Interview: Racket

To start can you tell us a little about Racket and how it came to be? Where did the name come from?

Racket is a partnership of Rachel Peachey and Paul Mosig. We met at Canberra School of Art and started off collaborating on exhibitions of photography, video and collage. We were doing the occasional design job to supplement our art practice but then we moved to Melbourne and were expecting our first child so we decided to focus more on design for a while. When we were spending most of our time on our art work and only doing a few design jobs now and then, we used the name Racket as it is an old slang word for an occupation or business or an easy and profitable source of livelihood, which was in contrast to our art practice. By the time we started to take our design work more seriously the name had stuck.

Your work seems to incorporate a heavy sense of place, space and displacement of objects. Where do you think you draw your inspiration from when starting a new project?

Like anyone who works in a creative field, we are always exploring different aesthetics and being inspired by things that we find interesting (which is almost anything). When we start a new project we are drawing from this understanding of the visual world and together with the client brief, we start to build a narrative that feels right. We almost always work with people whose projects we have some affinity with and therefore it's generally not too much of a jump to work out where they are coming from. When we are working on our own projects the process is quite similar, there are just not as many limiting factors unless we create them for ourselves.

I’m interested in how you start a project and manage your time vs income which I know is hard for most designers. How do you go about creating concepts and gauging if your ideas are what the client is after before spending hours in the studio actually making the work?

This is a hard question to answer as it's always a bit different. A lot of work as a design professional is about communication and building and managing relationships. Sometimes it's really easy and the first idea we develop and send through is approved and we move on. Other times we labour over something for ages until we are happy it's going in the right direction and then the client just isn't in to it, no matter how much we explain how we got to this point and why we think it works. I am not sure there is a magic solution for this. We always try to be very up front and open with our clients from the start of a project and hope they are the same with us and this way we can move through the process fairly smoothly without too much conflict.

A lot of your work looks like the kind of fun and experimentation one would expect from studio projects rather than commercial projects. How did you get into the ideal position of being known for a unique design style and having clients come to you because of that. Rather than having to fit into existing ideas and styles brought to you by the client? Which I’m sure is the norm for a number of designers that work with small businesses on a low budget.

Most of our first clients found us through our art work, which at that point had a very particular style. These first projects formed the basis of our portfolio and people would then approach us because of this. We have been lucky in this way and we also think because there is just the two of us and we communicate directly to all of our clients and not through an account manager, we get to explain our ideas personally which helps.

I’m interested in whether you also dabble in other art forms and if so, how does that cross over to what you do as a visual artist / designer?

We work in quite a few different mediums both commercially and for our own visual art and it all crosses over, as everything we do furthers our understanding of things and gives us ideas for what might come next. We exhibit photography and assemblages, we make videos for clients and for ourselves, we have been working on some ceramics with one of our neighbours and we have been renovating an old house and garden, all of which influences our perspective on art and design.

What is your opinion on design crowd sourcing websites and what effect do you think this is having on small design individuals and studios and design in general?

We are not huge fans of the practice as it essentially means there are a lot of people working for the chance to get paid and most of them won't. However it doesn't personally impact on us directly, as the jobs that are currently offered on these sites are generally not the kind of jobs we want to be doing. We have sympathy for small businesses that need someone to do a small job for them and don't really know how to engage with the design industry or how to find a designer. We are also sensitive to the fact that if you aren't getting any offers of work and you don't have much of a portfolio, it could be a way of developing this. Not many studios we know want to be doing hundred dollar logos but I guess if someone feels that this would be an acceptable price for them then I am not sure it is our place to tell them they shouldn't.

On a practical level, do you have any advise to young designers on how to approach new work, how to estimate time and cost required in creating work that is both rewarding to do but also meets the expectations of the client brief?

Ha! We have got better at this over time but it is still hard to work out and we still sometimes get it wrong. I guess you have to have confidence in your work and be able to communicate that well. You need to record all the time you spend on a project until you have a better sense of how long different types of jobs might take. In terms of creating rewarding work, for us this means working with good people. We have been able to work with interesting people through having an interesting portfolio and that started with doing self-initiated projects – making zines, videos, a self-published book and exhibiting. Doing these types of things meant our folio started off reflecting our interests and then each new job we get builds on that.

For more details about Racket visit: www.racket.net.au

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