Design Context: Nous Vous Visit

After talking to Jay at the christmas party he gave me a card and a piece of his work and said to get in touch about coming down and having a chat. I gave him an email the other day and although he is currently doing some work in london for a few days he was more than happy for me to come over and show me his studio space.

I went down on thursday and ended up having a really good chat for probably nearly 2 hours! The studio space where he is set up is near the WY Playhouse, its a really old and somewhat neglected warehouse/office space, but the amount of space that was available and just having a complete environment that was quiet where no-one would bother you was actually really nice. I asked him all sorts of questions about the things he was getting up to and looking at. As it turns out he has currently being back and forth from london working on an interesting education project, he is also working on the re-vamp of the Nous Vous Website and a couple of comissoins. ]

I asked about where he started and how from finishing his degree he found work and so oninturn this led to the discussion on my portfolio and Jay gave some great crituque, not just about the work but about the presentataion and delivery. Jay left uni and took a more relaxed approach to the development of his worka and didn;t setup the collective until over a year of leaving uni and spent his time working and simply earning a living. And for he first few years of the collective a steady job was used to pay for the expenses of his creative side.

On my portfolio jay commented he enjoyed more looking through the tactile piece of print that i had produced rather than the more mundane and somewhat cliche of having my work presented in photographs in plastic sleeves. Something to think about would be the packaging of my portfolio.

On the subject of originality for my dissertation it did in fact crop up. Jay's studio space didn't actually have internet access and that brought up questions about how he finds inspiration and how looking at other people's work can influence your own. Jay talked about how jay will create something and then as time moves on other people may look at his work and although he may have disliked it, someone will pick it up and to an extent copy the visual styling. Jay believes that orginality is something that in today's design world it does not exist, especially in something such as graphic design and it shouln't be seen as such a benchmark to set your work against.