Mawgablog

Way back in May, Vince Fraser, a digital designer and illustrator based in west London, suggested we do an interview for Mawgablog. I said, yeah great! And we did the interview. It’s taken forever for me to get it all sorted out, as I seem to have been doing numerous odds and sods in-between then and now, but I’ve sorted it, and written it up. Apologies to him for the lag.

Vince comes from an interior design background, going from BTEC to HND to BA to MA through the early 1990s. He started his design professional life at Gensler Architects, in the City of London, but found that it was a little bit dull. “I wasn’t working on projects that I thought I might be working on,” he explains. “A lot of the work I was doing at the time was technical, like drawings, plans and AutoCAD, and I thought to myself, this isn’t what I want to do.”

Told on a number of occasions that his approach suited graphic design, he decided to try his hand. He taught himself Photoshop and Illustrator and took the plunge. He’s not looked back since, having amassed a client base that includes both editorial and advertising, with tutorials in magazines like Computer Arts and Advanced Photoshop, and display work for Kappa, British Airways, Guess Jeans, Gap, among others.

Graeme Aymer: How would you describe your art? What characteristics define a Vince Fraser piece?

Vince Fraser: I’d say it’s sometimes calm, sometimes chaotic! Sometimes I’ll go completely mad and at others I’ll be calm. My work’s very colourful, I’ve been told it’s very energetic, lots of movement.

GA: Where do you find inspiration?

VF: Mainly through going out for a stroll, observing things around me, what people are wearing, colour palettes, blogs, you name it. But I kind of like a lot of the multidiscipline artists and designers, like Vault 49, I Love Dust, those kinds of people.

GA: How would you describe your creative process?

VF: I tend to sketch. Once I have a brief or a synopsis, I’ll read through it, brainstorm it, and then publish some very basic ideas on paper. Then I’ll do a very rough composition in Photoshop and email that to my client, just to explain my theory of how I’d gone about it. Once the client is happy with that conceptual stage, I’ll move on to the final artwork and then it’s just a matter of getting that approved by the client. With the advertising work it can drag on for quite a while. You can do the finished work and it might be a month or two until you get the okay, which can be a bit tiring sometimes. But usually you get there.

GA: What’s been your greatest success as a designer?

VF: It’s hard to judge. I’ve done work for IBM; that’s one of my big accomplishments I think. But I’ve had my work on billboards in America, 50-foot billboards etc, so that’s pretty mind-blowing.

GA: What’s one thing you know now that you wish you’d known when you were first starting out as a designer?

VF: When I initially started out, I had an agent and he said to me, ‘Vince, you can earn a lot of work in this industry. If you’re a mediocre illustrator, you’ll earn 60-grand-plus per year. If you’re good, it will be 120-plus.’ I kind of had this in my head. And it didn’t actually work out that way!

GA: What advice would you offer to people just starting out in the design industry?

VF: I’d say, just try, and do be very focussed and try to be original. Don’t try to follow lots of trends. Try to develop your trademark style. Focus and keep your head down and work hard, really. It might take some time, but eventually it does start to piece together, like a jigsaw.

GA: Let’s talk about your work. Tell me a little bit about your work for Florida ‘s Sarasota Film Festival, from April this year.

VF: The brief was to create something that was related to the festival and would be very symbolic to the area it was held in. So what I had to do was take lots of photos of various museums, landmarks, statues in the actual area and try and incorporate that into my design, and also to keep the film element in it as well.

GA: What factors informed the approach you took?

VF: I just wanted to create something that was very striking, that would make you look at it in the street if you saw it on a poster. You’re kind of looking at it and you think, wow! Something that would draw you in as a viewer.

GA: How did you come to work for Kappa?

VF: It was more of a sculpture. It wasn’t really an illustration as such. When I got the brief, the first thing that came into my head was the logo. The first thing I pictured was something 3D, and I thought, yeah, that would look good as a 3D logo which is kind of freestanding.

GA: How about your Icecapade images?

VF: That was for a Nigerian friend of mine. He’d hold some events once a year, kind of a gathering for some Nigerian friends, but it’s getting bigger and bigger each year. Last year’s event there were about 300 people who attended and this year, it’s probably looking at 900! For this year, the brief was for Nigeria’s golden jubilee independence anniversary. He wanted to reflect that in a gold theme. That was the main reason behind the artwork. I actually did the art direction for that too. I got the model and I got the photographer to shoot the model with the gold face and then I basically manipulated it in Photoshop and Illustrator.

GA: What was your idea for your typography piece, Soul Fusion?

VF: Try and make it look like it’s moving. Basically, a friend of mine hosts a night called Soul Fusion and he said to me, can you do anything with the name? So it came out of that. I just wanted to show movement.

GA: What can you say about your Golden Child image?

VF: I like the contrast between the background and he foreground, and also the skin colour tone, the way it reflects the golden elements that I’ve used.

For more on this artist, visit his website at www.vincefraser.com