Inter­view: Alt Group

BeST Awards 2009: build up

The BeST Awards roll into town tomor­row (that is, Fri­day 16 Octo­ber, Auck­land Museum). Last year's big graphic design win­ner was Alt Group, pick­ing up the over­all graphic prize, the Stringer Award, and a slew of golds, sil­vers and bronzes. Alt's in the BeST Awards mix again this year, and see­ing as the design firm has been on a hot streak for months, pick­ing up awards all over the place (TDCs, ADCs, Graphis, Red Dots, etc…) we thought we'd re-run this inter­view from earlier in the year. Given that this year they have a num­ber of entries in a num­ber of cat­egor­ies you'd prob­ably be a fool to bet against them pick­ing up an award or two this year too. Here's Alt Group's Ben Corban and Dean Poole talk­ing design.

ProDesign: How did Alt come together, what are your backgrounds?

Ben: Alt star­ted as con­ver­sa­tion when Dean and I were liv­ing in Lon­don, hav­ing fin­ished and gradu­ated from Elam. Dean was mak­ing work in Lon­don and I was study­ing over there. The con­ver­sa­tion was around where the art world was going. It was at the time in the 90s when Brit art had shaken up the whole art world and all sorts of things were being done that hadn’t been done before. Art was cross­ing over to other media out­side the gal­lery. Damian Hirst was doing his stuff, Gil­lian War­ing was dan­cing in shop­ping malls, and Hirst had also star­ted launch­ing res­taur­ants and the like. Everything star­ted homo­gen­ising. Our real interest was art, but the thing that really drives art is ideas – ideas are the guts of any kind of com­mu­nic­a­tion. So our interest was in tak­ing our train­ing and think­ing out­side of the white box in which you exhibit, and put­ting it in other places. The idea was to start a com­pany that sells ideas. So we got back to New Zea­l­and and said, ‘let’s start an ideas com­pany’. We got a phone, sat around, smoked cigar­ettes, drank cof­fee, and waited for the phone to ring – and then the phone never rang. In many ways we took a harder and more uncon­ven­tional approach. The tra­di­tional way of get­ting into the design and advert­ising industry is to go and work for someone, learn how the industry works, and then leave how­ever many years later with a back pocket full of cli­ents, sys­tems and pro­cesses and set up shop. Our way was to stare into the abyss and just start doing some­thing, but now we’re eight years down the track…

Dean: Elam was about ideas train­ing, not neces­sar­ily about pro­cesses, or tools, it was more about a way of think­ing. That was really pushed through in the hey­day by people like Greer Twiss. You know, cre­ativ­ity is kind of a dirty word to use in the art world but it’s not when it comes to busi­ness, it’s what busi­ness wants.

ProDesign: Are your art school peers con­des­cend­ing about the com­mer­cial­isa­tion of ideas?

Dean: There’s always been a dir­ect rela­tion­ship between art and design. Piet Mon­drian designed the 3M logo. Kurt Schwit­ters had an advert­ising com­pany. It’s this kind of thing that people never talk about. It’s not like we sold out, or sold our souls, we still think that art is about ideas in con­text, we just took the con­text from the white cube and applied it to some­thing else. At the end of the day, you could say the only dif­fer­ence between an artist and a pizza is that a pizza can feed a fam­ily of four.

Ben: Art and com­merce have had a rela­tion­ship for cen­tur­ies. If you look back at the Renais­sance there was the Church, and every­one ser­viced the Church. There was always a cli­ent and designer rela­tion­ship, which was always on com­mer­cial terms.

Dean: And if you look at Renais­sance con­tracts they’re no dif­fer­ent to con­tracts that get served up today. In a sense, Renais­sance paint­ers were the design and advert­ising prac­ti­tion­ers of that time.

ProDesign: How does a Fine Arts edu­ca­tion dif­fer­en­ti­ate you from design­ers who have a design education?

