Q&A with Tony Brook

Unit Editions D&AD lecture and Q&A with Tony Brook

Tony brook met with a few of us before the lecture and we had a chat. I asked him mainly about the connection between published material and the online world, which would be useful to know for my last project of the term, where I was starting to think about producing a series of self-publications. He told us that, “If your going to use print, there has to be a tangible reason, they have to earn the right to be magazines, if not, why not be online?” He also spoke of ‘the return’ for the designer, as being far greater online, saying that not only on a flat screen does your work look immaculate but you avoid the frustration of a man with a van taking a 50% cut to distribute print whilst the book seller also takes 25%. This is in part, why he has set up his own publishing company to do the work themselves. He spoke of the fact that in America people are buying PDF magazines and the merits of the I Pad, commenting however, that you have to get apple to agree to run your app, which Tony feels is an unfair restriction of trade. Tony commented that as a publisher your job is not to produce books but to get content out to people, using the shipping industry as a metaphor (their job was to move people and if they had translated their business to planes instead of sticking to boats they would have come off far better). He says to take advantage of movements in media, linking books and magazines with an online version or presence- but each must stand on their own for their inherent qualities. We also spoke of the freedom of the internet and how people can publish un-backed up quick fire views/comments and the merits and woes of this. Although Tony is influenced by Punk, (where he says visual language first came from) and the Swiss and Holland design influences, he is careful to only take inspiration from these, designing in a more of conceptual forward thinking manner.