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ALEX SPIRO | NOBROW

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ALEX SPIRO | DIRECTOR OF NOBROW | WWW.NOBROW.NET

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FROM THE FRINGE OF CREATIVITY

he following interview took place during a snowy afternoon when Alex came back to Central Saint Martins to offer a little advice to graphics students. His softer side became evident as he took time to look at work and chatted to some about their hopes and plans for the future. Afterwards student writer Oliver Ballon asked some questions.

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Alex Spiro is an impressive guy, really intense and strong. You can tell he is his own man from the first handshake. His work is a breath of fresh air and he appears to be a real force of nature behind Nobrow, an illustrator’s collective set up with Sam Arthur. When you walk in the East London shop you first get a

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ALEX SPIRO | NOBROW

Oliver Campbell Ballon: What was it that you learnt from your time at CSM? Alex Spiro: I was here (St Martins) from 2003-2007 and I spent the first half of the four years, mainly focusing on graphics. At the beginning of my second year of the BA I decided to switch over to illustration. I was answering a lot of my design briefs with illustrated solutions and had always straddled the two disciplines, I thought I’d give it a shot.

I had already completed a degree before I came to CSM, so I was a bit older, 21. For my first degree I read modern history at Oxford, as you can imagine, I was coming from a very different background to many of my design classmates. I learnt a lot at CSM, but I have to admit that much of what I learnt was self-taught.

I think that’s what’s quite good about Saint Martins, it forces you to teach yourself things that you’re scared of, things that you can get from the technicians

but aren’t a third year! But I think that it was an encouraging and very creative atmosphere. It helped having a lot of talented students around to inspire and collaborate with, it pushed you to keep inventing and innovating to compete As I was on my second degree at CSM, I was working quite a bit on the side whilst at college. I was mostly working on music videos and idents, little AV projects. My forte was digital matte painting and in-betweens for animation, so I did a lot of that. Initially I was working for a director who I had known socially, Sam Arthur, I had experience working with other directors too, but Sam was the most talented (and the best to work for). As we worked together more, we found that we had a good work dynamic. So I kept coming back to him to work in my holidays and any down time I had from college. I was mostly going in that direction when I graduated, AV and music videos.

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my time as a historian).. Having said that, I found that many of my ideas were being ignored because of the necessary contingencies of editorial control. That was to be expected, I’m sure, but I felt that illustrators should be trusted more in the art direction process, so the idea for Nobrow began to gestate.

Sam was also looking for a change and he was as much of a print enthusiast as he was a great storyteller, publishing just seemed a good area for both of us to explore. So we set up Nobrow, with a screen-printing bed, a small budget for Issue No 1.

Our aim: to develop a publishing company that would focus on the qualities of books as covetable objects and to always respect the illustrators’ vision.

ALEX SPIRO | NOBROW

However, I also began working as an illustrator, at first with children’s publishers; I did some work for Dorling and Kindersley on a new non-fiction list. The first book I worked on was called Take Me Back. That was an interesting experience, not entirely positive, but not negative either. What was particularly enjoyable was that I was allowed to combine the two halves of my (very long) education, as the spreads required a lot of research to render them useful to the editors (research I was more than familiar with from my time as a historian). Having said that, I found that many of my ideas were list. The first book I worked on was called Take Me Back. That was an interesting experience, not entirely positive, but not negative either. What was particularly enjoyable was that I was allowed to combine the two halves of my (very long) education, as the spreads required a lot of research to render them useful to the editors (research I was more than familiar with from

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ALEX SPIRO | NOBROW

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OB: If you knew then what you know now… Could you give any advice to anyone starting out?

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AS: Yes, don’t expect too much as a result from having been here, [CSM]. You’re still going to have to work your arse off. You’re still going to have to do some unpleasant work placements and internships and work for some unpleasant people. Nothing is handed to you on a silver platter once you leave; it’s all down to you and your work ethic.

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I don’t mean to sound pessimistic but you have to have realistic expectations when you leave; you aren’t going to immediately be an art director in a design studio, and often you’ll have to work your way up the ladder, gradually.

But at the same time be ambitious and aim high, just don’t expect rapid success, it happens to the few and even then it can be short lived. But enjoy your work and do it well and anything is achievable.

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OB: When you left was there a defining moment after leaving university that you could characterise as your big break?

AS: I spent a year working after I left Saint Martins mostly freelancing I was also doing a part time post graduate at the Prince’s Drawing School. So I was dividing myself between those things and I realised that besides working with Sam, I hadn’t really enjoyed working for anyone else. It may be because I’m a bit bolshie and I don’t like taking orders from people. So I thought the best way for me to work was to set up something with an equal partner. It started small and with a few projects, over time we built a proper company with employees, even a water cooler! No longer is it just a room with a screen-printing bed, some Japanese Kaiju toys and a pot of Indian ink.

