Video and audio transcripts

Video transcript

My name is Ray Parslow. I?m Design Director of Emery Vincent Design.

Ray talks about working on a visual identity for the Sydney Festival.

If I was asked what was a great project or how did I feel at the end of a project, one of the jobs I worked on was for the Sydney Festival. We?ll design the identity and the branding, the brochure and posters, fliers, signs and other things. The creative process, it?s really quite hard to determine when it?s going to happen. It?s either going to be there and it?s in your head straight away or you think about it and you sort of get this intuitive feeling about what should happen or what it should look like. Or otherwise, you?re sitting down there and you?re trying to work out what you?re going to do. Or, I?ve got a deadline and I haven?t done anything, or come up with anything I?m really happy with. So its like you?re in a bit of a panic.

So we worked for the Sydney Festival and we had to design the identity in the first year. The festival director was quite open about it really ? his brief was: I want it to be different and exciting, I want it to stimulate people. I want it to challenge! There?s just a string of words, thoughts, about what it should be. There?s no sort of pictures to say it should be like this. Very often we don?t get that. We?ll just get, or have a discussion about what a job is. With this one, it was like we designed over a week. All these sort of logos and identities and applied some of them and just felt that none of them really had life and energy. And really what is a festival? It?s about a whole collision of things. So, its like we were trying to analyse really what the problem is. And what I found with that was that, all my designs, and the team out there helped with some, were too tight. They were just thinking too hard about the problem.

And what happened was about half an hour before a meeting, I just thought, I?ve got to do something different here, and he?s not going to like some of this stuff. And I just grabbed a pen and just went ? scribble and tucked that in the designs and it just went up. And with this particular client I?m not really allowed to talk about my jobs. He just flicks through them because he has an inherent knowledge about design. He came from an advertising background so he doesn?t like the rationalisation or anything - which is really different to a lot of clients. He just went through and pulled out this one and said, this is the one that?s got the most feeling and aggressiveness and spontaneity and all of that. It?s going to be this! That?s really quite cool because that was the one that had the five minutes of thought and it was a reaction of everything else that had happened. So I suppose those sorts of things, where you have a challenging situation and then suddenly you have success at the end of it. That?s really cool.

Audio transcripts

Ray talks about what inspires him.

I suppose where I like to drag my creative thoughts from, is just what I?ve seen around me. I do a lot of research and reading. I get inspired by going to the gallery or going to an exhibition, or seeing a performance or going to a great movie. You know, it doesn?t have to be an arthouse movie it can be just an action movie, but there?s been a great action sequence that?s in it and you think, wow, how do they do that? Or there?s some fantastic lighting there and the next time I shoot a board member in an annual report I?d like to shoot it with that sort of intensity or that quality of light. So, there are a lot of things that are out there. You might see someone wearing a fantastic hairdo or a piece of clothing and you say, oh, great, there?s something fantastic in that. The spirit of that you might want to bring into your work so its invigorating and lively.

Ray?s advice if you are interested in a graphic design career.

I think the best thing that you can do is some form of tertiary education. I think what that helps you to gain is some fundamentals to art and design. What it also does is it exposes you to people that are in the same field, that want to be inspired and want to find things out. I think it allows you an opportunity to explore a whole range of ideas. If you don?t do that, I think that you are only drawing on your own limited experience. Just like our studio, the experience of the whole is much better than the individual. And I think that?s how we approach a lot of our work.

So I?d say that what?s really important is that you go out and you study, and you read, and you observe and you absorb as much stuff as you can. That can be from a movie or it could be from a gallery, or it might be from one of your hobbies. It might be photography or you might like doing macramé. And macramé sounds really uncool, but there?s some fabulous artists that do woven sculptures ? now that?s not macramé, that?s sculpture ? that just challenge and alter people?s perceptions of how things should be read and how they should be understood. So I think it?s important to draw in all those sorts of things because that makes you grow. The whole part of this job is about learning ? and continuing learning.

Ray talks about the benefits of teamwork in the design process.

Because we?re deadline-based, there are a lot of things happening each day or each week. That can be quite stressful when things perhaps don?t go as fast as what you want or you can?t get an idea. So, you need to have other things that offset that, that make it enjoyable. Like we have a great lot of staff that make you laugh, or they say, Ray, have you thought about this idea? And its like, I wouldn?t have even considered thinking about that, but that idea?s great and it?s made me think about something else.

Ray talks about communication skills and relating to your clients.

