Form have been designing and branding artists in the music industry for nearly twenty years. They created the East 17 dog logo,  the design behind Pendulum’s InSilico album and singles campaign and have just started to work their magic on Pixie Lott – not to mention all the other bands they’ve helped become unforgettable. On top of this they’ve delivered their No More Heroes lecture across the world on how fashion, music, and identity are all connected. We spoke to Paul West and Paula Benson, founders of Form to ask about how the change in the music industry has affected them, whether they still feel there’s a correlation between music and fashion, and the journey that lead them to become the graphic design giants they are today.

Paul: When I was at college in the late eighties most people wanted to work in the music Industry.  I’d worked in Peter Saville Associates, then Mark Farrow’s, who are real pioneers in the design industry, as well as Vaughan Oliver before setting up with Paula. We hooked up with a very important band manager at the time who kept us rollercoaster busy for years, we worked for just about all the majors and all the independents that were available in London, and then we did some work for a French label – but we always saw ourselves as designers working in the music industry, not music industry designers.

Paula: The manager Paul’s talking about is a guy called Tom Watkins, who managed the Pet Shop Boys, Bros and many other acts. One of the first jobs he gave us was East 17 – and although not the coolest band on the planet, for us it was a really massive project. Tom made sure we did absolutely everything, so you remember the dog logo? We did that, and every single record sleeve, every single poster, and back then there was a lot of formats, so we’d be doing cassettes, remix’s, vinyl’s, CD’s, mini disk’s, all the marketing material, we also did all the merchandise, so we were designing duvets, crisp packets, calendar’s, everything. I suppose our background became branding, we were used to seeing the whole overview. We’ve always done music, but I suppose the classics that people know us for are the campaign we did for Everything But The Girl, which was the  Walking Wounded campaign – that won loads of awards, and then there was Scritti Politti, who were really respected in the music industry and a massive favourite of both of ours. I did my art A-Level listening to Scritti Politti, fast-forward fifteen years and he phoned up saying ‘Do you want to work with us on the album?’

Describe the journey you go on, from being approached by someone, to the finished product?

Paula: It can be quite a long process! Usually the record company’s marketing department will phone up and say “we’ve got a new album for whatever band, can you put forward some ideas” and they might ask two to six other design companies to do the same, so at that stage we need to make sure that we’re not just wasting our time – that we know exactly what they’re looking for, if they’ve got any ideas, what kind of direction it’s going in and a bit more about the overview. Then three or four of us will sit in this room, talking about directions and ideas, we’ll always have loads of references to films or art or things we’ve seen on the street – just thinking about what feels intuitively right. Then we’ll work for three or four days on different logos and ideas for the visual campaign and sleeves- we’re always trying to think of not just how it’s going to look on a record sleeve, especially now it’s got to work this big (she holds her finger and thumb an inch and a half from each other) on iTunes, we’re thinking about how the identity’s going to work huge on the back of a stage or in a not-very-well-printed newspaper.

Paul: The weird thing is nowadays the logo’s either completely tiny, like 90 pixels, or it’s absolutely massive at the back of a stage. There’s practically nothing in between.

Paula: Designing a logo is a bit like a science really, you have to make sure it works black and white, colour, on screen, in print, and all the rest. We normally present three or four completely different routes to the record company and the band, then if they like our vibe we’ll get together and develop that. Then they commission us to start working on the actual sleeves and the download sleeves, but there’s also all the promo stuff behind the scenes that isn’t necessarily commercially available, like the special limited edition packs or the DJ releases, the press teams need press kits to launch it to the magazines, there’s normally quite a lot of different stuff going on at any one times.

What inspired you to do your No More Heroes talk?

