be things I don’t want to learn, like how to read a profit and loss account fluently and how to say the same things again and again and feign interest while actually having none. At the other end of the scale are the things I will never be able to do. I used to dream that one day I would write the next Waste Land, or write and direct the next Stranger Than Paradise, or be at the vanguard of the next breakthrough genre in electronic dance music. But in recent years I’ve learned not to yearn for these things. To achieve them, I suspect my skills would need to be a little more developed by now. My poetry doesn’t yet show the signs of expressing the great alienations of the age, the videos I’ve shot on my iPhone have not really forged the new 78

beatnik mise-en-scène and my looping and sampling skills probably peaked at GarageBand v5. I have come to accept that I probably won’t reach those distant dreams that lie the other side of the misty mountains. For me, the fun is not in the all-toopossibles, or the impossibles, but in the maybes. The things I could maybe do if I persisted enough and got lucky enough. The creative endeavours that build on what I know but which push me further than I have been before, to camps higher than where I am but definitely on this side of the mountain. For instance, I don’t know how to make a two hour film, but I do know how to make a series of animated shorts and maybe I can build them through trial and error into an interesting two hour story. Equally, I have no idea how to make a new electronic dance sound but I can play guitar passingly well and maybe I can write a bunch of songs that become the basics of a very simple and personal album. I say maybe: in fact both those projects are well under way, alongside a couple of others for good measure. And they’re all so liberating. They’re not a client’s, or commissioner’s, or investor’s. They’re mine. I’ve promised them to no one, so no one’s expecting them. They’re an experiment, so they’re just as likely to turn out badly as to turn out well. It doesn’t matter. These ‘maybe’ projects are about trying, exploring, hopefully completing but always growing. And I know why I do them: because when I finish them, I’ll know a little more.

Fraudulently creative Words // Brenda Wong, Writer, Hexjam Illustration // Lucie Ebrey

Hi, I’m Brenda, and I’m an impostor. Or so I think every time I walk through my office front door. It’s been a few months since I’ve been transferred into the editorial team from the client services department, and although the lump-in-the-throat nervousness has mostly gone away, it is still stupidly 80

intimidating sitting among some of the quickest-thinking people I’ve ever met. For months my job title has been in its own special level of limbo, changing from content marketing to campaigns to community management. Now here I sit, sweating, as I struggle to churn out article pitches for the morning meeting. The title of ‘writer’? Nowhere in sight.

Trust me. Enforced stereotypes are the worst thing for a Chinese gal who spends her days batting off the various jibes about being good at maths (I’m not), stingy as hell (not according to my bank account) and a bad driver (alright maybe). However, the fact is, doing a job that isn’t necessarily branded as ‘useful’ is flipping difficult to explain to my extended Asian family. My mother suggested I just send my uncle my CV. My cousins are all either doctors, dentists or accountants, and achingly, I wonder if the reason why I didn’t choose that path was simply because I was too defiant. “I don’t want to live a soulless life,” I embarrassingly scribbled on Tumblr when I was 17. Damn all that poetry I was encouraged to read. I am almost ashamed to admit my stance of privilege, because privileged I am. I had incredible teachers who influenced me with the likes of Virginia Woolf and T S Eliot. It was incredible. Every day was like a scene straight out of Dead Poets Society, my grizzly grey English teacher passionately exclaiming that yes, maths and science and engineering are all worthy pursuits. But there is nothing that will enrich you more than putting pen to paper. My parents were supportive, to a point. It was only on the day I said to them I wanted to do English Literature at university when the truth came out. The years of letting me write bad sonnets, acting out Shakespeare and reading Vonnegut were what they hoped was a temporary phase. “You wouldn’t be able to do anything with an English Literature degree. Be realistic.” They lived a hard life, mum and dad. At night I know she tosses and turns 6,000 miles away, dreaming of a better life for me than the one she lived through, poor and wanting in the south of Malaysia. My dad works hard to give us all the

