I found this interview extremely useful for my practice as I found Josiah easy to talk to making it easier for me to ask the questions I wanted to know. I was also able to look through his portfolio with him and find out how each of his projects were created. My transcribed interview is seen below.
How did you get to work in Mexico and what did this involve?
I’ve got two revenue streams at the moment. One is my bread and butter work where I do stuff for an insurance company. This is boring, shit work but it’s what pays the bill. This pays for the stuff I actually want to be doing which doesn’t really pay but looks good. Without this work I wouldn’t have a lot of income because the people I like to work for don’t usually have a lot of money. I’m just on a retainer with three different insurances companies where they pay me once a month. I don’t usually have any influence on what I am creating and it isn’t work I particularly enjoy doing. They work for ticketing agencies and big music festivals so when I go out for drinks with them it’s the guy who own canal mills and wire, however one of their friends and business partners set up a bar/restaurant in Mexico and it was through the insurance companies that I met her. She was looking for a graphic designer. She came to me with a logo but I tried to pitch a new logo as it’s not that good. But she was insistent on the previous design so I had to art direct almost and build the identity around the logo.
What did you get to do in Mexico?
I was basically finishing things off. I’ve been working with them since November 2016 and they launched in the new year. It properly got started in January-February time when they flew me out to Mexico where I had planned to stay for four days but ended up staying for fifteen.
Did you spend your time exploring Mexico at all?
I spent a lot of time working on the beach and walked around a bit. It’s the benefit of being freelance. I could still do work for other people there as I don’t need to be in Leeds to do work.
What briefs do you enjoy?
I enjoy working with other disciplines as I don’t really like working with other graphic designers! Photographers, artists, product designers but mostly photographers. I’m now intact a visiting lecturer at Leeds College of Art on the photography course. I don’t take many photos but I make a lot of photo books so they get me in as a graphic designer to help students with this.
How did you manage to get this?
Adrian who is the senior photography lecturer at the university is sitting on a backlog of photographs that have never been published. We’re going to work together to create a publishing company where I create his books and they go under his name.
I was based in Duke Studios and moved out in January. I’m back at home at the moment but will soon move into a studio in an art gallery by the town hall. I’m going to be doing doing work for the art gallery in exchange for a studio space.
Did you find the workload as a freelance artist to be constant or was it difficult straight out of uni?
From the day after graduation I was like: right, I’m going to go for it. It was quite hard as I sat down at my desk and I realised I had to start and make money. It helped that I set targets so in a month I want to earn this much, in six months I want to earn this much. Even if it’s just revenue and not profit, I just wanted to get that much work done.
Did you have to really push people with emails and meet new creatives to get work?
I didn’t really have to contact people, a lot of work came to me. Throughout the whole of uni I met so many people and I found Leeds is a really close knit community of creatives and you just have to break into that circle so people know you. I did this because of Nest basically so from launching exhibitions at Colours May Vary, Village, working at Duke Studios,
What is Researchhh?
I started the blog at the start of uni but it’s grown into quite a big thing now. I just started it as a really small tumblr where I would just reblog things I liked and I get around a submission a day. I like this as it saves me time looking for posts! So I usually stick it on and people get exposure which I find is easy networking as they email me and I have maintained a number of relationships through this.
Do you still get a lot of internet traffic from this blog?
I decided to move to Instagram as people were getting tired of Instagram and switched. There are quite a few big graphic design blogs on tumblr and I wanted to be the first that moves onto Instagram as you then get that traffic. I did this and now I’m getting more and more followers. I usually get around 70,000 impressions a week which means all these people are seeing work. I also find myself posting my own work on here as it is such good exposure.
A lot of blogs, especially on tumblr, specialise so precisely to get that audience so its either graphic design or fashion; it’s never both or it’s graphic design or photography; never both. So I just do stuff I like and other people like it too.
I have long term ambitions with this blog where I would like to do a magazine with the same name. I hope to do this when I get 10,000 followers on Instagram. The small publication will feature work from creatives I like. I don’t even mind if I don’t make money with this, as long as I break even. The studio HAW-LIN also had their own magazine after their blog. It started as a blog with two interns at the design studio, Hort who would send images back and forth. From this they realised they worked really well together and so set up a successful magazine and design studio.
