Born and based in Illinois, Chad Wys is a ‘visual conceptual artist, designer and writer’. His work covers a number of mediums including digital manipulation, painting, sculpture and mixed media, and his interest is largely focused around the deconstruction and appropriation of pre-existing images and objects. His work explores ways of finding a new meaning within the art he finds by altering and playing with what’s already there. After coming across his work on sites such as Ffffound and Behance, we got in touch with Chad to see if he’d be interested in answering our Ten Questions. Luckily for us, he was.

Read on for an insight into the thought process, concepts and inspirations that go into Chad’s work.

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Simon Birch is and artist based in Hong Kong. Working mainly in large-scale, figurative oil paintings, his recent direction has included installation and film. Past exhibitions have been held throughout the world including at London’s Haunch of Venison Gallery and Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art. With more recent shows in Hong Kong, such as ‘Laughing With A Mouth Full Of Blood’ and a large-scale collaborative exhibition entitled Hope & Glory. Filling the 20,000 square feet of ArtisTree Exhibition Space in Beijing’s Taikoo Place, the installation took the viewer through a metaphysical world, or ‘conceptual circus’ and saw Birch working alongside a broad range of collaborators including artist Stanley Wong, photographer Wing Shya, British music producer James Lavelle, filmmaker Eric Hu, designer Douglas Young, architect Paul Kember, actor Daniel Wu and Beijing-based artist Cang Xin. Birch’s work explores the concept of ‘universal ideas of transition, the ambiguous moment between an initiation and a conclusion, the unobtainable now and the future, inevitably crashing towards us’.

His work has been featured and reviewed in many international publications, including Artforum, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, Time Out and the New York Times. He was kind enough to take some time out and get involved with our Ten Questions series.

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We don’t do games. We don’t mind the odd game of Kerplunk or bout of Twister, but when it comes to consoles and losing 5hrs pretending to be a sniper we just switch off and would rather talk to another human being or open up a good book. Same too for apps on our wonderful handheld smartphone device thingies. Angry Birds passed us by and that was that. No biggy. We’ve got better things to do on the tube.

But then our friends over at ustwo caught our eye. They’ve been busy working away for ages developing a neat little app called WhaleTrail. Now, we’re all for promoting and supporting our friends, but the game is actually very good. Coming from self-confessed non-gamers that’s quite a thing. So no hard sell, it’s just a really good game and we recommend you checking it out. It’s 69p so you can’t go wrong. Buy it here.

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When we meet clients for the first time they’re often quite surprised to find out how long we’ve been established and how many people actually work here. It happens all the time, and even comes from other agencies within the industry too. “Really???” is a common reaction. People’s perception of Mat Dolphin is based on a number of factors. Our creative work, the brands we’ve been fortunate to work with, the exposure we’ve had, our twitter presence, this very blog etc. all go together to paint a picture, and one that is apparently bigger and louder than we are. So why don’t we just be more open about it all? The vast majority of design agencies these days share what they want to be heard or seen. Like well oiled PR companies, they carefully control what the world finds out about them. But that’s kind of missing the point. What makes agencies unique is the people that work there. Designers constantly encourage brands to be open and honest, yet hide behind the typical designer ‘cool wall’.

We’ve been talking about this topic for a while, but the original train of thought came from Bernadette Jiwa ‘brand and business catalyst and verbal designer’ who we regularly chat with on Twitter. She questioned why we at MDHQ portray ourselves in the way we do and it got us thinking. We were going to write a blog post about it but thought who better to write a post than Bernadette herself.

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Glug London is an event for people from the creative industries to come together, have a few drinks and hear talks from some of the most creative designers and studios around. Each event has seen a steady growth with bigger names talking, bigger venues selling out and more people scrambling to get tickets. Needless to say, they’ve been busy. With this in mind, we thought it was time to catch up with founders Ian Hambleton and Nick Clement to have a chat about the event and see what they’ve got in the pipeline.

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Welcome to Blog post number 100! Since July 2009 we’ve been updating this little blog on a fairly regular basis with our random musings, showcasing the work of those we admire and letting you know what we’ve been up to. We wanted to do something a bit special for the hundredth post and the perfect opportunity came up just at the right moment. Iconic UK music mag, the one and only NME, got in touch after seeing the first two posts in our Sound & Vision series, asking if we’d be interested in writing a bit of a ‘Special Edition’ post for their blog. Being long time fans, we immediately agreed and are now pleased to present Sound & Vision 03 – The NME edition.