things he didn’t have when he grew up in a makeshift shack in his hometown. What I didn’t understand, sitting in the backseat of a car with tears falling down my face at 17 as they said no, was that burning desperation for their kid not to struggle the way they struggled, ever again. So, I applied to read law. Grudgingly, I started the degree, and God it was like a sprite had snuck in the night and turned my spirit off. No matter how hard I tried (and tried I did), I was completely and utterly shit at it. Three years passed and I finished it. I, Ishmael, had survived my very own Moby Dick, and man, it was a beast. By that point, my parents and I had reached an understanding we couldn’t face before. They only wanted what was best for me. I only wish I had the strength to express that trying to fit my square into a circle meant cutting my corners off. So here I am, fighting a make-believe battle to prove that I can do this. I can write. I can write well. I can actually make something of my lost passion. The day I sent my first piece off to the editor I very nearly popped a new vein in my forehead from the stress. It got published. Soon enough they were actually listening to my ideas and to my genuine surprise, commissioning them. The anxiety is sometimes crippling. “I’m not funny enough to write funny pieces. Why are they letting me do this, I can’t even string two sentences together without fucking my tenses up. Are they laughing at me or with me?” I may never feel truly comfortable in this team. Hell, I’m not even sure whether a writer’s life is truly for me. It doesn’t matter. What does is the feeling of electricity in my fingers when they fly across the keyboard, and knowing that, yeah, I’m switched on again.

Interview & illustrations // Alex Vissaridis Photography // Nathan Perkins

“Who would win in a fight between one three-legged horse and three one-legged horses?” We thought we’d kick off our interview with Jonny Burch and Andrew Muir Wood with something light-hearted, but boy, did this throw up a whole load of counter-questions. How did they lose their legs? Who’s riding the horses? What are the horses’ names? Is one of them called Steven? If one of them was called Jared, would it be more likely to win? Jonny and Andrew may have slowly taken a back seat from their ShellsuitZombie duties over the last couple of years, but they sure as hell haven’t lost any of that hungry inquisitiveness they instilled in their successors. In December 2012, they handed the reigns to their beloved side project over to 25 new faces, fresh out of uni. Always there for support, they would step in when we needed help, but largely left us to our own devices. Three years down the line, SSZ is now a revolving door of young creatives, and some of us who were there at the handover are planning to step away as well. Without telling them any details, we invited Jonny and Andrew to The Four Quarters, a gaming arcade bar in Peckham, where we surprised them with the news that they were to be our second big interview in issue six. The look on Jonny’s face was priceless. Andrew had already figured it out. Bastard. 82

ShellsuitZombie was founded in the summer of 2008, when Jonny graduated and landed his first job at a book publisher – a role that he found didn’t push him enough. “They’d give me what they thought was a day’s work and it would take me two hours, so I taught myself how to make a website.” Seeing the mates he graduated with struggling to find a job, he decided to get them on board to help, and the subject matter of this new website pretty much decided itself. “We went to a D&AD event and got talking about what we were doing, and they decided to help us out. That was our sort of break and we ended up doing New Blood that year. From then on it was all about growing it. The print mag came a year later.” Doing ShellsuitZombie was way more interesting than Jonny’s first job—your first job is nearly always fucking boring—and it gave him a way to do the stuff that he wanted to do. “I got my friends involved, we got drunk a lot, we talked about the future and imagined huge dreams. It was exciting. We got to meet people who we never otherwise would have done, and got an inside look into an industry that seemed impossible to get into.” Andrew joined the team a little later, initially writing for the blog from a product design background, but slowly becoming more involved in the events side of things. We asked him what he got out of joining. “I believe it was professional bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman who said “ain’t nuttin’ to it but to do it”. Before I got involved with SSZ, I was kind of a planning person. I’d plan to do things, and put a lot of time into how I was going to do stuff, working out all the possible things that could go wrong, and I’d get kind of paralysed by the over-planning of it all. “I think when you’re running your own thing, you just have to fucking do it. Time’s run out for planning, deadline’s approaching and you have to just make it look like you know what you’re doing. But then you realise that actually, that’s what everyone else is doing; they’re just taking things on and figuring it out along the way. Working on SSZ got me to that realisation a lot faster, and it was very liberating.” 84

“I would strongly recommend not thinking at all.” adds Jonny. “Thinking is boring and takes too long.” “There’s a spectrum. Jonny’s at the ‘don’t think, just do’ end–” “It’s called a bias to action. People like it!” “Well, there are other words that describe that kind of person.” Jonny does a perfect ‘u wot m8?’ face. Andrew continues, “I’m more at the thinking end. It’s a good combo to have both working together.”

