Concrete Playground

Melbournian design duo tin&ed (separately, Tin Nguyen and Edward Cutting) have made their mark through illustration, collage, photography, sculpture, installation, motion, web design and art direction funnelled into all manner of wares, and are still on a high from their recent SOYA win. We caught up with them ahead of their appearance at Semi-Permanent this week.

Concrete Playground: What has been your favourite project to work on so far?

Ed: Our exhibition at the start of last year was our first solo show — I suppose, there’s two of us — and that was really fun. I mean it was a bit stressful, but we turned it into a really fun project.

Tin: And we got to work with our friends. We involved like 12 of our friends in it — and I guess even with commercial projects as much as we can we like to involve other creative people.

Ed: Probably another one with a similar thing about involving our friends was the Melbourne International Design Festival, which was in 2008. That was a super, super quick job. I mean, the job took a little while, but coming up with the identity for it had to be done fairly quickly. So we basically set up a project for our friends and we worked with them and it turned out really well.

Concrete Playground: Could you describe your creative process? Do you work on all projects together?

Tin: We do work on all the projects together. Our processes change depending on what we’re working on because we do quite a lot of different types of work.

Ed: And there’s some things that, you know, maybe I’m better at, or Tin’s better at, but what’s generally good is if we both work on it and have different things that we put into it — it gets a bit more interesting that way.

Tin: It’s a pretty democratic process. We sort of talk through everything together and then we’ll work on different parts of it, and then we’ll swap. It’s very integrated, so it’s very hard with any project to sort of dissect who’s done what, because we’ve pretty much at some point worked on each of the different parts of it.

Ed: And certainly conceptually we try to work things out fairly clearly together so that we are working in the same kind of way and thinking about similar things as we work on the project.

Concrete Playground: How do you approach corporate jobs as opposed to personal projects?

Tin: Actually probably the same. I think the thing with more corporate jobs — because we’ve done work through some quite large companies, and they’re usually through agencies — is we’re usually only a small part of the whole project. Usually with those projects they’ve already come up with a concept and we’re brought in to execute it, basically. So that’s probably a big difference . . . within a personal project we’ll actually come up with a concept and work it all the way through to the end, and in a big, corporate project we’re usually brought in at just a single stage.

Ed: Most of the time it’s really good for us because they get us to do what we do and, if it’s good, it will be a really good brief, but it will still be a bit open for us to play around and if the art directors are good then it works really well.

Concrete Playground: How has winning the Qantas Spirit Of Youth Award (SOYA) affected your practice?

Tin: I guess it means that we get to go overseas this year! (laughs) That’s sort of awesome. We did get a little bit of media through it.

Ed: We had people commenting because we were in the Qantas in-flight magazine. So, you know, my mum was pretty happy.

Tin: Our friends who have been travelling have found it funny to see us in the in-flight magazine.

Ed: And your mum has like five copies.

Tin: Yeah, she pretty much got as many as she could when she was on the plane. I guess one of the great things about winning the SOYA award was the mentorship that we got, which was with Vince Frost, and we’ve had a few meetings with him and he’s already given us some great advice. He used to be one of our heroes when we were at uni — and still is — so it’s kind of amazing to chat with him and for him to give us advice about stuff.

Concrete Playground: What do you think of Australian graphic design and image making?

Ed: I think there’s a nice freedom with what goes on in Australia. When you speak to people from overseas, they’re sort of embedded in their traditions, and that’s a great thing for them to build on, but from an Australian point of view, we don’t have this ‘Swiss design’ thing going on or anything, [and that] is actually quite liberating.

Tin: Yeah, you can kind of just do whatever you want. We had some friends from Germany who studied design over there as well as over here, and just the weight of their history — I mean they sort of came up with typography. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, and we don’t have the weight of that history here. So it’s like a fresh slate. It’s up to us to come up with Australia’s style. We’re not tied to anything, and I think there’s a really good opportunity there.

Ed: Also, I look at a lot of stuff online, and it’s really nice to enjoy some work and then you find out that it is from Australia, and you feel like there’s a certain kind of freshness with it.

Concrete Playground: What are you excited about at the moment?

Tin: We’re excited to be going to Sydney [for Semi-Permanent]! We’re very excited about going overseas at the end of the year; we’re planning a very big trip with our SOYA award money. We’re going to be going around the world to America, Europe and Japan. And hopefully if we get our shit together we can publish a book and do another exhibition overseas this year. That’s the plan. This is sort of an exciting year so I guess: everything.

Ed: I’m excited and a bit scared to speak at Semi-Permanent. It’s a great opportunity to show what we’re up to and to try to have fun with being in front of . . . too many people . . . We’re thinking about paying some other people to do it for us. We could pay some actors. I dunno, a sort of overweight white guy . . .

Tin: . . . and a little Asian man. In his 40s or something.