WorkGroup is headed up by two Dublin design veterans, Conor Nolan and David Wall (who usually is behind the keyboard for this section of the magazine), and who worked together under the unassuming moniker of Conor & David for nearly a decade, producing a range of identifiable and logically rigorous work that has appeared everywhere from coffee cups to record sleeves to books to bars to websites. While their personalities are woven into the fabric of their company, they’ve recently redesigned their own identity, reflecting the expansion of the studio and the collective nature of the work they produce together across a variety of media. We caught up with Conor and David to find out the importance of systems and what makes a great client.
After almost a decade, your studio recently changed name from Conor & David to WorkGroup. Can you tell me about why you did that?
Conor Nolan: The name change is down to when, really, the studio became about more than David and myself. And you could pinpoint that on the timeline many years ago, not necessarily recently. I think we’ve always tried to work with other, both within the studio and outside the studio. So it was a reflection of our working practice that we’ve developed over years rather than over the last six months or eight months.
David Wall: I think for me it is an aspirational thing. It shifts the view from it being just the two of us working together on stuff. It’s like, there’s a project there that’s the studio, that’s actually the thing you’re trying to create. That’s the exercise: the studio. And if the studio works well, all the other projects work well. And when the studio gets neglected I think everything suffers as well. So it’s not two people anymore, it’s this place where stuff happens. So, how can we make it a place where good stuff happens, a place where people would want to work or collaborate with us?
There’s other things about our old name that get called into question [when you start employing other people]. And when people come and go, you realise that that’s always going to be a facet of work as well, and that the constant can be not just us, but the place and the values, the outlook. And definitely working with other people, particularly more senior people, you get a better perspective on what makes your studio different from other studios, which is really useful.
Have there been any points or projects along the way that have drastically changed the way your studio do work? Or has it been more of a steady accumulation process.
CN: I think year on year we’ve certainly developed, we’ve shifted particular aspects of the work maybe, but the core principles remain the same. We still want to do great work for great clients. Every job has challenges that you look back on and influence how you go forward, but that’s the nature of being a designer at any stage in your career: you’re constantly learning. It’s very often the failures and the challenges that you look back on that you say, “I’m glad we did that, we really learned from it.”
DW: I think there’s a few projects [that stand out], not necessarily big projects. Designing Space was one that we did for a conference and it was an opportunity to do that range of work within an identity system where we just thought, this is very cool. Around that time we were doing more one-off type projects like posters and stuff like that, but there was a bigger satisfaction in the complexity and interlinked parts of that project.
CN: It was a move towards something that was systemic. If you do a poster that lives on its own, it’s not part of a series; it’s just once off. There’s something there a bit more challenging about creating something that needs to work in a variety of applications that people need to use, that needs to respond to how people use it. It was also a project where we had a great relationship building experience, one that definitely developed beyond that and into other work. That’s also is something that sticks with us.
DW: We learned that this is what a really good client is, and it’s not necessarily what you expect. It’s not someone who’s like “Do anything you like, here’s loads of money!” That’s not what you want. You want somebody who’s like, “Here are the constraints, and here are my ideas,” because then you have something to work with.
The systems we work now are bigger and more complex, we get to do system design for a couple of clients, like 3fe and Tropical Popical, and in both cases we feel like we understand their whole business and try to build tools for them to try and make it run better. And in both cases there’s huge input from them, they’ve both said, “This is a problem that I’ve identified that needs to be fixed,” and then you get to go in and try to deal with that.
But because those things have got more complex, sometimes you just get to do the poster that you do in one day, and you realise that they’re almost two different jobs. There are skills that cross over but one has an element of maybe a little indulgence, of just making it look really nice.
When you engage with a client, is it the case that they want you to be a solution for every design problem that they have? Or are there times where people will ask for just a logo?
CN: I think when people what people say that they need a logo, they don’t know that they should be saying that they need an identity. I think that’s just an understanding thing, a phraseology thing.
DW: They’ve identified a need in their business to articulate themselves and people will say, “that’s a logo” and it is and it isn’t: logos are part of the work that we do.
CN: If you create a logo for somebody, it has to go somewhere, it has to appear physically or on screen somewhere, and once it steps into that realm it’s part of an identity. It’s never seen in isolation.
DW: To answer your question directly, the best solutions are the ones that are not created in isolation. You want to know what the big picture is.
After the year long celebration of Irish Design 2015, do you think the position of design in Ireland has changed on the basis of it, or do you think it was more a recognition of how much it had changed already?
CN: I think it’s a line in the sand, but I don’t know what impact it’s going to have.
DW: Maybe in ten years time. I think you need that distance to know if things have had an impact. It was huge, we were involved [designing the ID2015 website], so in a way it gives you an interesting perspective on it. Its success is tied to our own on some level. But you see behind the curtain and you see the activity and the mayhem and the successes and the things that don’t go as expected. You’re invested in its success but aware of the warts-and-all realities of starting something from scratch and doing something that big and sustain it solidly for 12 months. For me, particularly, it’ll be five years before for there to be any measurable impact in terms of our lives and our practice, beyond the fact that we did work for them.
I think one of the interesting things that have come out of it is this report on the design industry in Ireland and the size of that industry, which I think is a really important piece of work. I think that’s a good thing to have come out of it. And one of the reasons that it happened was because of continually improving relations between design organisations. There are loads of reasons for that, and sometimes it’s just because, internationally there’s more international acknowledgement of the role and value of design in that context, but it’s also the facts and figures for a government minister to say, “There are X people working in Ireland’s design industry and our design exports are Y billion euro,” – it’s great to have the numbers behind it. But apart from that, it’s probably soon to tell.
To have a look at some of WorkGroup’s extensive body of work, check out workgroup.ie or follow them at @wrkgrp
Words: Ian Lamont
