Johnny Hardstaff talks about his career

Johnny Hardstaff

Johnny began by describing to us the seedling that set his career into motion. Having graduated as a graphic designer in 1992 with no experience of moving image, he continued his explorations off all the contemporary influences that interested him, imperialism, good and bad, cultural input and antiquity. He developed a story-board of doodles and began meticulously feeding the art work into Photoshop where he could make it move. He called the piece The History of Gaming. This simplistic retro piece is really what got Hardstaff spotted and is an example of how one really good bit of work is enough. Sony liked it and commissioned him to make a similar but ‘fierce’ piece. Hardstaff described to us his extremely daring attitude, even this early in his career he challenged ‘the corporation’. He deliberately made a piece that represented the evils of a corporation whilst using corporate money to do it! It turns out that although the company ‘hated it’ as predicted, they actually loved it and the commercial (which never aired!) got lots of attention, so it just shows that you can break the rules and never know what will happen. I would like to start being more brave about my work and my attitude to employment, but I’ve got a long way to go until I get balls like Hardstaff!!  

He describes the real thrill of commercial work as being when you start repossessing it. As Hardstaff introduced his chosen Kino 4 film for us to watch, he explained his love hate relationship with corporations, he likes to merely collaborate but not have a master! Hardstaff described the thrill he gets out of the variety of work people offer him. His approach is one of taking all pre sets and trying to bend and break them, “Graphics for me is a sensation, a quality, it’s a whole set of sensations that you can’t articulate”. Semiotics interests him, what the design does to others, what it says. Hardstaff appears to constantly struggle with the ethics of design or just having fun, a battle between the visually appealing and the meaningful. He is both fascinated and I think slightly horrified, by how much you can manipulate and direct people through design. “I reserve the right to make string bananas, but also to make something poignant”.  Hardstaff talked of his advertisement for Orange whereby paint flowed freely from bottles, he was amazed to find out that middle aged people just loved to sit a watch it over and over as the idea of ‘here we give you more, we give you so much you cant contain it’ was particularly appealing to them.

It was encouraging to hear that people are starting to understand that designers want to play with their subject, they are beginning to commission different ways of working, more and more. “With all the changes there’s never been a more exciting time to be producing work, design acts as the glue to broach all these new and exciting areas”.