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OB: Are there any specific practical tips you can give?

So I would say do internships while you’re still at college.

Because when you leave you’re going to need a job and you might not have the luxury to try out all the internships you’re interested in.

AS: I have to say with Nobrow it was very much a case of assembling a group for the first project based on their qualities and skills, as illustrators and it had almost nothing to do with the people I was at college with.

It goes without saying that you get help from friends, but it was Sam, my former boss and now business partner who was the most formative in my development after college.

ALEX SPIRO | NOBROW

AS: I can’t stress enough the importance of doing internships whilst you’re at college. Design studios vary greatly in size, from 3 or 4 people, to hundreds of employees, if you’re talking about something like Pentagram.

Whatever size, these studios can always do with extra help, but can’t always afford it. That’s where interns come in.* Internships are a great way to learn and get stuck in. Who knows, you may even end up with a job! (*Don’t do internships without pay for more than a few weeks!

They’re a good ‘in’ but they can be exploitative, be careful).

OB: Was there a lot of collaboration at university? Or was it the people you meet outside CSM or by proxy that you end up working with?

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KATH TUDBALL | JOHNSON BANKS

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FROM THE FRINGE OF CREATIVITY

ath Tudball has been working with Michael Johnson for the past ten years as a senior designer at johnson banks. Together with fellow CSM alumni & co-worker Julia Woollams, she has developed unusual branding solutions for an impressive range of local and international clients, including BFI, Pew Center and Virgin Atlantic.

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In this interview, Kath shares her experience as a student at Central Saint Martin’s and offers some tips and insight on surviving in the industry after graduation.

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JHT: Did you go on a linear path to Johnson Banks, or try a series of different things and decide upon that later?

KT: It’s an unusual path, because I worked with Julia, and we worked together at CSM from our second year onwards; mainly just because we were friends and we liked [each others’] ideas, and you know you’ll ask your mates, ‘Is this a good idea? I’m thinking of doing this for the project’.

From there we decided to collaborate on a few projects and by the time we in our third year, I’d say it was 50/50. Half our projects were done together, half on our own.

So as we started to reach graduation, we started to panic: ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do for a job? How are we going to live?’

You know, all of those scary questions. Because we had all this work together, we thought to kill a few birds with one stone, and we set ourselves a project to brand ourselves, as if we were a design company – as if we were to set up as ‘Kath and Julia’, the design group. So we came up with an identity, and a brand – stationary and all that

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had something we could send to potential employers In those days, there wasn’t actually that much online to tell you who was doing what, and my advice to students now is: do your research. If you see something that is great, you know, in a magazine or on a blog, find out who did it, make a note of that and remember them. Research those people. You need to find people who really inspire you out there, and those are the ones you need to hit up when you leave

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stuff – and made a screen-based digital portfolio of our projects together and separately. It was a really good way to focus on getting a portfolio together that we could show to the outside world. And so, we did that, and presented our degree show as if it was our studio. We had a little room and we made it look like a little design studio: there was a computer there and you could look at our work. It was an unusual approach, but it meant that when we finished, we actually

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and say ‘I want to talk to you, do you have any advice? Can I have an internship?’ Don’t waste your time with people who you don’t have a connection to. So, it was difficult for us; there was no Creative Review blog, you had to buy the magazine, it was really expensive. It was hard to do this research. So we asked tutors like Cath and Phil and all those people, to tell us some design companies – we were really that clueless! And they gave us some names and we looked through Design Week at who was winning awards who was doing interesting work. We looked at their website and we ended up with maybe a list of twelve companies that we admired and we sent them our stuff on a little CD: ‘This is us; Kath and Julia. You can see us as a pair or meet us individually if you want, but we’d really like to show you our portfolio in person’. And that led directly to the job that we are still in now, at Johnson Banks. Our boss, Mike

Johnson Banks. Our boss, Mike Johnson, asked us to come in for a chat, we showed him our portfolio together individual and separate, and we started an internship, which turned into a job.

Now I look back, it was amazing timing; we were very lucky that there was a vacancy there and all those things, however it was a company that we really admired and we knew when we saw the work that we would ‘fit in’ there.

We didn’t know personality-wise, but that yet that our work would fit in. That would be a really good start in identifying who you want to talk to. We never had an official job interview. I’ve been there for eleven years. We never sat in an interview, and you know, answered questions about what I want to do, all those scary things – and I think that’s the way it can be in Graphics. The reason to hire someone is because you like their work, you can almost tell when you look at a PDF from a student or a graduate: three

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slides and you’re like, that’s interesting. I want to know more.

I want to meet that person. Then it’s a chemistry thing. Can you talk to them, do you get on with them? Do you want them in your office? Give them a chance. Give them an internship. If there’s a vacancy: give them a job. That’s how it works; it’s connecting to people – that’s the most important thing when you graduate.

