I think a good graphic designer is a mixture of cerebralness and an ability to physically touch and make things and understand that graphic design is a combination of those two things. I think a graphic designer is somebody who’s got lots of legs, because you need stamina to complete often lengthy and complicated projects ... and I think there is that aspect to graphic design which is about understanding laws and making sure you break them.Quentin Newark
Quentin Newark
Graphic Design Counsultant and Partner, Atelier Works
I’m Quentin Newark, and I’m a partner in Atelier Works, which is a graphic design company.
Why become a graphic designer?
Why I think, like every graphic designer, I am an iconoclast. I arrogantly imagine that I can remake the world better than it is currently. That’s what happens whenever you come across a piece of graphic design that you’re asked to do. Very often, you’re looking at something else that somebody else has done, and you’re being asked to redo it, but more clearly or more succinctly, or in a more contemporary way. And that deeply appeals to me. That deeply appeals to me to make things and it deeply appeals to me to make things better.
Sit down, because I’m going to do my James Bond villain thing here. Smut, stay. I want you to sit up there.
I became a graphic designer in order to have Smut here with me all day.
What are you doing now? It’s like... trying to make me lactate, or something.
The path to becoming a graphic designer
I left college and got one or two jobs, awful jobs. Then I was very lucky and I went to a big office called Pentagram, and I was even luckier because within Pentagram, I worked with a designer called Alan Fletcher who is the kind of soul and consciousness of British graphic design. So it was an enormous privilege to work with him. And after having worked with Alan, there really didn’t seem any point in going to work with another lesser graphic designer, so I set up initially on my own, and then very quickly afterwards joined with two friends. So Atelier is the three of us practicing together.
Originally, we called ourselves Atelier, which means studio in French. We could have just called ourselves studio I suppose, but I am pretentious. But then we discovered that there are dozens of other Ateliers. They all tend to be called Atelier something, Atelier one, Atelier two, so we decided to call ourselves Atelier Works.
Projects and clients
I suppose I really do two kinds of work. I either do work that is extremely boiled down and concentrated and really as simple as I can make it. Or I do work that is big and complicated. They're the two kinds of work that I like doing, and just to of sort show you some examples to illustrate that, here are some logos, several by me, several by my two partners, and they illustrate the idea of concentrating something down. So this, for example, is a logo for a conference about culture that's called Eye to Eye.
This is, I think a good illustration of the content of the project determining the form. This is one of a series of posters for the British Council about data. We wanted to find a way of epitomising, visualising data. So, there’s a face in varnish printed on the poster, just glistening there. And the caption at the top of the poster says, make data easy to find, which of course it isn’t easy to find. It’s difficult to find; it’s difficult to see.
We don’t have any preferences of a kind of a composition that we impose on a project. Everything that we do comes from the project, it’s derived from the content itself.
I suppose we find ourselves drawn to cultural clients, architects in particular. So here’s a little invitation to the opening of a new building by David Chipperfield, and I’ve designed the invitation to be the same format as the building. And there’s a little introduction of the building. Or this was a book that we designed for a film-maker who found inspiration from the street. So he’s taken lots and lots and lots of photographs of graffiti, torn posters, and then these have directly informed the way he makes his little introductory films. And of course, with paper, it’s incompatible with film except... unless you do it as a flick book. So I suppose we’re always looking for projects that give us the opportunity to test ourselves in some way, to learn some new technique.
What makes a good graphic designer?
I think the way of explaining what a good graphic designer is is just to look at this poster. I think a good graphic designer is a mixture of cerebralness and an ability to physically touch and make things and understand that graphic design is a combination of those two things. I think a graphic designer is somebody who’s got lots of legs, because you need stamina to complete often lengthy and complicated projects. And the poster itself is printed on bible paper, and I think there is that aspect to graphic design which is about understanding laws and making sure you break them.