See it live on their site here or read on below…

There are so many amazing album covers out there that choosing favourites seems like an unachievable task. Like the albums themselves, the way I feel about the artwork they’re wrapped in changes on a regular basis. That said, there are some which, for various reasons, I’ve always loved. Some of them are considered classic and some of them are barely known but all of them are, in my eyes, brilliant examples of what an album cover should be. A visual partner to the music on the record, something that can encapsulate the sounds in a way that you can’t always put your finger on but somehow just works…

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A while ago we received an email out of the blue asking if we’d like to be involved with an upcoming typography exhibition. Imaginary Menagerie is being held at Text/Gallery in Holborn and features work from a number of designers exploring ‘language’s difficult, tongue-tripping, unpronounceable labyrinths typographically and in their own language’. Using typography to visually communicate a difficult to say phrase or sentence sounded like an interesting brief, so we promptly agreed. Well up for it.

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The second installment of our regular Sound and Vision feature has arrived! In these posts we’re going to be dissecting some classic album covers as well as offering up actual tunes to listen to – something that can often be overlooked when discussing graphic design for music.

Music is a massively important aspect of our work and working environment. Like many designers, it’s a big part of the reason we wanted to become designers in the first place. This series aims to feature some of our favourite covers and the songs which feature within the albums. All of which are on constant rotation in the Mat Dolphin daily playlist. So, without further ado, click below to read (and hear) plenty more of the same.

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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary…”

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

In 1991, after being told by his tutors at Chelsea College of Art and Design that he ‘wasn’t good enough’ to become an artist, John Dowling realised he needed a change of direction. When someone encouraged him to pursue Graphic Design, he went for it although does admit to not knowing exactly what it was at the time. In the years since then he’s learnt in no uncertain terms what it means to be a graphic designer and has honed his skills at some of the most prestigious agencies around.

Starting his employment at the now defunct Area (a studio established by two former designers from Peter Saville Associates) John went on to stints at the almighty Pentagram, SEA and Frost before setting up Dowling Duncan alongside his former Pentagram colleague Rob Duncan. They’ve used their wealth of experience to produce a great body of work for clients such as AIGA, Apple, The British Museum, Google, John Lewis, Microsoft, The Serpentine Gallery… This list goes on.

John kindly agreed to get involved with our regular Ten Questions series. Here’s what he had to say…

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A retreat to Japan in an attempt to escape London for a while was the starting point for John Paul Thurlow’s best known work. Whilst drawing the contents of his room he came across a travel sized copy of British Elle and recreated the cover as a pencil drawing (amending the title to read ‘Hell’ as an expression of his mood). From that point on John Paul has made it his mission to ‘recreate cover art for every great magazine and record’ he owns. The meticulously intricate drawings are far from perfect reproductions – they are filled with his own additional scrawlings, notes, thoughts, feelings and scribbles to make them a one of a kind piece of art based on a mass produced piece of media.

John Paul was kind enough to take the time out to answer our Ten Questions.

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There has been some internet chatter of late debating whether it’s necessary for designers to learn back-end coding, much of it around Frank Chimero’s Designers vs Coding post which is currently doing the rounds. Being the all-knowing opinion formers that we are, we couldn’t help but let our thoughts be known on the matter.

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A couple of months ago we took a trip to the Pentagram offices in Needham Road, West London to attend a talk by designer, Pentgram partner, author and all round nice-guy Angus Hyland. The talk focused on symbols and was organised in conjunction with the publication of Symbol, the recent book by Hyland and Steve Bateman. The talk was utterly brilliant and the book is equally so. Highly recommended.

Whilst I could write at length about the talk itself and the points Hyland raised, there was one thing he said that particularly stuck out for me. When talking about the more unusual, quirky and perhaps even awkward logo designs from years gone by Hyland said…

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We noticed the other day that our Ten Questions series has had a rather severe shortage of photographers. While the majority of focus on the blog has been on graphic design, our influences and inspirations come from far and wide. Photography is one of those areas and we plan to showcase plenty more of it on the blog in the future. Will Robson-Scott is a photographer who came to my attention some time ago with his series showing the London grime movement. Shining a light on the more outsider or marginalised subcultures has become a bit of a theme in his work, the most recent example of this being his Ego Bombing series, showing graffiti writers going about their business in and around London. The series eventually became the basis for Crack and Shine, a book produced in collaboration with publisher Fred Forsyth, TopSafe and Vans. The success of Crack and Shine enabled the collaboration to continue in the shape of Crack and Shine International, where Robson-Scott travelled to various major cities around the world to document some of the most well known graffiti writers in their natural habitat.

