Standard Life International

I’m here to talk about a small Scottish business, one of the 97% who employ less than 50 people, I’ll show you some of the work we have done abroad, and I’ll say a bit about our international aspirations.

I am one of the founders of Graven Images, a design consultancy based in Glasgow.

I started the company back in 1985, along with my partner Janice Kirkpatrick, whilst we were still students at the Glasgow School of Art. Me an architect, and she a graphic designer.

We had a choice back then – either resign yourself to an unchallenging career in Scotland’s design backwaters or leave for London/Milan/New York.

I had spent some time in the States and Janice had a job offer in London with the BBC but we were both reluctant to jump straight onto the career carousel and thought we could prolong studenthood by setting up this company which would allow us to test whether we could make a living out of doing the kind of work which interested us from Scotland.

We were inspired by Italian groups like Memphis who seemed to break all the conventional boundaries of the design disciplines by designing furniture and ceramics and textiles and graphics and interiors. So we rented a room with no windows in a lane at the back of Sauchiehall Street, and started to do the same.

Our method was always to produce work with a rigour which would allow it to be viewed in an international context.

International work from Glasgow, back in the pre-city of culture days, was a radical enough thought as it was, but probably were picking up on a feeling which was in the air.

Our very first commissions included a paper mache Stonehenge and an ecclesiastical mosaic (actually a genuine graven image) for the archdiocese of Glasgow.

And also, our first year or so we put together an exhibition on Glasgow’s creativity, designed furniture, opened a shop, and came up with ranges of products under the banner of Tartanalia—a word which seemed somehow exotic for the London press. But we were really interested in ordinary things—things which were rooted in our own culture.

It all generated good publicity. We always did our best to look moody and interesting.

Our work was exhibited and published and we got deeply involved in the run-up to the City of Culture events which were focused on Glasgow’s Tramway venue, where ultimately we were to create this foyer and café bar.

In the very early days of Apple Mac we produced difficult and ambitious graphic design—for Peter Brooks productions of Mahabarata, and Carmen, the Wooster Group and many others.

Sometimes the constraints of digital image making defeated us and we resorted to more conventional trickery.

This image was build up of poystyrene letters and projected slides—and the photographers assistant walked through the exposure at the right moment with a torch to create the wiggly line.

Our international aspiration never receded but commercial survival became necessary—alongside the gentle process of building our networks through talking and publishing as broadly as we could.

We manufactured furniture in Dundee and Salerno, we exhibited in New York and London, we lectured in Cairo and Helsinki—but all of this provided scant income.

We worked instinctively and opportunistically rather than strategically—which is both the strength and weakness of small energetic organisations.

In the early nineties there were seven or eight of us, and money was tight. We learned about corporate design and got serious with our approach to interior design.

Around ’95 Terence Conran invited Janice to collect and curate an exhibition at the Design Museum in London. The resulting show about ordinary things, not only generated a TV documentary but generated a wave of international exhibition contracts for The British Council, and the DTI.

Now, I say ordinary things, but Janice not only persuaded Terence to allow her to spend more than half the budget on the Ducati—but also to let her ride it for the six months leading up to the show.

She loved it so much that she bought one herself, and still belts around on it.

An exhibition about British street style, called UK Style, was commissioned by the DTI under Maggie Thatcher—showing that cool Britannia was actually a Tory idea. This toured to South Korea Hong Kong and New Zealand, and then we worked on a little show about biodiversity for China.

It was a little controversial—not least because of the imminent three gorges plan—so we had to be careful with the content. We came up with a simple series of demountable panels which were printed straight onto thin plywood, and held together with a system of tabs and chopsticks.

There was an awkward moment when I was on a reconnaissance trip to the Botanic Gardens in Shenzhen. I was there with two professors of botany from the UK. After showing us around in the morning our hosts served us an amazing and huge lunch. Afterwards they took us to room adjacent to one of the cactus houses, and sat us down in these soft low vinyl covered seats that the Chinese love and declared “now we have seminar”. At first I thought they were joking but was relaxed in the knowledge that it was not really my area of expertise and I could defer to my learned colleagues.

Then I noticed that they had both fallen asleep.

It would be fair to say that I bluffed my way through it with biodiversity for beginners—and they were too polite to challenge me.

In a way this picture represents an attitude which we tried to convey in representing British design culture—particularly in shows like UK style.

But we were sucked in by the establishment …

Partly, as it turned out, due to the especially astute and insightful Alan Murray (who some of you may know!).

China was to became a particular area of expertise for us. In 1998 Alan invited us to design a dinner and exhibition in Shanghai to mark the prime Minister’s visit. Now, we don’t normally do events, but realised that there was an opportunity to take a creative lead on the project, and to bring in specialist expertise to ensure that the event logistics and security issues were in safe hands.

Downing Street made it clear in the brief that there should be no sit-down formal dinner and that Tony Blair wanted to meet as many Chinese people as possible, rather than just a lot of ex-pats. Naturally, the British Chamber were involved and news of the forthcoming visit had already encouraged the wives to invest in new hats—so they were a bit nonplussed when we proposed a format which was based on the idea of an informal bar supper.

