Zoe Bather - Studio 8

Zoe's talk was one that I enjoyed, even if it was rather lengthy.

Not really the, what seems now to be, standard placement routine. Placement taken up at FrostDesign who are a mainly specialise in editorial and print based design. The placement was then extended and eventually she was offered a job which she took. With the head of the company then moving away to New Zealand she and a colleague were left to run the studio themselves.

Freelancing was her next move after leaving ForstDesign, this included being involved in two projects completely from start to finish at Antidote.

Studio 8 was made up of just 4 employees and will sadly be closing in June of this year.

Clients included...

Dealerward
Central School of Speech and Drama
D&AD
Global Blue

The Global Blue and CSSD jobs interested me most those as these were jobs that grew into something more. The Speech and Drama school initially turned to studio 8 and asked them for a new logo. However when the job was finished, the job grew to include bags, signage and stationary.

Global Blue asked for city guides to be created. This job was quite high end and they would be revolved around people finding the best restaurants and shopping districts in a number of cities. The job initially included 6 guides, the next year it grew to 15, until two years later they asked for 40.

This job was also a great example of how you can source talent form other areas to create the best outcome possible. Illustrators were asked to create the covers of the guides, and as the job grew, collaboration with more and more illustrators became increasingly important. 

Another thing that came across in this talk was the importance of self initiated work. 'At This Rate' was a project that was inspired by the photography of Gilles Rivell. The images were of disintegrating leaves very close up and seemed almost to resemble cities from above. This then lead to a project to do with deforestation and was produced as a leaflet that included statistics about the amount of natural forests the world looses each year/month/week etc. 

Zoe went on to explain the she is sure that some of the work that came her way after 'At This Rate' was entirely because of this project.