You’ve got to be brave about contacting people. If you go and see someone and you love their work, they’re the most amazing designer and they work on their own and they’re never going to hire you, still, go and see them, get the information from them, pick their brain. If they like you, they’ll recommend you to someone else. We get asked all the time: ‘do you know anyone good? Like a middle-weight designer for an internship?’ And we always remember the really good people that we’ve worked with and we couldn’t give them a job

ourselves because we’ve no job available, but we’ll always recommend people we’ve met. Making those personal connections is what gets you around, really.

It’s a small industry. In London, there are a lot of you guys and there are a lot of design companies relatively speaking, but the connections are everywhere.

These guys today, your tutors… half these people are people I was at college with and they are giving portfolio advice here, and they’re film directors now or artists. Doing all sorts of different things. But I’m still in touch with them, because, professionally, I might want to work with them on something. Someone you know now, you could still be working with them in ten years time.

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JHT: There seems to be a recurring theme: that you have to reach into the industry and grab what you want. In your time here, were you aware of that?

KT: I imagine that it’s changed a lot in ten years, but it might still be quite similar, in that, there’s a lot of students here on the course, and you’ve got some amazing staff, but everybody’s pushed for time; there’s not many teaching hours; there’s no studio- space. So, sitting here biding your time, waiting for somebody to tell you what to do it’s not going to happen. If you do that, you’re going to get lost. You need to shout at your tutors and say: ‘look at my work. Give me some feedback!’ And, they will. If you have that attitude and you go and seek them out, they will help you. You have to learn that pretty fast here. Sitting still and waiting for things to happen isn’t going to help. For example, Julia and me got into our third year, and we were panicking about life in general.

And we were seeing all our tutors, doing our briefs, but we were like: ‘We need more advice, we need more input’, so we forced the second year tutors at that point: Phil Baines, Cath Caldwell, Marc Wood, Amanda Lester, - and the photography department, everybody, to look at our third year work. They didn’t have to do that, they’re second year tutors. They had no responsibility for me any more.

But we went to see Phil and asked him to look at the captions in our portfolio for typographic feedback, you know… Most people want to help if they see that you’re very keen, and that’s really good practice for the outside world. I see students from other colleges and they get loads of help. They get sent on a placement in their second year, they’re like ‘oh yeah, fine, I’ve done it’. But it’s a bit of a fight, and learning to do that while you’re here means you’re part of this course. You’ll go far in this kind of environment and it’s good training for outside.

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K ATH TUDBALL | JOHNSON BANKS

JHT: Since you’ve left, what’s the attitude towards CSM students and the institution?

KT: That’s an interesting one.

We’ve all got a reputation, that’s the thing and it’s not necessarily a good one. I don’t know how it is for you guys here, but I was very proud when I got into CSM. It was a bit of a thing, right? It’s a big name and it has a reputation for a reason. Some of the staff would encourage that a bit… because it is a good place, sort of sell it a bit. I still am, as a graduate, very proud of having been here and I want to be connected and help students still. It’s quite surprising going out there, because our boss, Michael, said he didn’t have much experience with CSM students approaching him for jobs. He had a very fixed idea of what a CSM student was like. I’ve found this, not just with him, but with many, many people in the industry, there’s a definite idea that CSM students are arrogant, they’re pretentious, they can be a bit too arty, not really focused on

real-world stuff. There are some people like that! But, it’s not everybody. People didn’t expect CSM students to have ideas, as such; they expected them to be quite style-driven. And I don’t know whether that was because at the time, there was a certain type of ‘style’ coming out of CSM in the ‘90’s, as a sort of early-digital thing, there was a reputation for that kind of work. But I found, there’s loads of ideas here and you can work in any way you choose, so that surprised me. It’s good to prove people wrong. A lot of people high up in the industry didn’t go here, and they have an attitude based on when they were students, what they thought of CSM then, and when they’ve been meeting students and hiring people, but you’ll find that happens everywhere. So someone that graduated from Kingston will hire Kingston students because they have an affiliation, they have a relationship with those staff and the students, and so, it’s a naturally occurring thing. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing,

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because there’s a network here if you want to stay involved with other students. There definitely is a reputation. Some people, of course, will love that idea that there’s a sort of edginess with CSM students – that they’re difficult and they don’t toe the line or do what they’re told, but that could be a good or a bad thing and might give the impression that they’re hard to employ because they’re not going to do what they’re supposed to do.

JHT: Do you think that when you were here, the idea of the concept was pushed more than the technical aspects or aesthetics?

