Swiss Legacy : Could you please introduce yourself? Where are you from? What are your backgrounds?
BB/Saunders : BB/Saunders was born in 2004 out of a simple idea: To make great design with purpose and to enjoy the making. We want to make design which motivates organisations and informs the way they connect with the outside world.
We have grown to a team of six people with experience across all aspects of design, but specifically brand identity work. Warren Beeby, co-founder, worked initially in editorial design, for the likes of i-D, Dazed and Arena before becoming group art director of Time Out. Preceding BB/Saunders he worked as joint creative director at Spin. Martin Saunders’ background is in retail marketing. Martin and Warren met during Martin’s employment at Nike UK, Martin employed Spin as it¹s lead design agency before joining them a couple of years later. Martin and Warren then worked together as an account/creative team.
SL: Which place takes the typography in your work? (What is the role of typography in your work?)
BB/S: To communicate and decorate.
Have you been influenced by the major Swiss graphic designers?
BB/S: I don’t think we can realistically ignore the Swiss influence, their legacy is omnipresent in our culture. Most notably we reference the teachings of Max Bill, Armin Hoffman, Josef Muller Brockmann, Emil Ruder, Jan Tschichold and Wolfgang Weingart. There is rarely a job goes through the studio without the works of these designers being cross-examined in an attempt to understand how they might have responded to a brief.
SL: Do the printing effects play an important role in your creative process?
BB/S:There are many tools available to the designer, enabling them to communicate an idea more effectively. With the advances in production methods, printing effects have become an integral part of any print job. A print effect can become the message of a job itself. We always try to employ the best method of communication in all our work, whether that involves a large sans serif headline or use of a transparent matt foil.
SL: Your last work “Journal 1 Â 365 pages”, is a very interesting piece of work. Could you please explain us why did you choose to make this project? What is his purpose?
BB/S: Every week BB/Saunders produce a diary for inclusion on their website. The brief is open, we can simply map the last seven days of our lives, or we can publish a manifesto of how to save the world. We wanted to catalogue these diaries in some way. What better way, we thought, than to create a journal of diaries. As designers we all love to doodle in our sketch books. We though that having some interesting grids to function as backgrounds would be useful, we created 12 grids, based on our page format and technical drafting grids to serve the purpose.
SL: Any upcoming projects?
BB/S: We recently won a pitch for a new job which will involve a huge range of design disciplines. Print, digitlal and environmental work will all be addressed in scales varying from intimate to immense. Needless to say, we’re all charged to have the opportunity to work on such a stimulating and diverse project.
SL: Last word?
BB/S: “Faster, faster until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death“, Hunter S. Thompson.
This is reasonably self explanatory. We always try new ideas, whether they be creative, production lead or at a planning level. We constantly try to take our design to an unexplored place, not necessarily because of the fear of failure, but because we love to innovate, and maybe scare ourselves a little.
Interview made with Phil Evans, Senior Designer at BB/Saunders.
Photos by Tube Design.