Ben: What we were trained to do was under­stand the his­tory before you pro­duce some­thing and that’s lit­er­ally how we approach design. To get here has been an exer­cise in immer­sion and understanding…

Dean: I do think the Fine Arts tra­di­tion is about under­stand­ing his­tory and life and how you fit in with that canon. It’s about look­ing back­ward, but you make things for the now… I don’t know what the formal dif­fer­ence is because I’ve never been through that [design school]… but artists are very con­scious of history.

ProDesign: Is there any­thing new in this world?

Dean: No, I don’t think there is, you just reor­gan­ise exist­ing things.

ProDesign: Is there an Alt ver­nacu­lar or any sys­tems that help pro­duce a con­sist­ent standard?

Dean: Well, we don’t have a house style.

Ben: Essen­tially, we’ve got a group of 17 people from dif­fer­ent back­grounds. Build­ing a team is not about one iden­tity crawl­ing over another; it’s about a num­ber of sep­ar­ate inquir­ies con­ver­ging, and things being pro­duced in a sup­port­ive envir­on­ment that fosters those inquiries.

Dean: I still believe in what Greer Twiss said: “You fail as an edu­cator if a stu­dent doesn’t leave the sys­tem with their own inquiry.” They don’t have to make great stuff; you don’t have to have good ideas. You just have to be able to change the world, which means that you’ve got to have a way of view­ing, or hav­ing an inquiry, that is per­sonal to you. I don’t care if you’re pump­ing cof­fee as long as you’ve got an inquiry. We act­ively pur­sue this here; every­one has an inquiry that impacts on the prac­tice. Is there a ver­nacu­lar? Well, it’s a cul­tural thing. Sys­tems and pro­cesses are only ena­blers. Cul­ture is actu­ally where it all hap­pens. That align­ment, or hun­ger, or being per­petu­ally dis­sat­is­fied, or being com­fort­able or uncom­fort­able are types of things that you need to have if you want to have an inquir­ing mind and an inquir­ing cul­ture. You need to be per­petu­ally dis­sat­is­fied. You don’t wake up in the morn­ing and go, ‘today I’ve decided to be aver­age, let’s do what that person's done’. You’ve got to go, ‘well, this is about the joy of find­ing out and bump­ing into the unex­pec­ted’. And that’s really what cre­ativ­ity is; it’s an uncom­fort­able jour­ney that hope­fully res­ults in something.

ProDesign: So, if you wake up and go, ‘I’m com­fort­able with my lot, I’m not going to do any­thing new’, then you’re history?

Dean: Totally, if you can hear your­self wrink­ling you’re not moving.

Ben: Cre­ativ­ity is a dif­fi­cult pro­cess that’s best sup­por­ted in one of two envir­on­ments, either one that’s incred­ibly stable, or one that’s incred­ibly volat­ile. Most great thinkers live in either one of those camps. What we’ve got is a team has been built over a period of time, and it is very stable. In some organ­isa­tions people will only be there for six or 12 months but it’s not long enough to get it working.

ProDesign: What about work­ing with NZTE? The Music Con­ver­gence CDs have an unex­pec­ted under­tone. How do you strike the right note?

Ben: We’ve worked with NZTE for five or six years. The inter­est­ing thing is that they sup­port New Zea­l­and busi­ness across a range of sec­tors, and it’s all out­wardly facing. Our pro­jects for them are all quite dif­fer­ent. It’s not mass or gen­eral com­mu­nic­a­tions; it’s tar­geted and niche for spe­cific audi­ences. With Music Con­ver­gence, the object­ive is to com­mu­nic­ate to 500 people – the influ­en­cers, taste­m­akers, and crit­ical decision makers – who dic­tate what people listen to in other media, what music gets selec­ted for movies, games and TV campaigns.

ProDesign: The work seems edgy…

Dean: When you’re com­mu­nic­at­ing with that audi­ence it’s import­ant that you look like you’re part of the music busi­ness first, before you look like you’re from some­where. You’ve got to look rel­ev­ant. It’s con­tent, con­text, coun­try. Con­tent leads any­thing. It’s an ideas eco­nomy, and content’s going to win. That’s what gets your atten­tion, that’s what val­ued; con­text is like, ‘does it fit?’ Does the con­tent fit the con­text? If it does, then it’s rel­ev­ant, it’s now, it’s useable – and oh, by the way it’s from this place. With an industry like cre­ativ­ity every­one knows that the idea is king. You can’t push a coun­try pos­i­tion, like Cool Brit­an­nia, it can back­fire on you. The idea has got to lead the con­ver­sa­tion. NZTE being a soph­ist­ic­ated cli­ent knows how those dif­fer­ent sec­tors have to operate.

