“Every day is Bring Your Soul To Work day”
— MARCUS TAYLOR
What were some of your first jobs as a designer?
After graduating from Central TAFE, I worked at several small design studios in Fremantle for the first couple of years whilst dabbling in freelance work, as we all do. Then met a girl, packed up everything that could fit in a small van, sold the rest, and drove my life to Melbourne.
While living in Melbourne, I worked in bars, did artworking for a print company, freelanced for advertising agencies and spent a lot of time flying back and forth to Sydney to represent the creative arm of an FMCG marketing company there. I never intended to start my own company, but the dream job I'd always hoped for never materialised, and I kept getting more clients. So around ~2010, I leant into it, and Studio Papa was accidentally born.
After a couple of years, the romance fell apart, and I came back to WA. While there, I got offered an exciting share space opportunity and a plum client gig. The tea leaves were all pointing toward me staying, so I did.
I've been running Papa for almost 13 years, and the business has grown and evolved significantly. I've worked in various lifestyle industries, from the music scene and the arts to now specialising in alcohol packaging and hospitality businesses. I scaled the company and had some wonderful people come on board the mothership and expand our services. I've scaled it back these days, and I prefer to work more like a micro agency, working across design, marketing and communications services for a mostly locked client list.
Whilst I move across roles these days, graphic design is undoubtedly the backbone of what I do, and my experience at Central TAFE was the foundation upon which I built my career.
How did you get your first graphic design job?
I was lucky enough to be contacted the day after our grad show, and invited for an interview.
What advice would you give to Graphic Design students studying at NM TAFE right now?
Balance is everything.
Don't let your career get in the way of your life.
Cultivate just enough confidence to believe in your work, but not so much that you can't take feedback.
The client isn't the enemy. They were smart enough to hire you. Listen to them.
What is post-pandemic Perth design in need of most?
Sustainable design practice. Top to bottom.
What do you think are the most important qualities in a graphic designer?
Confidence, humility, hunger, curiosity, and the temperament to flow, rather than block.
Please list some awesome new developments happening right now in the design industry.
AI is obviously disrupting every industry at the moment. It's too soon to see if the overall outcome is positive for our industry or negative, but it's certainly arrived, and will change many areas of our work I believe.
Any further comments that may assist with our course and curriculum development?
A knowledge of technical skills is critical to making good design, but the production of design alone is something that I think will become increasingly undervalued. If we want to future proof our grads, we need to equip them with something that adds value to to the design process, and can't easily be reproduced by an app, or a design competition.
Perhaps that's something is project management skills, marketing skills, or perhaps it's having a strategic process.
I believe we also need to move away from cultivating a rock star culture, and instead, place more value on sustainable, ethical creative practice. We need to stop awarding worth based on how pretty something is, and place a little more value on the context in which something was made.
Read THE DESIGN KIDS interview from 2014 here
Check out the Studio Papa website
Check out his Studio Bomba handpainted rebrand: vimeo.com/77464885
