If there’s one thing we’ll miss about Morton Street it’s the view – so I’ve attached some ‘greatest hits’ from one of the most distracting views around.

At the weekend I made a trip to upstate New York and visited the Dia contemporary art museum in Beacon. It’s an easy 90 minute train ride from Grand Central, with some pretty stunning views of the Hudson along the way. The gallery is a 300,000-square-foot converted printing factory and houses works of art too big to be shown in conventional gallery spaces. It’s a truly mind-blowing place. The scale of the building and the art within is just enormous. Top tip – don’t wear heels. There’s room upon room of works by Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin and Louise Bourgeois to name but a few.

Many of the pieces have been created specifically for the space: with Michael Heizer’s North, East, South, West and Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses being particularly memorable (if not a little distubing, claustrophobics beware). The graphic designer geek inside me also loved the Sol Lewitt wall drawings which occupy several rooms in the gallery.

I was also struck by the specially comissioned work by Zoe Leonard, who was asked to respond the the museum’s collection and location. I thought it was a good example of work that would pass the ‘would you understand the idea if it was described over the phone test’, something we strive to achieve in our work at TP. The piece, You see I am here after all, is made up of several thousand vintage postcards of Niagara Falls. The postcards, which were mostly bought online from sites like eBay, are arranged in a grid and positioned horizontally in accordance to their geographical location and vertically in accordance to the camera angle. The resulting visual impact of the piece is fascinating: a sea of sameness, but also every part a little different.

And then after all that walking, and all that thinking, there was a nice shop and a café at the end. Lovely.

We know about the power of branding and the importance of the brand message.

So when an upscale pizza house decided to open a restaurant in the West Village (which is now the most expensive retail real-estate in Manhattan) someone decided they needed a “coming soon” sign for the window during construction.

Brilliant!!!!

We’ve seem our fair share of dramas unfold from our view on Morton Street in the last year, including two plane crashes (the most recent with a less happy ending than the first, unfortunately), a faked Airforce One fly-by and more beautiful sunsets than you can shake a stick at.

It’s hot and humid at the moment in NYC and this brings with it some pretty spectacular storms. This is one from Friday afternoon: watch New Jersey disappear (complete your own joke here).

Read more…

Our Design director from t’north Robert Ball has been featured as part of the Preston Profiles feature on design blog The Disciples of Design.

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Year of Graduation / Grade

1997 / 2:1

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Profile
Before graduating I’d shared a house with my best mates Steve Royle (now at The Chase) and Steve Owen (The Partners, and Dave). I joined The Partners in 2000 after basically pissing about for a couple of years.

And I’m still there.

And they’re still my best mates.

Aww.

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The Disciples of Design Q&A

Q. How and where did you secure your first job?
A. I joined The Partners through a recommendation from my mate Steve Owen. I was working as an office clerk at the time and took all my holiday entitlement for the year to do a placement. Nine years later, I’m still here.

Q. Did anyone ever ask you what degree grade you got?
A. Only my mum & dad.

Q. Who’s work has inspired / influenced you the most?
A. I don’t really get inspired by anyone in particular – I’m inspired by fear of failure. I get inspired a lot.

Q. Where do you get your ideas from?
A. Mostly from ripping off other stuff, then changing it enough so no-one notices.

Q. What would you have done differently at University knowing what you know now?
A. I wouldn’t have had that pint of Old Tom at The Black Horse.

Q. What’s the best thing about your job?
A. Comparing it to 99% of other jobs.

Q. What is the most unusual thing you have done in your career?
A. I had a look round Puff Daddy/P Diddy’s superyacht for a photo shoot in Monaco once. I really blended in.

Q. What do you look for in graduates and their portfolios?
A. Attitude. I like enthusiastic students who realise how lucky they are to even be considering making a living out of colouring things in like what we do.

Q. Any advice for students entering the industry during the recession?
A. It’s hard to get a job in the creative industry even when the sun’s shining so do the same things but quicker, louder and weirder.

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Portfolio

2004/2005 – the National Gallery branding

We realised that if people are turned off by paintings, then posters of paintings aren’t going to change their minds. So we did the opposite. No paintings. As you might imagine, the Gallery took some convincing. We wrote a list of all the themes and emotions you can experience there – I like to think of it as the longest logo ever made. This went onto posters, t-shirts, banners, screensavers – the lot. The big red poster is still my favourite thing I’ve ever produced.

We eventually did show paintings, but just a glimpse, a tease. We broke the collection down into broad themes – love, war, sex etc. and produced advertising based on these.

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2006/2007 – The Grand Tour

We hung 44 full sized exact replica paintings up in central London for twelve weeks as an advertising campaign. You could download tours from a website or get commentary by phone. We even produced tour guides. It looks simple but took eighteen months and nearly killed us. Every wall space was donated free – asking permission in the sex shop was an interesting one. Each painting was graffiti proof, weather proof, beer proof. I was worried sick about vandalism but it was weird – they remained pretty much untouched. I think only four got nicked, and replaced pretty quickly. We’ve got CCTV footage of one getting ripped from a wall – it’s brilliant.

The idea is, it goes up in a new city every year. It was up in York last year.

(N.B. Rob neglected to mention the critical acclaim this project received, notably picking up D&AD and Art Directors Club of New York golds).

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2008 -2009 Thrislington Cubicles are The Partners oldest, and most award-winning client. I worked on a new sub-brand, building toilet cubicles for schools. For this brochure we got a load of blank exercise books and printed straight onto it with really rough digital photographs and nice big chunky yellow text. Everything’s done on a shoestring – I wrote it, the photography is by the boss’s son and most of the objects we found lying about.

We got this bog roll holder off e-bay. The things people can sell…

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2002 Design Council rebranding

This brochure was part of a new manifesto. As you can see on the cover, we decided it was one of the most important things of the century. We illustrated the problems and solutions by using two completely different styles of photography (Dod Miller and Lee Funnel). Amongst other things we photographed a fridge mountain in Wales and the guy doing the welding is creating the B of the Bang sculpture which is part of the sport-city development in Manchester…

We got the chance to turn it into an exhibition – nice big graphics. mmm.

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2008 Deloitte

This is a book what I wrote for Deloitte. It’s about being ‘One Step Ahead’ so we started page 1 on the cover. The book is about people who made clever decisions at turning points in their life. It took months of research. Thank God for Wikipedia.

I got to work with a great photographer called Andy Macdonald to bring the stories to life. I’ve got a thing about cables. I think they end up in pretty much every project I do. Lovely cables.

We needed a blood bag for this one – Andy made a phone call and it arrived – full – in about ten minutes. I didn’t ask…

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2000 D&AD

Lastly, I’ve stuck this in because it was one of the first things I did and it still makes me smile because it looks so kind of, well, shite. It was an invite for D&AD judging which was being held in Brighton. A million postcards later and finally we found a picture with a yellow pencil in it…

With a background including a role as the Creative Director of the formidable ad agency, TAXI in New York, Stewart is renowned for his inimitable creativity and wit which we believe makes him the perfect fit for the role of The Partners lead creative in NY. Having cut his creative teeth here in the UK at the likes of Lewis Moberly, Stewart has a strong understanding of both markets either side of the Atlantic. He says: “With a London agency background, this is the perfect role for me as the whole ethos behind the international expansion is ‘one office, two front doors’.”

Welcome Stewart.