Ben: The trick here was that it had to be a spe­cific medium, a CD in a jewel case. That was the first thing. The people who make the decisions receive hun­dreds of these things a month; all these CDs are stamped, racked and filed in lib­rar­ies. So it had to be in a spe­cific format.

Dean: That’s the con­ven­tion. You can’t go, ‘let’s send them an iPod with NZ music on it’; it’s not going to work. So, first of all, stick with the con­ven­tion. Second, try and find some­thing that is an under­cur­rent, a reason to start an idea, so obvi­ously you’ve got birds – tuis, song­birds: New Zealand’s first kind of song maker. It’s a mim­ick­ing bird and all those sorts of things. Also, the music doesn’t have any sort of genre, there’s ran­dom­ness to it. You want the thing to land on someone’s desk and be a total exper­i­ence, like unpack­ing an iPod. And then there’s the shiny thing [the brooches that accom­pan­ied the CDs], which we call the mag­pie effect. It’s a series of things that make the dir­ect mail exper­i­ence a sur­prise. You build up a whole lot of anti­cip­a­tion, so someone may put the CD in the ste­reo. That’s all you’re try­ing to do.

ProDesign: Some of the pro­jects you’ve done extend the bound­ar­ies of what one would expect from a design stu­dio. For instance, I Kiss NZ was a multi-level campaign.

Dean: That was designed to pro­mote New Zea­l­and pro­duc­tion com­pan­ies off the back of some of our inter­na­tional film suc­cess. Every­one gath­ers at Cannes each year, everyone’s there for a big party. How do you come up with an idea that makes people engage with a coun­try? You’re only going to come up with that idea if you under­stand how the con­text oper­ates: people are there to have fun. We’re com­mu­nic­at­ing to a diverse bunch of people, and we’re selling cre­ativ­ity to other cre­at­ives. It’s a pretty dodgy area. So, we had to pick a basic idea, some­thing uni­ver­sal, and the best way to cre­ate mean­ing is to build on exist­ing mean­ing. Blow­ing a kiss is a uni­ver­sal idea, so we know that’s going to work – there’s no doubt in my mind that the idea of a kiss is going to work. And we wanted to cre­ate an inter­ac­tion that was act­ive. This inter­ac­tion wasn’t about read, listen and watch, it was about user-generated con­tent. You can set up a pro­cess and the thing can make itself. And that’s what it is – an online art­work of kisses gathered from around the globe. Four thou­sand kisses were gathered, anti­cip­a­tion was built, but people didn’t know why they’re doing it. There’s a dis­con­nec­tion hap­pen­ing, and that’s why it works. If you don’t look like you’re dir­ectly selling some­thing, then people are far more open about their inter­ac­tion. If someone says, ‘blow me a kiss, take a photo of it, and send it to this address’, then why do you want to find out where that’s gone? It’s about basic human beha­vior – van­ity. You want to see how your image con­trib­utes to some­thing big­ger. And that’s the suc­cess of MySpace, You­Tube, Flickr. When you got to the [I Kiss NZ] web­site it bounced you on to the pro­spect­ive com­pan­ies. So it’s a long way of get­ting there, but the end is very short.

Last year you could see this trend in advert­ising. A gor­illa plays some drums, that’s con­tent. People need enter­tain­ment: con­text. Oh, and by the way, I’m selling chocol­ate. That’s gone from really dir­ect storytelling to unex­pec­ted, oblique and adjunct.

Ben: It’s very hard to con­vince a cli­ent of those types of inter­ac­tions. There’s a dif­fer­ence between say­ing ‘Briscoes, fifty per­cent off’ – because every­one under­stands what that is. Sta­ging an exper­i­ence changes things. Lead with an idea that’s obtuse, people engage with it, and the reveal hap­pens after­wards. It’s a bit like Damien Hirst put­ting a shark in a tank. Hirst isn’t build­ing a sculp­ture; he’s build­ing an image of a sculp­ture, and the image is bet­ter known than the thing itself, and that’s how things operate.