The trouble was it was for 700 people and we didn’t want to miss the chance to change Chinese perceptions that Britain has the worst food in the world. They may not be wrong there but they have an almost equally poor impression of the French.

So we engaged Nick Nairn, hero of daytime TV, and his team to design a menu which might appeal. Mushy peas, scallop spring rolls, lobster thingys, and smoked duck and neeps, were favourites on the night. We knew they would work, because the whole menu had been tested on Chinese volounteers in Scotland some months beforehand.

All of the ingredients were airfreighted in, in a giant chilled diplomatic bag—it was a wonderful experience seeing 20 chefs, some British as well as a local team working to produce 10,000 individual pieces of food.

The whole time, the man from BritCham, busied around telling us it would never work and that we had to get the dinner protocol right otherwise the Chinese VIP guests would be mortally insulted. Even the day before the event Simon was urging us to change everything to a conventional service format.

On the night, as part of the entertainment, Nick had agreed to do a cookery demonstration.

And on the spur of a moment he invited Cherie Blair to join him in the preparation—and she enthusiastically set about chopping tomatoes.

At this point, the Mayor of Shanghai, not to be out done, leapt to his feet and set about chopping a huge bunch of coriander with an enormous knife.

From then on the evening moved from being pleasantly informal to a bit of a party.

My lasting memory will be Simon from the Chamber of Commerce punching the air, eyes blazing, and exclaiming “we did it, we did it!”

If there is a lesson to be cautiously learned I think it is that people have more in common with each other than our diverse cultures and languages might suggest. By creating an event which didn’t conform to the formal protocols of either country we created an opportunity for people to relax, to join in, to lower their barriers and to simply enjoy themselves.

Since then we have designed and toured an exhibition on Abdul Aziz in the middle east, one about British packaging expertise and one on Football which was particularly popular in China.

Last year we designed and organised an exhibition called Leading Edge Showcase in Shanghai.

The exhibition was introduced by Maddy, Tomorrow’s World’s virtual presenter, who we managed to teach Mandarin, and have her talk in perfect lip synch.

Standard Life were one of the participants, along with sixty or so other British companies who are active in China.

For the first time we worked with Chinese contractors for the whole exhibition build and that meant we had to be very careful with our choice of materials and technologies.

We also designed a trade stand at Shenzhen Hi Tech Fair, which picked up a couple of awards, and as a result of both of these projects have been building a much more coherent strategy to extend our business opportunities in China.

This book, (available at all good book stores), put together by a Dutch publisher, and called Design in a Cold Climate is about some of our interior projects, and this year we will be publishing a book which specifically focuses on our graphic and exhibition designs, and a Chinese version will be available.

We have joined CBBC (who have been clients of ours for a few years) and have a simple strategy which aims to work primarily with British companies who already have Chinese partners or are active in the region. For us it’s a confident toe in the water but we are not quite ready yet to attack the Chinese consumer head on!

Now, this might seem like one extreme to another, but we have also developed in the last 4 or 5 years a close relationship with a US company called TSYS. Part of the Synovus group and based in Columbus, Georgia they are third party processors of debit and credit card transactions. They got to know us when they started to develop their business into the European market, opening offices in York and London. However most of the marketing fuctions are still based in the US.

They were concerned not to look like “just another American company” and sensitive to the need to adopt a more European perspective in their communications material.

They had just launched a new identity system when we first got to know them, and we helped them implement that, we designed various items of marketing collateral, some trade advertising and exhibitions.

They are a truly wonderful organisation—in some ways similar to Standard Life they have maintained a strong sense of community and remain responsible and involved with their local roots.

Our challenge is to convey their personality and people focussed ideology, and to keep it fresh and European.

Most of the work is briefed and approved electronically, and we have occasional conference calls to discuss options and strategies—but one of the great advantages of distance is that it eliminates unnecessary meetings.

At their recent show in Paris, they decided to serve cocktails. It was no problem for us to design a bar but they were struggling to find staff who could do all the Tom Cruise juggling and mixing. Round about the same time we came across a group of three Greenock lads who had just launched the appropriately named organisation “Liquid Assets”—and with a little trepidation we introduced them to our Client. Now, these guys are about as far as you get from deep southern politesse and refinement—but their cocktails were brilliant and they didn’t use a drop of Buckfast.

We made sure that they were well briefed on the names and organisations which were our clients’ key targets, so when they spotted someone important they used their bar tending skills to draw them.

We hope to do more with TSYS, and as they build on their successes in processing for The Royal Bank and Natwest, and Allied Irish, we will get wider opportunities to again extend that network.

We have always held that design is an international language, which can transcend the usual boundaries of geography.

It’s a medium which allows you to communicate emotion, energy, and enthusiasm, and as such it allows you to get closer to your clients or customers.

And finally, I couldn’t have you all here and miss the opportunity of showing a couple of slides from closer to home—RBS, Radisson, TCS—Thankyou very much.