| 
visual artists
|
|
Q&A: Nomad Ink Studio
From DC, to the rest of the map. Nomad Ink has probably
been there.
Name: Tyler Littlejohn Johnson
& Flavia Sanches Johnson
Company: Nomad Ink Studio
Title: Co-Founder / Creative Director
& Co-Founder / Art Director
Top 5 inspirations of the moment:
science / nature / urban art / basketball / daily adventures
Favorite quote of the moment:
"Drawing is a way of reasoning on paper." Saul Steinberg
|
|
 |
|
What was it that led to the decision
to create Nomad Ink Studio?
I had been trying to come up with a name for my company for some
time, and was deciding between "Nomad Ink" and "Abstract
Being." Having been blessed by marrying a beautiful Brazilian
branding specialist (also a calligrapher / photographer), my bride
pointed out that most corporate clients would not be too keen
to contract with an abstract being. So Nomad Ink seemed the logical
choice. After deciding to start the company together, we combined
our love for design, travel, food, culture, art and social impact.
What sets Nomad Ink Studio apart from
other design companies?
Lots of love. Everything we do, we put a piece of our souls into
it. Whether we are doing a corporate identity for a multinational,
an album cover for an independent music producer, or a menu and
website for an innovative new restaurant, we always seek deeper
meanings behind the work, and evocative methods for production.
We are constantly exploring new media, and repurposing old materials
and techniques—wooden stamps from Afghanistan, calligraphy
pens from Germany, silk-screen, drawing, illustration and photography.
We live in the valley between digital and manual, and build bridges
between the two worlds.
|
| 
|
|
How many clients have you had, and how
many do you work with each month?
Over the past 3 years, we have worked with about 30 clients. We
usually have at least 3 projects going at a time. The industry
tells us that smart designers have about 3 main clients that bring
in 80% of the revenue. Hopefully, these are also clients who can
see the bigger picture of design, and you don't have to try to
convince them that something is good. There must be thousands
of them sitting up on a cloud somewhere, "client utopia number
9."
What was your favorite or most enjoyable
project to work on?
That's a tough one. Many come to mind. My favorite probably is
the project that we have just launched. The most recent is always
the best, right? We put together a 5-month study tour of design,
typography and artisan studios in Europe and Istanbul in 2005,
and created an online travelogue of the trip. We had extremely
rich content to choose from, because we were feverishly inspired
on the road. We had 3,500 photos and 3 sketchbooks full of things
we love: typography, art, design, film, calligraphy, museums and
food. We had talked about doing a cultural and artistic mini-website
after returning from an equally inspiring study tour to Minas
Gerais, Brazil, in August, 2004. But when we got back from that
trip, we had so much client work to catch up on that we didn't
have time to put a site together to share with people. With our
European study tour, we promised ourselves that we would not let
that happen again, even if we had to work long days for a month
to both serve our clients and to memorialize the trip. Join us
on the road at www.europa.nomadink.com.
|
| 
|
|
How important is outside inspiration when it comes to creating
your art and design?
I have always liked the term "culture vulture." My formative
design years were spent in Washington DC, NYC, Paris and Brazil.
I have been blessed with a nearly photographic memory for names
in art, music, film, design, and the like, and I spend huge amounts
of time poring over books, talking to people, listening to music,
gathering stimuli like a sponge wherever I go. I used to always
use 100% of my own illustrations, photos and text. I am now finding
just how important collaborations really are. In addition to all
of my wonderful teachers through the years, my wife Flavia and
frequent collaborator Juliano Domingues have taught me a lot about
seeing during these past few years in Brazil.
How have your travels abroad shaped
you and your vision for Nomad Ink Studio?
Profoundly. My family is not the traditional American variety.
I grew up in a house in DC with a Nigerian thumb piano, Indonesian
gamelan orchestral instruments, a Pakistani infant's bed, a Papua
New Guinea fertility god in the shape of a yam, and my favorite,
a winged Garuda from Bali that is over 7 feet or 2 ½ meters
tall. My brother lives in Vietnam, and my parents were living
in Rome and Venice, are now in Paris, and will be moving to Morocco
soon. Being based in Brazil, but having clients primarily in Washington
DC and Europe has been an amazing experience. It is like an alternate
world: answer the phone in Portuguese, send an email in English.
We use our cross-cultural mind set to achieve deeper meanings.
Our goal is to live in a virtual world that we create, to combine
the best elements from each country, and to live somewhere that
is better than either country individually.
What plans do you have to take Nomad
Ink Studio to the next level as a virtual design company?
We will be getting a bigger space. Something with more green outside,
more nature. We are fascinated by the eternal spring and summer
concept: the idea of splitting our time and energy between the
northern and southern hemispheres, depending on where the weather
is good. Spring and summer in Brazil, immediately followed by
more of the same in London or Barcelona. We are getting more internationalized.