There’s something we’ve always wondered. Was Jonny drunk when he came up with the name? Turns out he wasn’t. His long-term girlfriend (now fiancée, aww) Karen Brotherton, is an illustrator and had taken on a commission for an 80s disco night that was running a Halloween party. “She was drawing a zombie in a shellsuit, and I couldn’t think of a name, so I literally just stole her idea. So many people have asked about the name. There is literally nothing clever about it.” As the last syllable left Jonny’s lips, we all noticed a look of pure betrayal had washed over Andrew’s face. “I’ve never heard that story before.” He stood up straight, stared Jonny down and gestured towards the Street Fighter II machine. “Let’s settle this.” Character select. Andrew picks Ryu. Jonny goes for Ken. The first round is very scrappy, but Andrew just about edges it. Round two is also close, but it’s a warm day and their palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. Andrew’s hand slips at a crucial moment and Jonny’s well-timed Shoryuken wins him the round. Wiping his palms on his shirt, the look on Andrew’s face going into this final round is one of pure determination. As the counter begins, Andrew’s Ryu jumps back, dodging an immediate offensive from Jonny’s Ken, but follows with a series of combos. Jonny can do nothing as Andrew’s fingers smack those buttons with all the subtlety of a pneumatic drill. One final Hadoken from Ryu. Glowing letters fill the screen. ‘PERFECT!’ Perfect indeed – our next question asks them if they’ve ever fallen out. “I think it comes across earlier,” Andrew explains, “when we spoke about how Jonny’s a doer and I’m a thinker. There have been times where Jonny’s said yes to something, and I’ve initially got stressed out because of the logistics side of things, but the best solution always gets worked out very quickly.” “We always move through the argument stage very quickly,” adds Jonny, “We always kiss and make up.” 85

ShellsuitZombie was always meant to be run “for creative graduates, by creative graduates”, so in the summer of 2012, with a few years between them and their graduation ceremony, Jonny describes how they began to feel that their opinions had become somewhat tempered; they were less militant about the things they believed when it was set up. “I felt quite strongly that it should always be run by people who are a bit pissed off about how graduates are treated in the industry, but that was starting to become less relevant to me.” “I think your priorities change over time;” Andrew concludes. “I was running ZombieLabs, the commercial arm of SSZ, and that was my only source of money, so naturally I started to think of ShellsuitZombie as something that could potentially be another source of income. But that ultimately would take away from the reason that it was set up, and it made me realise that maybe I wasn’t thinking about the project in the right way anymore.” We can definitely relate to that feeling of changing priorities. As a few of us are taking on more responsibilities at work, or perhaps starting projects of our own, we are finding ourselves with less time to dedicate to the original ShellsuitZombie mission. We’re more focused on getting where we want to be with our day jobs; we don’t really feel settled into the right career path yet. It’s a confusing time still, but for different reasons. We’re on the cusp of something, but we don’t quite know what yet. Would Andrew and Jonny have any advice? Jonny would embrace it. “If you’re not constantly questioning what you’re doing then you’ll get complacent and sit on your arse,” he says. “I would say about once a month I think about finding a space in Leytonstone and setting up a coffee shop where I can make furniture in the back. And that’s not even a joke.” Calling bullshit to the myth that you can’t forge a decent career if you keep changing what you do, Jonny’s already switched industries three times in seven years. From book design, into agency-side marketing, 86

and now in the startup/product world, these days he calls himself a product designer, whereas before he was a digital designer, and before that, a print designer. And he wouldn’t be surprised if he changed again. “In five years time I might not even be a designer at all!” We quickly touch on whether Andrew and Jonny are doing what they thought they would be when they graduated. “I didn’t even know the job I’m doing was a thing,” says Jonny. “Exactly,” Andrew chips in, “my job title didn’t exist at all ten years ago. After my undergraduate studies, I thought that I was gonna be a designer, and what I’ve ended up doing is much more about strategy, research and planning. You have to kind of reinvent yourself, to translate your skills into what’s relevant to the world around you.” Jonny continues, “I think it’s okay to not really know, or not be satisfied with what you’re doing now, because it means the next thing will be better. So go travelling, join a naked commune, become a cheese maker. As long as it pays the bills and makes you happy, now’s the time to do what the fuck you want, before you get married, start a family or have any other kind of responsibilities. Quit your job and spend your days as a flea farmer.” “Or a whale annoyer.” Andrew adds. “I think the interesting thing about being a creative is that you’re basically a walking money-printing machine. There will always be a need for creative people. In that way, you’re ultimately flexible.” We take a short Ms Pac-man break, to contemplate the creativity involved in annoying whales for a living. Jonny goes first, and completes the first level without losing a life, racking up an impressive score of 8230. The second level doesn’t go quite as smoothly; a couple of mistakes cost him two lives, but he completes it, and we see the first cutscene, ‘They Meet’, where Pac-man and Ms Pac-man first lock eyes. Perhaps transfixed by the love in the air, Jonny starts level three by immediately running straight into Blinky, losing his third life. Andrew loses all three lives in the first level. He prefers Street Fighter II.