What work do you like?
Studios like OK-RM, they’ve just created a new identity for the new J.W. Anderson show at the Hepworth, it’s worth checking out.
What kind of graphic design would you say that you specialise in?
More print based I guess so publications, editorial. Throughout uni I hated identities and if there was any brief that involved creating an identity I would avoid doing it but I’ve really enjoyed it whilst working freelance.
At uni we sometimes have to juggle 4 modules at once. How many briefs do you usually undertake at one time as a freelance?
I never thought it would be that busy but I have a lot of stuff on. Even if they are projects I am just starting and are waiting to hear back from people so although it is different to the course, it’s about managing your time.
I quite like freelance because I see a project from start to finish, if I worked from an agency it would just be doing pass work and I wouldn't see the full project it would just be: ‘can you finish this off for me’. As a junior designer you never really work on a full project. That’s why I basically wanted to go freelance as its jumping into the deep end but you get to see the whole project and control it more. It’s even learning how to pitch more and other skills.
What is your opinion on working for free?
A guy in Belgian set up a small t-shirt company but didn’t have any money. I’ve been working for him for a while but haven’t yet been payed however has said that once he does have money I will be payed. It will be such a substantial project as I have done the whole identity for it, the art direction for the spring/ summer collection which will launch hopefully next week. From that I can then do the art direction for the photoshoot and then it will hopefully continue on and become good regular work.
I found it was really hard to get people to submit for NEST. I knew that each publication’s focus had to be really broad so issue 6 which was my first was based off the letters N and E. It had to be like this as people never create work specifically for the magazine. The magazine was bi-annual so we produced NE in Spring/ Summer and ST in Autumn/ Winter.
I always planned to launch the first one before Christmas and the other one before summer but it always worked out that the one before Christmas was February and the one before summer was after summer.
One of my ambitions when I was trying to get it turned into a thing people knew about was letting the audience know it was free. At the time it was the college magazine but there were students that didn’t even know about it. I mean now, most people know about it because it’s everywhere which is good.
Even people who have submitted to next have gone far. Danny who was in first year when he submitted to one of my issues, is now in his second year and is who I am creating an exhibition for. We met through NEST.
Being so highly involved in NEST has given me experience in curating exhibitions which I have been able to use within my professional practice. I talked to the people at Colours May Vary about holding the opening party there which they agreed too without hesitating. I took a video of the whole printing process at Pressission and projected this within the gallery space and took pallets that the publications came on and placed them within the space.
He doesn’t really want to be known as the publisher behind this. It’s called the Cave Press because he’s just been throwing books out of the cave and this also forms the identity showing books within a cave. Easy.
We approach MKI, an independent close store in Leeds to do a photoshoot with the locations being the Uni of Leeds Campus. I worked with Ben Renshaw, a photographer and looked at the idea to create an A3 poster that would be folded. We like the idea of bringing folding into the images themselves. Especially because a lot of the garments that they sell are all about the cuts of the clothes so within the art direction of the brief it was about cutting the photos. A big no-no in fashion photography is having anything intersecting with the head but we quite liked it because it has these cuts.
We scouted this location before hand and knew what places would work well such as the car park. We then found out the exact right time where the shadow cuts across the frame of the photo. We also tried to focus on colours so picked out a yellow throughout different shots. The photographer would take a series of shots then show me as the art director and I would tell him whether I wanted the image framed differently or timed by the models differently. Timing was especially important throughout the day. We chose a day in October time for the shoot when we had limited hours of light so I had to make sure we didn’t spend too much time in a location between shots.
That’s why I like working with photographers who know they aren’t graphic designers, you can respect their practice and they can respect yours.
So I was art directing this, I collected the right materials. These are also in fact my sunglasses also, I thought they looked cool so thought why not, let’s shoot them. and these are actually all shot outside using the natural sunlight. It was an amazing day and we were going to shoot it with a few studio lights but the sunlight worked well. We did photos for three different styles and made it look as professional as we could. We bought the sunglasses and then sent them back after the shoot. We improvised during the shoot using white and black card, mirrors and the natural sunlight. It was also all shot in his garden but people don’t see this and the final results came out well.
More questions were recored and asked however found these answers to be most useful
I also made some useful notes whilst with Josiah:
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