Sending more work abroad, getting more involved in education through
speches and workshops, and building our network of top designers
around the world with whom we can collaborate. Obviously, the
most important thing is to continue developing the quality of
our work. If the quality is there, then everything else is going
to fall into place. So we are working to put together some exhibitions,
and to get some bigger Cloud 9 clients. We have been invited to
speak about our our Europa trip at Ndesign, a huge design conference
that will take place in Brasilia in July 2006. We also have a
workshop called "Dirty Honor" that we will be teaching
in Curitiba and Brasilia. We'll keep pushing the envelope with
design and art. Do more collaborations, including environmental
graphics with some architects we know, and keep experimenting
with new forms of media. As I am writing this on my computer,
Flavia is working on some Lombardic hand lettering.
|
| 
|
After living in Brazil and other countries
for the past couple of years, how do your international clients
differ from US clients? It differs from country to country.
My experiences in Paris were much different than in Brazil. I was
a 19-year-old student in Paris, and still in design school, so there
was not much client interaction. During the last 3 years that I
have spent in Brazil, I have met a very amazing, talented and generous
group of designers and typographers. They make me feel like I am
part of the crew. "O gringo no Brasil!", they tease me.
So while the community is very strong here, graphic design is a
relatively new field in Brazil, and most designers do not have the
same traditions and values that you find in the USA. Brazilian designers
over the age of about 40 had to study architecture in school, because
graphic design was not an option until recently. In general, I would
say that our American clients are more direct and clear about what
they want and don't want. One of the biggest issues for Brazilian
designers in working with Brazilian clients is the lack of clarity
about a project—and even if the prospective client is genuinely
interested in having some work done, or just talking. In Brazil,
most people think that they can go to a printer and have the same
quality of work done for less money, without the designer, or they
have a cousin with desktop publishing software. But then of course
the work looks terrible. Fazer o qûe né? (What
are you going to do?) In response to this, we decided a long time
ago to go after the American market. Not just for the money, but
for the direct and straightforward communications with clients.
Nomad Ink Studio has grown since you
started 3 years ago. What methods are you working on to get your
name out there? Flavia and I are the core team doing the
work, but we collaborate with other talented designers and typographers
in a number of countries, and I have trained Tibor, our dog, to
do some nice tricks with advanced layering in Photoshop and tail
wagging. We use lots of good ol' word of mouth marketing. We printed
some promotional cards that were a big hit, using design to show
how 4 different cultures interpret the same image. Our business
cards are all hand done, using calligraphy, stamps, and stencils.
We have 2 big clients who love our work and often lead us to other
projects. And we have met really great people from going to conferences.
Icograda, DNA2 and ATYPI 49 were a big career booster for us.
We translated an article by Ellen Shapiro about the work of Kiko
Farkas (a very important Brazilian designer) that appeared in
Print magazine in April 2005. We just finished translating an
issue of Tupigrafia Magazine (a wonderful Brazilian typographic
publication), so now the English speaking world can enjoy the
rich content. While we do not actively pursue translation work,
we are in a unique position where we can form a virtual bridge,
because of our design knowledge, international contacts and language
skills, so we occasionally do translations if the circumstances
are right. 2006 is going to be big, as we will be launching a
line of high-end artists' sketchbooks with silk-screened covers,
for an exhibition in August 2006 at a new calligraphy gallery
that is opening in São Paulo, and we have several other
big projects that we are working on.
|
| 
|
|
Top 10 memorable moments?
1. Our 5 month study tour, Europa 2005. And getting back to Brazil
and our studio after being so long on the road.
Home sweet home!
2. Right after I graduated from art school, I got a project to
do my first logo, for Sjtorm + Theory, a new alternative furniture
store. For the grand opening party, I did an invitation with Queen
Victoria in the nude, with moths holding a cloth as if they were
angels—really crazy art work mixed with design. A woman
at the opening who did not know that I had done the design commented
on the invite. "Oh man," she said, "this is freaking
wild, some naked chick with insects and s**t, it says cocktail
reception, you know what that means? Free booze!" I loved
that.
3. For the "Heat Beats" record label, I asked Flavia
to do some calligraphy that combined graffiti with some Persian
flavor. She did some amazing work. Juliano drooled all over her
work, converted it to vector art, and passed it on to me to put
on the finishing touches of layout and refined design. I was very
proud to be a part of that inspired 3-way collaboration.
4. Getting a nice check to do portrait drawings for the Aquent
merger party while drinking a full bodied red wine and eating
delectables. Tough life for the artist. But they got good value
out of me. Everybody loved their drawings, and I also made a sign
out of random kitchen objects, including a corkscrew, to spell
out the word "portraits."
5. Helping install Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto's cloth sculpture
at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC.
6. Not sleeping for 3 days in a row to get the posters and program
ready for a big conference in Istanbul in 2004 on women's entrepreneurship.
7. Running into all of my Brazilian colleagues in Helsinki, Finland,
during the ATYPI 49 conference in 2005.
8. Using my design skills to try and help John Kerry defeat Bush
in 2004, by making some invites and flyers to
promote Concerts for Change.
9. One of our Brazilian designer friends was going to do a logo
for a Columbian wine distributor, until the prospective client
asked him if he could make some counterfeit money for him first.
Whoops!
10. I started college in Florida, and when I realized that it
was design that I wanted to study, I knew that I had to make a
change of programs. I remember opening the acceptance letter to
Parsons NYC, one of the best design schools in the world. That
was a feeling of pure elation.
For more info about Nomad Ink Studio please click these links:
1 (202) 787 1851
nomadink@gmail.com
www.nomadink.com
www.europa.nomadink.com |
|