Paul: We were approached by this guy called Daniel for CEDIM, a pioneering design college over in Monterrey in Mexico. Every year CEDIM have this big festival called Design Week Monterrey, where they get luminaries in their field to come and talk about a subject for a weekend of conferences, and when we were asked the theme was Identity. They said you’ve got a completely blank slate, you can talk about anything to do with identity as long as it doesn’t involve your work directly. We decided to do a sort of plotted history of youth culture in the UK, from when real subculture started. We got really excited, but we soon found ourselves lost in the jigsaw puzzle of culture, I mean how far down the rabbit hole do you  go? We had to focus on pivotal genres and bypass so many musical styles and epochs that we really loved. You had the Teddy Boys, then we went to Mods and Rockers, Mods led onto Skin Heads, which went on to Punk, and then from Punk we went to the Smiley and Rave Culture of the eighties, and we just went on like that bringing in references en route.

Paula : I think music, identity, fashion and subculture are all so intrinsically linked, so many people form identities in their early teenage years around music. It’s about wanting to belong, or the exact opposite – wanting to be different to everyone else, and I  think that often comes from music.

Do you still feel there’s a correlation between fashion and music at the moment?

Paula: Definitely, it’s almost like we’re trying to find what’s authentic, what’s real, and in absence of making something new going back to the retro and vintage look – how many bands have you seen in dinner jackets, drainpipe suit trousers and thin ties? Pick any new band and stick them next to a picture of The Who or The New Faces and it’s hard to tell the difference. I think it’s because music and fashion are often a reaction against something, and at the moment I don’t think anyone knows what to react against anymore, so they’re going back to when they did. After 9/11 the sales of vintage went through the roof. Why was that? Because people were looking for something authentic, they didn’t want to look like everyone else, they wanted something to say “I’m important, I’m me, and I’ve got an identity” and vintage is still really important – because you’ve got something that no one else has.

So how has the download era effected you and the graphic design industry

Paula: We could see that the way people were consuming music was changing a long time ago, but the industry wasn’t adapting, so we made a deliberate effort to start working in other areas. It’s definitely affected what we do, but it doesn’t change what we’re good at and why we get commissioned to do a lot of acts. It’s about getting a really strong idea that can work however the music is delivered. The practical way it’s affected us is that we’re not designing this anymore (She makes a square with her hands, around the size of an album sleeve) we’re designing this (She shrinks the square to an iTunes album art size) but we still have to make sure there’s the same impact in that small area. We’re also thinking about how is the basic concept of that going to translate in video, online and all the rest of it, so yeah it’s totally affected what we do.

Paul: I think the good thing is we mentally prepared for it, and not to bang on about the age thing but when you hit your forties there are other things to do! There are really exciting projects to work on that are still music affiliated without it being an album sleeve.

Paula: Like this project we’re doing with Cutty Sark Whisky with Asian Dub Foundation, it’s a collaboration between a brand and a band, so there is no record company telling them how to go about it, but Cutty Sark Whisky are not only putting money up for them to make an album and tour their gigs, but collaborating directly with the band and we’ve built a website around an exciting series of events rather than simply launching an album. I think that’s gonna happen a hell of a lot more.

What would you change about the music industry?

Paul: The problem with the mentality in the music industry is actually valuing our creativity. I don’t feel that there’s a lot of respect for what designers do, and for the amount of time that we put into everything – including the pitch. Designers don’t just bring the visuals to the table, we have amassed years of experience, reference, and knowledge of pretty much everything. Would you go to a restaurant and ask for a free meal, or ask a builder to fix your wall for free? No, you pay these people for their profession, and design is our profession. Without payment, a design studio cannot exist. I’m not talking about the creative element of competition, because we are all creative, the problem exists when you become a commodity – when you are not judged on how good you are, or what real value you can bring, but how cheap you are. The design industry have to address this because there are shed loads of young designers who have no idea that you can charge, and should charge for a pitch, and that by doing so you are not only saving your soul, you are helping your fellow designer, and bringing value to the end result.

Look out for work by Form, a portfolio can be found at www.form.uk.com, and if you haven’t already, make sure you check out www.cuttysarksessions.com

Written by Bee Pahnke