KT: Yeah I do. I don’t think in those days, there was an emphasis on technical stuff like knowing your programmes inside-out or learning those specialist skills. I mean, some people could go through and never learn certain skills, but then there were some people who were very, very passionate about something like bookbinding or typography or something where they’d actually get into making stuff. I think the

K ATH TUDBALL | JOHNSON BANKS

concept is the right word, and it is what I’ve always felt here. All sorts of different work can come from that, from the conceptual starting-point. I never felt that it was driven by style, or technique or process but that it was about expressing something - whether that was just about expressing yourself, sometimes. It was still all about the concept, ‘what is the idea here? What am I trying to say?’ and that’s still how I work now. I learned that here and it transferred absolutely into what I do now.

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JHT: If you knew then, what you know now, what advice would you give?

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KT: I’d tell myself to chill out a bit in the third year. Don’t panic – I panicked a lot. I was very, very stressed. That’s not to say relax, I had no concept of whether I was

doing well or not at that point, it was really strange. Now I look back at it, I think, you know, I could have calmed down a bit.

Also to have some confidence when you leave: it’s hard – it’s really hard – when you’re not sure yourself, and you haven’t shown your work to that many

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people. If you have confidence when you’re talking to people, and you really engage with them, it will go a long way. So, being nervous in an interview or not really explaining a project because you haven’t thought through how to explain it to an outsider, that can really be a bad thing in a

one-to-one situation. So, try to feel confident, even when you’re not 100% – that’s the advice I’d give to myself, even though I was a nervous wreck.

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SEB LESTER

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SEB LESTER | WWW.SEBLESTER.CO.UK

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FROM THE FRINGE OF CREATIVITY

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SEB LESTER

eb Lester exhibits an obvious enthusiasm for the subtleties of letterforms. He is perhaps, most famous for his mastery of illustration and lettering – which he would consider to be his mÊtier. Much of his oeuvre prominently features a modernising of traditional calligraphic techniques to generate edgy, but t echnically stunning outcomes. He has produced work for Apple, Nike, Penguin, Intel, the New York Times and countless other prestigious companies. He is a self-professed artist, type designer and illustrator who deserves due obeisance.

Student Jordan Harrison Twist spoke to him after he gave a talk about his work to typography students in Central Saint Martins graphics studios.

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Seb Lester: I was saying this to someone earlier, I think it’s one of those strange things; it kind of chose me as much as I chose it. It sounds weird, I really enjoyed lots of things, but that was the thing that pulled me in the most and I found most stimulating and challenging and engaging.

SEB LESTER

JHT: Would you say, from CSM, you went on a linear path to Johnson Banks, or did you try a series of different things and decide upon that later?

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JHT: You decided to specialise into a much smaller area of design, rather than being a broad graphic designer or an illustrator, you’ve gone into typography. What was your decision to go into that? Was it a natural progression?

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SEB LESTER

SL: I was saying this to someone earlier, I think it’s one of those strange things; it kind of chose me as much as I chose it. It sounds weird, I really enjoyed lots of things, but that was the thing that pulled me in the most and I found most stimulating and challenging and engaging.

JHT: So, what was the turning point from leaving here?

SL: I got most interested in type design actually on my foundation course. To be honest, I was pretty fixed on that. I liked doing other things, but I think ultimately, that was probably the point….it caused a certain amount of friction when I was here, because I was pretty headstrong about

students here doing photo-shoots with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell which was amazing, I mean, they were students. There were people really high-flying and they hadn’t even left college, so there was that atmosphere that instilled a certain amount of confidence in you, that you could go out and do whatever you wanted if you set your mind to it.

JHT: So, did CSM help you get into the job market, or did you have to find your own way to break into that?

SL: The best thing about CSM for me, was they had a degree show in central London; that makes a big difference.

I mean, having a degree show in London, literally a thousand agencies, you know, in Central London – lots of people are going to see your work.

That was the biggest factor for me because I was very... well I got a Rolling Stones tour book when I left college, that was the first job. And I wouldn’t have got that necessarily if I was studying somewhere else.

JHT: Did your time at CSM play a part in that or was it something that came along later?

JHT: If not that, what would you consider to be your ‘big break’

SL: What I did get out of CSM was a sense that you could do anything, that the world is your oyster. I remember, there were students when I was studying here, going off - third year

SL: My big break was studying at Monotype as a type designer.

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SEB LESTER INTERVIEW

SEB LESTER |’BEAUTIFUL MALICE’

SEB LESTER

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JHT: You said on your website, you are an illustrator, a designer and an artist. Would you have described your work as a student as all of those things, or were you quite specific with what you were producing?

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SL: I was trying to do all of those things really, but within the context of letterforms. So it was typographic, illustration‌ I was doing art. I was doing all of those things with a very specific purpose.

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JHT: If you knew then what you know now, what piece of advice would you give your younger self?

SL: I think just believe in yourself actually‌

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