Snask are an exuberant, eccentric and extremely entertaining design firm based in Stockholm for whom conventionality is a curse word. Ahead of what is likely to be an exciting performance at OFFSET, we spoke with creative director and founder Fredrik Öst (left) about keeping all the different plates spinning.
I’m interested in the background to Snask and how it got started. What were you doing before Snask and how many people were involved at the start?
Magnus and I met in England when we were studying graphic design. We decided to start Snask together with another friend and student, Petter Johansson (pjadad.com). We started out straight after university. Magnus did a swift visit to an agency before joining. A few years later, Petter and ourselves went our separate ways and he started his own shop. In his place, Erik Kockum joined in. From the beginning we wanted to start an agency that was exactly what we wanted and not built on what others wanted or on principals and methods that other people had used. We wanted to make design that stood out and was bold and beautiful rather than minimalistic. There are so many great minimalistic designers out there, especially in Scandinavia! We were tired of that aesthetic.
Was the anti-conventional ethos, the ‘make enemies’ ethos there right from the start as a foundation to the agency? Or was the something that developed as Snask found its voice?
That idea has always been in Snask. We saw ourselves as underdogs and rebels straight from the start. Our industry is run by old men with too much power and we decided to not care about them and go our own way. After a few years, we garnered this ethos of not being afraid of standing up for our beliefs, and to do it loudly and so came the actual sentence or slogan, ‘Make enemies and gain fans’ [which became the title of Snask’s first book]. It’s inspired by a Tibor Kalman quote: ‘When you make something no one hates, no one loves it.’
The description of Snask places a lot of emphasis on ‘doing things differently’ from conservative parts of the industry and worshiping unconventional ideas. With an industry that moves very quickly, what happens when your unconventional ideas become new conventions? Are there times when Snask does like to do things conventionally, or even has to do them conventionally? Or is that not something that you’ll produce?
The dream would be that we would always be unconventional. But if we become successful our ideas will become the new conventions. If we live in a world where gender, age, sexuality or ethnicity doesn’t matter, then we happily live by the conventional rules. My guess is that the old men won’t let go of power, and this will force the younger generations to skip them entirely and start their own world online, where work is judged based on quality and not on contacts in the industry, age or gender. I think it’s already happening.
Regarding our work we don’t really see it the way that we deliberately produce constant unconventional ideas, but rather that today it’s sadly as easy that if you push your own ideas, you will be seen as unconventional.
Definitely Malmö Festival 2014. We’d been working with that project and client for four years. This was our fifth go and we’d been pushing our ambitions higher for each year, so we decided to make something bigger and bolder that we’d ever tried before. We produced the biggest poster in the world that also served as an interactive playground during the actual festival. We designed an identity that could be placed on the streets and have the visitors climb and interact with it, after it had actually been drawn there with the same piece of design. So they saw the poster that made them come and, when they were there, they could actually climb and interact with it. So a message was sent, received and then interacted with!
You have a lot of projects in a lot of different areas that I imagine other design companies might consider extra-curricular (say the craft beer, the record label, the bikes, the books, the speaking tours) but from a distance, to me they seem very much part of what makes Snask what it is. How do you find the expertise to work in so many different areas but still control the Snask brand?
Then I guess most design companies that think that’s extra-curricular are fucking boring or just don’t see their own potential. We know design and branding and our everyday job is to solve problems. For us it’s very natural to create things we see are missing or that solves problems. I know several design agencies that started restaurants, bike shops, bars, etc., and when you think about it it’s natural. Regarding the Snask brand we just want to create things that makes our own lives more fun to lead. There weren’t any track and field events for fat, beer-drinking thirty-something media people, so we invented Snask & Field. Same goes for a lot of other projects. Sometimes we think other people or agencies have extremely low ambitions. Take lecturing for example. Why stand there and babble only about your own work for an hour? You’re on a stage. You’re there to inspire, but also to entertain and most lecturers only do the first part. When it comes to culture, we think it’s extremely important, as designers, to be part of our own world and time and consume film, music, etc. – pop culture basically – but also create your own culture and thereby contribute to your own time and society.
Snask is also known for public speaking and lecturing about destroying the ‘myth of being creative’ and talking about ‘taking risks, fucking up and reaching success’. What is the ‘myth of being creative’? And what does Snask consider success?
Haha! The myth of being creative is everyone who says, ‘I am creative,’ or ‘I am not creative’. We believe that everybody is born creative and then society pushes your creativity down with stupid rules that are supposed to be seen as ‘grown-up’. So people go around acting grown-up, but no one questions if this is good or where it came from. Actually acting ‘grown-up’ is the most immature you can do. Stop acting an age, be yourself and you’ll realise that you’re creative. So that’s what we would call the myth of being creative. Also in our industry a lot of people want to come across as perfect, but actually talking about the opposite is what inspires people. Nothing ever worth having came without a risk.
Words: Ian Lamont
Feature image: Soeren Skarby