Another skill that's really important is about being able to collaborate. We work in a very team environment, both with clients and with the guys in the studio. If you're unable to collaborate, if you're just sort of focused on yourself and what you're trying to do, that always doesn't work. We like to have many different things feed into our projects. That skill of working well with others and being able to communicate. Being able to talk to your client, sometimes, that's quite intimidating. If you're going to see someone that's running a company and you think, they're 20 years older than me, and you're just like, you feel like a little graphic designer going in there, like going into the school principal sometimes. It's like I don't know much about what they do. But you can start to get them talking and they have a passion about their business. And if you can throw a few leads into ? and the lead might be something not related to their business, it might be sport or it might be movies or it might be food or it might be something else. And once you start engaging in conversation, they can feel comfortable talking about what they do. Then the process can start.

It's about listening to them and being receptive to what their needs are and applying your knowledge and really taking them somewhere where they might not necessarily have gone.

Ray talks about creating innovative design solutions.

In my design process, what I look for is to create something that is quite unique and special. I want it to be interesting to the person that is going to look at it or respond to it. They need to notice it within the environment. If it's a poster, there are a lot of posters out there, and you just want your one to stand out. Or if it's a book jacket or a cover, or an annual report, or a sign for example, you want it to be noticed, you want it to have some sort of energy. So I think what you try and do, or what I try and do, is bring a lot of things that might trigger different responses from people. That might be done by colour or through scale or by form or have something that's aggressive or something that's very quiet and calming.

There's a lot of visual ways and also, you might do it by language. The tone of the language that's within, if it's a poster for example, you might have an aggressive headline or it might have a tempting headline ? there's a number of ways that you can actually grab people's attention and I think that what we try and do is bring in a sort of eclectic mix of references.

I think our studio, what's different to some perhaps more hard-core design-based studios that might be more rigorous in a particular style, is we like to have, and this comes back to the cultural aspect of different people's experiences, bring those a little bit more into the mix of what we are trying to design so that they are little bit more interesting and exciting.

Ray talks about the importance of research and understanding your client?s business.

I'm doing a project at the moment which is dealing with a hotel in Hong Kong and I've only travelled to Hong Kong a couple of times so there's cultural things I need to learn about that. But also, it's a six-star hotel and I've never stayed in a six-star hotel before. So I need to go and study those a little bit and see what the differences between a normal hotel and perhaps a six-star hotel that not many people get the opportunity to stay at. You have to understand the quality of that, whether it's service or whether it's the visual look of it and then bring that into your design work to say, ok, well this is quite minimal or streamlined or quite bright and invigorating. Then that focuses how you might design.

After doing extensive research at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Ray talks about how they came up with a design solution for the Fox Studios project.

When Fox Studios took over the Showgrounds in Moore Park we were given the task of working with five architectural companies to put some branding and image things within the site. And no one really had determined what they really should be except someone from Fox suggested that it should naturally be about movies.

So we started to investigate what was unique about Australian cinema. And that was led by Kim Williams who was at the time the head of Fox, whose vision was really to bring to the forefront some of the remarkable things that had happened within Australian cinema and really identify those to the public. Australia really had the first talking documentary and I don't think many people know that. It had one of the first feature films. It had some remarkable films through its short history that dealt with cultural aspects of society in the 50s or for example, taking the glam part and the uniqueness of the Australian character in films like Crocodile Dundee and Strictly Ballroom and taking them out to an international audience.

So we took those things and expressed it on the site in a number of different ways.

Ray describes a typical day at work.

Our days are quite long. It's really hard to put a nine-to-five on the creative process. Things just happen and sometimes you're working on a project and you're inspired by it and you've just got to keep running with it. So when that happens, it's like, you're focused and you keep doing it and you really want to shut everything else out. Then other parts of the day are a little bit more structured where you have some client meetings and you might have some briefings. There's a big part of the design process, apart from doing the creative idea and that, it's actually doing the production for the project to actually take it from the idea though to the completed product. And you might be dealing with printers or clients and actually selling your idea. Or you might have to find out how to do something and you don't know how to do it so you've got to learn a little bit fast. Sometimes you're going to a meeting and you need to actually study the client. Understand really what they do and how they do it so that you don't feel a little bit out of your depth.

Ray talks about the skills needed to be a good designer.

To be a good designer I think, the core skills are that you've got to have a passion. If you don't care about what you're going to do and you're not going to get inspired, if you don't have that drive or that want to do something well, then it's not going to be the place for you. I think, you need to be inspired and be inspirational. You need to be able to think, you need to listen. Listening is very important because that's how you gain knowledge about what you need to do. You need to observe. You need to have fun.