E 06
WIP What was your approach to finding your clients at the time?
AS Very low level at beginning. We used, I think the last of our student loan to print like a flyer. And then we sent it out to 500 people that we liked, and had found on the internet and then proceeded to just badger them on the phone until they met us. We had like no work, we had no clients, no money. So really you have to just try and get the wheels moving. This sort of tactics might not work as effectively now. But it was quite fun and we actually got quite a few clients from it.
WIP At the time as you were sort of building your partnership and later went on to create Colophon as well, how did your roles evolve and how did you sort of find out who was best, better, doing what and how did that dynamic of your partnership evolve?
AS So at the beginning I think we could still have it somewhere, we folded a piece of paper in half and wrote down different tasks and I think it was sort of ridiculous, like I'd make the tea, Edd would make the coffee. We found it when we sold and had to clear out the studio and 15 years of ephemera and bits we'd collected and it had on like Edd would do the accounts which we swapped around. But I think naturally we had to sort of divide and conquer. We worked out if you both did exactly the same task you could then you're almost spending more time arguing, discussing, trying to work out between you who's right or wrong. So actually this kind of idea of the Venn diagram with the small kind of crossover is really powerful because you can kind of go out, hone your specific kind of disciplines or tasks or responsibilities and take back into that sort of central point where you overlap.
WIP And I remember Edd, from our previous chat, you talked about expanding your toolkit. I was wondering what kind of experimentations or side projects enabled you to do that in unexpected ways.
EH Yeah, I think, as you kind of expand, especially now where there's even more tools available, like it's kind of going back to that experimentation and trying to fail almost and going, okay, like what new tools can we use that kind of almost previously felt like a little bit too outside of our skill set, you know, of which there are many. But I think it's that expansion, that democratisation of tools that enables you to kind of have like different creative approaches to things as well. So, you know, for our fifth anniversary of Colophon, we created a show called Five Years, where we created a series of like kind of hyper real 3D renders of kind of everyday objects that were inspired by different typefaces that we'd drawn and all had a story and a concept behind. And at the time it was a huge technical lift like working with 3D, I won't go into all the technical issues that we had and also the creative challenges as well, like all of this. It took us four, five, six months to do back then. And I think now if we were to do it, it would take us like a couple of weeks because like the image generation is so much more advanced, especially with kind of AI and things like that.
WIP Now that AI is completely shifting the way we work and is speeding up repetitive tasks, what are some creative areas where you find yourself focusing on more now that you have maybe more time because AI is speeding up the process of other things you used to spend more time on before?
AS Great question! I think it's like a balloon, so the actual workload isn't less, as you're alluding to in the question, it shifts. I think it's much more about strategy and approach and testing. And the expectation of the result is almost like so much higher. So you have to front load it at the beginning to ensure that it's such a higher quality result and output. And I think also this is, when we started working together in 2009, there were only a certain number of type foundries. They were sort of medium-sized businesses or huge businesses. Now, you can be someone who's just in their house and you can run a pretty successful company and do very high quality work, which is awesome. But then I guess the market expects more. So you kind of have to even sort of take more risk and go deeper and develop.