A conversation with Alex Ritchie, industrial designer at e-2, Sydney

I first stumbled across e2 when I heard they designed a Pop Up pub for ad agency Droga5 as part of a summer promotion for Australia's most popular tipple, VB. They also designed the $10 million 'Centre of Service Excellence' for Qantas - an interesting experiment in simulating workspaces to train and inspire staff.

e2's Creative Director is Alex Ritchie, an architect-turned-industrial designer who also happens to be one of the designers behind the Millennium Dome in London. He's exactly as a creative should be - disheveled, passionate, silly, innately talented.

He co-founded e2 in Sydney a couple of years ago with another Scotsman, Robbie Robertson, which is one of first consultancies in Australia to specialize in the burgeoning field of experiential design. They told me their biggest challenge is explaining what 'experiential design' means to potential clients. It's one of those waffly, new-age marketing terms that is misunderstood and ambiguous, yet I think they're onto something as e2 was singled out in BRW's 2010 list of Fast Starter companies.

Alex is an architect/Creative Director and Robbie is the one who's good with business plans and spreadsheets. I interviewed them about e2's business evolution, and the story appears here on CreativeInnovation. It's long but (I hope) worth reading if you're a small business owner in the branding/experiential space.

Monocle (almost) agree to feature Kevin Finn, Finn Creative

I was hugely disappointed when Monocle decided not to publish this piece on graphic designer Kevin Finn.

Kevin quit his role as Creative Director at Saatchi Design in Sydney a few years ago to set up his own studio in Kununurra, Western Australia, which is not the most obvious place to set up a design studio. For two years, this red-headed Irish Australian lived in such sweltering, isolated and unusual conditions, working with an eclectic mix of clients, that Monocle singled him out as one of 5 designers to watch globally (but later decided not to run the piece after all). Here's how the story began:

“In the East Kimberley, Western Australia, Irish-born designer Kevin Finn established his design studio in perhaps one of the world’s most isolated towns, Kununurra, where the temperature can reach 40 degrees in the wet season.

With extremely limited access to photographers and materials, Finn Creative is in the unique position of bringing high-caliber design to indigenous organisations, rejecting clichéd imagery of boomerangs and dot paintings for more thoughtful, relevant symbolism…”

Although Monocle decided not to run this profile after all, I did write a long piece on Kevin for CREATIVE instead.

Finn relocated his studio, Finn Creative, to Brisbane this year. He also publishes an excellent design journal that explores design's relevance to everything from politics to popular culture, Open Manifesto.

Gemma O'Brien: being Mrs Eaves

I recently interviewed Gemma O’Brief for incubate magazine. I was not nearly as impressed by her body typography – which has made her almost-famous in the design blogosphere – as I was by her illustrations, which are cursive, ornate, and inspired by words, just like her blog (fortheloveoftype, which she writes under the pseudonym 'Mrs Eaves').

Ordinarily, I am suspicious of people who have the potential to become more successful than me by the age of 30. But Gemma is too lovely to begrudge. Bubbly and gorgeous, I love the way she experiments with typography in such a tactile, naïve way. I also love that she's established a global client base for her illustrations thanks to her knack for social networking.

She was recently commissioned to illustrate a story for The New York Times. She designed Bob Hawke’s 80th birthday invitations. She’ll appear at TypoBerlin for the second time as a guest speaker in 2011. And goddammit, she’s only 22.