ProDesign: At the other end of the scale, your work for Farmg­ate espouses the vir­tues of Hawke’s Bay wine and pro­duce, and util­ises the per­son­al­it­ies of cer­tain artisan pro­du­cers in the pack­aging and labelling. It’s some­what of a mind-shift don’t you think?

Dean: We like to get the idea and then the exe­cu­tion of that idea. It’s not like going we’re going to innov­ate with aes­thet­ics. When Phil­ippe Starck comes out with a new shoe he’s innov­at­ing with style – he’s not invent­ing a new way of walk­ing. A lot of our philo­sophy is fig­ur­ing out an idea and how it oper­ates in con­text, and then fig­ur­ing out the aes­thetic exe­cu­tion that will turn that into a pref­er­ence for some­body. A lot of the Farmg­ate pro­cess was about under­stand­ing what was chan­ging in the con­text, so you can reor­gan­ise the prob­lem of selling wine. Loc­al­ity is becom­ing a big­ger driver in the food and bever­age sec­tor, so is the slow food move­ment – slow is the new fast. These things are impact­ing on people’s decision mak­ing when it comes to buy­ing wine.

Ben: You need to look broadly out­side your dis­cip­line to fig­ure all that stuff out. You can’t just say ‘I’m a designer’; you need to say ‘I’m a cit­izen’. Loc­al­ity is one of the things the wine industry is based on, the concept of terroir, which is the unique aspects of place, micro­cli­mate, soil, and people. It’s tak­ing those things and put­ting them together and present­ing them in a slightly dif­fer­ent way. To put people who care about what they’re mak­ing and grow­ing on the labels helps cre­ate a net­work effect, with dif­fer­ent com­pan­ies sup­port­ing each other; it’s like an instant com­munity, a busi­ness com­munity, although in some ways it’s at odds with free mar­ket cap­it­al­ist economies.

ProDesign: Last year was a suc­cess­ful year for Alt. Why do you think the judges appre­ci­ate your work so much?

Dean: I don’t really know – it’s been a good year for our cli­ents. It’s sort of like alchemy. People always say, ‘where do you get your oppor­tun­it­ies from?’ Well, you cre­ate your oppor­tun­it­ies. There’s noth­ing in a brief from a cli­ent that says, ‘come up with a blind­ing insight that’s going to make a dif­fer­ence and add value to my busi­ness’. It doesn’t work like that. Design isn’t a sil­ver bul­let. You just have to do the hard graft, and wait.

Ben: The awards are another means of bench­mark­ing work in a dif­fer­ent way, not in a com­mer­cial sense.

Dean: Another reason why we enter awards is to help estab­lish a visual cul­ture. When a pro­ject gets judged well in a design award then that’s great because it’s been judged on purely aes­thetic terms. We’re equally inter­ested in the com­mer­cial suc­cess of our cli­ents. We believe in cre­at­ive excel­lence and com­mer­cial excel­lence, and if there’s no over­lap don’t do it. Design is either a sys­tem of dec­or­a­tion or a sys­tem of innov­a­tion. We’re inter­ested in the overlap.

ProDesign: So you’re try­ing to help estab­lish a New Zea­l­and visual cul­ture? Is that patriotic?

Dean: Yeah, I think it is. It’s a dif­fi­cult place to go to. Is there a New Zea­l­and design ver­nacu­lar? That con­ver­sa­tion is quite dif­fi­cult, it either falls into cringe or whinge.

ProDesign: These days bor­ders don’t con­tain ideas, so in that respect is design above country?