Will was kind enough to take some time to answer our Ten Questions.

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We first became aware of the work of Liam Brazier through the image bookmarking site Ffffound. His illustrations of Star Wars characters and superheroes in a distinctive, skewed style caught our attention = simple, stylish and refreshingly original. We checked out his portfolio and saw a wide range of varying styles and techniques in both static and moving image for clients such as Dazed & Confused, Creative Review, Design Week, Glastonbury, the Museum of London and Virgin TV. So, we thought we’d get in touch to see if Liam would be interested in answering our Ten Questions. He kindly obliged and gave us the following insight into the life of an illustrator – although please, don’t call him that.

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Whilst we do lots of different things here at Mat Dolphin, our main focus is graphic design. We design graphics. The stuff that sits on a computer screen and showcases what a person or company is offering. Or stuff that is printed onto a business card and introduces who that person is and what they do. Some of the stuff we design has to communicate a great deal within a very limited space or format. Some of the stuff we do has to communicate a great deal without actually saying too much. Often we have to work with strict, client-imposed constraints and occasionally we have complete carte blanche (which can often be the more difficult way to work).

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Music plays a big part in everyday life here at Mat Dolphin. We’re constantly listening to it, discussing it and plenty of our work has been inspired or related to it in some way. In fact, like many graphic designers, it was a large part of the reason we became interested in design in the first place. Pouring over the typography and layouts of our favourite album covers played a massively important part in shaping our design understanding and tastes. With the record sleeves shrinking from a 12inch gate-fold to a pixelated square on your phone, the art of record sleeve design has obviously changed and will probably continue to do so. I’m sure many of the brilliant examples of cover art we know and love wouldn’t exist today if they had to go through the approval process of any major record label. Which is a shame.

That said, we’re all about embracing change and this blog post certainly isn’t about crying about the good old days and getting nostalgic about the crackle of limited edition vinyl. Beautifully designed ways to package music releases in (physical or otherwise) is still with us and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

I’m fairly sure we’re not alone in our love of the marriage between great design and great tunes. There are countless books, websites and articles dedicated to the craft of creating the images which to go with music. One thing that often seems to get either overlooked or even completely ignored when discussing cover art is the music itself. With this in mind, we’ve come up with our pick of the design-geek-classic-covers of recent years, along with the actual songs contained within (sometimes not the most obvious choices). Sound & Vision will be a regular feature on the blog, showcasing music artwork we love alongside the tunes so you can listen while you read. Click below to have a look and, equally importantly, listen.

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Hello World.

Our blog has been comparatively quiet over the last couple of weeks, mainly due to ridiculous amounts of client work (which we’re not complaining about), looming deadlines and a couple of well deserved holidays in the sun. Feeble excuses aside, we’re back in your face like a plate full of shaving foam with another Five Things that have caught our interest this week.

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Tate Britain’s current exhibition is The Vorticists: Manifesto For A Modern World. We haven’t had a chance to see it yet but we’re definitely going to check it out before it closes on 4th September. The exhibition ‘celebrates the full electrifying force and vitality of this short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that was based in London but international in make-up and ambition’. Adopting the spirit of Blast – the art movement’s short-lived journal launched by Wyndham Lewis – Tate and Creative Review have teamed up to invite submissions on the themes of ‘Blast’ and ‘Bless’. The entries are currently available to view on the Blast/Bless Tumblr site and will be projected at Tate Britain during the upcoming Creative Review ‘Tweetup’ (apologies for the use of such a cringe-inducing word) on the 21st July.

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Seeing the logo you designed emblazoned down the side of a 747? The commemorative stamps you designed becoming collectors items? Garnering every award going whilst picking up a host of new clients along the way? These are the kind of things most designers would eat their own MacBook to have acheived. Johnson Banks are an agency that has ticked the above, and much more, off their to-do list. Virgin Atlantic, The Royal Mail, The BFI, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Yell.com, More Th>n and countless other companies, government organisations, universities and charities have been queueing up for re-brands and design work from them. At the helm of the operation is Michael Johnson. Amazing designer, guitar obsessive, brilliant writer, regular contributor to Creative Review & Design Week and very down to earth, nice guy.

His excellent Thought For The Week Blog is also a must read for anyone with a passing interest in what happens behind the scenes in one of the UKs most respected agencies. Michael kindly agreed to take time out answer our Ten Questions.

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