Has the industry changed for young people since SSZ started? Jonny explains how, when he graduated, he felt that in-house design roles were almost second fiddle to being a rockstar working for an agency. “But I didn’t know enough about all those other jobs, and how gamechanging they were compared to doing crappy agency work. So, if you work for a tiny product company, or equally if you work as a designer at the NHS, or on GOV.UK, where normal, everyday people get positively affected by the design decisions you make, that’s so much more rewarding than selling people stuff they don’t want.” He argues that roles in product design, UX and interaction design are better understood, so grads have a wider range of viable career options at their disposal than they might have done seven years ago. However, universities need to be more responsive to the changes in industry – the majority of courses are still focusing solely on traditional disciplines, and the pool of fresh talent for these new types of roles is small. “It’s very difficult to hire a graduate into a UX role – they just don’t have the skills yet.” Andrew echoes Jonny’s statements, talking about the general increase in the value of creativity to a business, not just as a way of making things more beautiful, but also as a way of thinking and problemsolving. “With anything you make, you have to do your research, preparation, then identify the problem, come up with various solutions, test them all and then implement your best one. To designers, that’s all super obvious stuff that’s part of any process, but it’s amazing how many businesses historically haven’t seen that, and test their hypotheses by releasing a product, seeing it fail and then wondering why that happened. That’s changing. It’s a different place to be a designer now than it was ten years ago.” 88

Jonny leaves us with some strong advice to round off the evening. “Don’t worry about the first job you get out of uni. Just make sure that what you’re doing alongside that is getting you to where you want to be. If you want to become an editorial illustrator, make sure that you go to events and meet people who are making magazines. Draw stuff in your spare time.” Now Jonny’s in a position where he’s hiring designers, and he tells us he’s always looking for the personal projects in people’s portfolios that show that they have passion and know what they want. He looks at people’s work to see what their dream jobs are. “If someone comes in and they’re working for a crappy place, but they’d be happier making apps, and they’ve made one in their spare time; that stuff is gold dust.” Happiness has been a recurring theme throughout the evening. It’s at the core of everything ShellsuitZombie has done in the seven years since its inception. It should be at the core of everything any of us do in life and work, but it’s easy to start feeling down if things aren’t quite going the way you had planned. That rose-tinted future you had in your head when you graduated won’t come easy. It still hasn’t arrived for many of us. Most of us still don’t know what we’re doing. But we’re getting there. As we pack up our things and head our separate ways, Jonny reflects. “People shouldn’t waste their time complaining about a job they’re not happy with, as if that’s it now for the rest of their lives. That’s simply not true.”

Whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s responsible for this? Editing, art direction and design Sam Ailey Alex Vissaridis

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Helping hands Jonny Burch Andrew Muir Wood Charlotte Prince

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THREE YEARS AGO A FRESH BUNCH OF CREATIVE GRADS STEPPED OUT INTO ‘THE REAL WORLD’ AND REALISED THEY HAD NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT THEY WERE DOING. AND GUESS WHAT? THAT STILL HASN’T CHANGED. WE’VE PUT ON PARTIES, EXHIBITIONS, TALKS AND PORTFOLIO CRITS, WRITTEN ONE METRIC BUTTLOAD OF BLOG POSTS AND NOW WE’VE PUBLISHED THREE MAGAZINES TOGETHER. AT TIMES, SHELLSUITZOMBIE HAS BEEN THAT LITTLE BOOST WE NEEDED TO MAKE IT ON TO BIGGER AND BETTER THINGS, BUT WE’RE STILL NOWHERE NEAR THE END OF OUR JOURNEY YET. AND NEITHER ARE YOU. FINDING YOUR WAY AS A CREATIVE IS TOUGH AS HELL SOMETIMES. WE DON’T KNOW WHERE WE’RE GOING EXACTLY, BUT WE’RE GOING THERE TOGETHER AND WE’RE GONNA HAVE A FUCKING GREAT TIME ALONG THE WAY. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE. START A COLLECTIVE. GO DRINK BEER AND SWEAR AT EACH OTHER. STAY UP LATE ON SCHOOL NIGHTS MAKING A MAGAZINE. SWEAR SOME MORE. CHALLENGE EACH OTHER. DRINK MORE BEER. HAVE FUN. STAY HUNGRY.