Dean: I think there are some places where you can lead with coun­try but you’ll always be niche. My hope is that New Zea­l­and com­pan­ies become pocket-sized mul­tina­tion­als that know their global niche rather than their local one. And they can scale it appro­pri­ately without a com­pet­itor tak­ing them out. Global niche is the ulti­mate. It’s how we’re going to com­pete as a coun­try. For New Zea­l­and design, if you’re not oper­at­ing inter­na­tion­ally, and you don’t know what trends are in mar­kets, then I don’t know how you can have a nation of export­ers that are rel­ev­ant. Region­al­ism, let alone nation­al­ism is a bit of a prob­lem, but you get that with a young design culture.

Ben: And we do have a young design culture.

Dean: So we do have an iden­tity issue, built around neo-tribalism, which is not the best thing to trade off in an off­shore mar­ket. It happened in the artworld.

Ben: The iden­tity dec­ade of the nineties…

Dean: That we got through, but that we needed to get through as a young nation.

ProDesign: Now that you’re estab­lished and have won numer­ous awards, do cli­ents come ask­ing for that sil­ver bullet?

Dean: We’re hon­est. We’ll say we don’t know the answer, but the joy of find­ing out is what we’re inter­ested in. Is there a pre­scribed pro­cess? Are we going to go through a brand camp? I mean, how many more Venn dia­grams do you need to show cli­ents to prove to them that strategy doesn’t work. All you need to do is have a plan to get some­where. That’s all it is, and that plan’s got to shift as fast as the mar­ket does. Pro­ductiv­ity and qual­ity and those types of things are table stakes in today’s busi­ness. Ideas are cur­rency, and you’ve got to oper­ate incred­ibly fast for that. You’ve got to be agile and adapt­ive. Find­ing cli­ents with those qual­it­ies is where the best work comes from.

Ben: The strategy and exe­cu­tion thing is inter­est­ing, because you really need both. You need an approach and a driver to do some­thing. No one sees the strategy; they inter­act with the exe­cu­tion. If you’ve got a great strategy and a bad exe­cu­tion, then you’re going to have a bad exper­i­ence. If you’ve got a bad strategy and a great exe­cu­tion, and there’s noth­ing behind it, then you’re going to have an equally bad exper­i­ence. Strategy is an ena­bler for get­ting on and doing some­thing. There’s a great story about a group of sol­diers stuck up a moun­tain, and they were well and truly stuffed, no gear, nowhere to stay, minus twenty. So they all lie down and get ready to die. Then one guy says, ‘I’ve found a map’, so every­one gets up off the ground. He says, ‘we’re going to go this way; we’re going to get out of the moun­tains’. So they march their way out, and some­how find a hut. After they get res­cued, the guy looks at the map and dis­cov­ers it wasn’t even a map for the right mountain.

Dean: You need a sense of dir­ec­tion to achieve any­thing, and you need purpose.

Ben: The rub­ber hits the road whether the inter­ac­tion works or not. Don’t chisel any­thing in stone because it won’t sur­vive. In the end, nobody knows what’s going to hap­pen tomor­row, or the next day – you can only make an informed decision.

ProDesign: Are there any iden­ti­fi­able trends in design?

Ben: When you’re build­ing an exper­i­ence it doesn’t hap­pen at one point in one chan­nel. So if you com­mu­nic­ate over a range of medi­ums it means you have more con­trol over cur­at­ing that exper­i­ence, rather than provid­ing one slice of it. In the future they’ll be two styles: more com­pan­ies doing more things, and more com­pan­ies that are deep specialists.

Dean: One thing that is chan­ging is the way brands are inter­act­ing with audi­ences. People talk a lot about brand storytelling. Storytelling to me is a one-way flow, and people don’t buy into that any­more. Most of our exper­i­ences are a series of micro-events that add up to some­thing. With a multi-disciplinary approach, which is what we’ve taken, we’re able to man­age lots of fin­ger­tip events that add up to some­thing big­ger, rather than say­ing I’ve got a story and I’m going to tame the mar­ket with it. Value has changed, and prob­ably the biggest thing that will change in the mar­ket is people’s per­cep­tion of value. Value is only what you choose to call import­ant, and what you choose to call import­ant changes all the time. So if design really wants to cre­ate value for busi­ness, first of all it needs to fig­ure out what it means in the mar­ket, then how to cap­ture it, turn it into an offer­ing and deliver it.