Multistorey Profile
Grafik Magazine / Text by Liz Brown
It's difficult to define Multistorey - something that its constituent partners Rhonda Drakeford and Harry Woodrow would probably be happy about-though the title of a new book designed by them, Paper Engineering, represents them well, particularly the "engineering" bit. Recent creations include Aveda's giant paper mosaic sign in Harvey Nichols; origami and flickbook invitations; a poster for a florist with lettering scalpelled out of a rubber-plant leaf; the exhibition for the 11 September memorial garden in Grosvenor Square; and knitted cushion posters for a Scarlet Projects event. The duo are equally happy working in either two or three dimensions, and with paper, wool, wood, paint, screenprinting and, of course, Photoshop.
Multistorey was set up in 1997, the year after Drakeford and Woodrow graduated from Saint Martins. Their alma mater has left a recognisable stamp on the way they think about their work and helped them develop the blueprint for the way they approach each project. "It's about ideas first and then how to do it after that," Drakeford says. Sarah Gaventa at Scarlet Projects, one of the clients to have been on the receiving end of their labours, agrees, recalling the first time she saw their portfolio: "The amount of effort they had put into each project was impressive, if not mad," she says. "There is also a lot of wit in their work. They don't have a certain discernible style, unless you count consistent inventiveness and effort no matter the scale of the job."
The work Multistorey created for Scarlet Projects' SAT/3 event, the third annual trail around Clerkenwell's finest furniture emporia, involved pleasing eleven clients, including Fritz Hansen, Orangebox, Milliken Carpet and Wilkhahn. All had very different styles of furniture and the event itself already had a personality, thanks to Graphic Thought Facility's design work on the previous two events. Paul Neale was one of Drakeford and Woodrow's Saint Martins lecturers and recommended them when GTF's schedule wouldn't allow it to participate for a third year. Drakeford and Woodrow created a series of designs to follow but not imitate the previous years' graphics, to complement the identity of all the participants, and to stand alone as strong works in themselves. Their solution involved Drakeford knitting a cushion pattern and Woodrow making a Tube-style map for the route with knotted wool, a passport, competition cards, taxi graphics and a carpet.
Drakeford explains: "The event was held in December and we set out to create a marriage between contract furniture and Christmas by integrating the graphics and the exhibitors' products. The poster text and furniture motifs were knitted into Fair Islestyle cushions, and these 3D posters sat on the furniture in each showroom to advertise the event. The Christmas jumper effect was extended into all the printed matter by using knitting pattern-inspired graphics."
"I liked the way that instead of just trying to persuade you something was a good idea verbally, they actually produced examples to prove their point," Sarah Gaventa says. "The cushion was so popular people asked if they could buy them."
The Saint Martins influence is detectable here too. And the teaching work that they both do proved to them the value of practising what they were preaching. "If you're always telling students not to stop thinking," Woodrow says, "that what they've done isn't enough, that they've got to push it, to take things further, and you come back to [your own] work and think, 'Oh, that'll do,' it doesn't really work. You've got to do it yourself." The Multistorey portfolio, which also confirms that the pair spend less time than the industry average at their computers, includes textile screenprints for fashion designer Camilla Stærk, type painted onto wood for BoConcept's furniture catalogue, a folded paper shirt for Simon Carter's clothing label, a doodled logo and letterhead for record label Southpaw, and a mid-winter suneffect brochure for fashion boutique Mirage, created with the help of coloured tracing paper and a lightbox.
Their readiness to use other tools and formats is facilitated by the fact that they have a group of people-many are friends from college-whom they can call on. One regular collaborator is Barnaby Roper, best known for his photography for i-D and GQ and promos for Ed Harcourt, Athlete and Moby (co-directed with Scott Lyon, who shares Multistorey's East End studio). Drakeford, Woodrow and Roper teamed up on Camilla Stærk's look book and are about to start work on their second brochure together for Burberry.
The first Burberry brochure-like Multistorey's work for George at Asda-is another example of a project where the raw materials became an element in a bigger idea rather than its limit. "The photographs captured a windy day on a rugged Cornish beach," Drakeford explains. "And we wanted the finished brochure to evoke that, to be like a hastily gathered collection of found pictures or beachcombings. Every page has a different size and position, so we had a few visits to the print finishers trying to persuade them to OK the binding method we created."
For its second fashion-press brochure for George at Asda, the collection had already been photographed, so Multistorey had the photos printed onto carrier bags, went to Asda in Wembley and did a second shoot. "George wanted to reposition itself as a cutting-edge fashion label," Woodrow explains, "but we also wanted to celebrate its identity as a supermarket own-brand, because I hate it when brands relaunch and completely deny their history. So we combined the two seemingly opposite ideas by using the mundane supermarket imagery of till receipts in the first brochure and carrier bags in the second brochure as a framework for the glamorous fashion shoots. This, along with the gold-foiled text in the first brochure and the large-format, ultra-glossy stock of the second, gave a feel of high quality, making a perfect and very specific solution."
Projects occasionally involve treading a fine line between finding the desired solution and avoiding creating something that would be positively wrong. The recent project for the 11 September memorial garden exhibition was the most extreme example Woodrow and Drakeford have experienced so far. They had originally pitched to design a book to accompany the memorial service, but didn't get it because at that stage they hadn't done a book before. Instead they were asked to design the exhibition of photographs showing the making of the garden by Gautier de Blonde and Howard Sooley. They designed a modular structure that was made from steel and MDF. "We hadn't done an exhibition before," Woodrow smiles. "We said yes thinking it would be easy," Drakeford admits. "It had to look simple and inoffensive, but a lot of work had to go into it because of that. We'd never worked on that scale before so we brought Frank on board to act as as structural engineers. But the hardest thing was that it was so important on that day nothing went wrong. That's what gave me the sleepless nights. I had visions that it would fall over, even though I knew it wouldn't because it was so secure. That was definitely one of the jobs where you had to imagine what the day was going to be like and work backwards from that, work out what was needed, what would be too much and what would offend somebody."
Practicalities are always of major importance, and while the end-user is usually the prime consideration in any good design project, Multistorey's extreme close-up view gives its works a level of detail that might be missed by a less sensitive viewer. For instance, for furniture designers Frank it created a logo that has no right way up but that can be read easily from any angle on packaging that is warehoused or in transit. "Probably the last thing we think of is the layout," Drakeford comments. The diversity of the pair's works developed as a result of the requests they received from a broad range of clients. Only one has ever been turned away, during Multistorey's early days, when Drakeford and Woodrow decided it was worth risking everything to avoid being typecast.
A couple of recent projects have confirmed their range and also enabled them to feel, after six years, a little less like the new kids on the block. Drakeford and Woodrow are working on their first 'high street' project for Middle England's second home, Marks & Spencer-designing packaging for the Organised Living zone in the new M&S Lifestore in Gateshead. The project, spearheaded by Vittorio Radice, is due to open in 2004. "We couldn't quite believe that we'd been approached to do it-as a small company-but they've been really nice to work with," Drakeford enthuses. "Some of the more corporate clients have been a breeze-it's the high-end ones, whose sales matter more to them personally, who are a bit more uptight about what you do. It's the opposite to what you might expect."
Since paper is the material with which they feel most comfortable and confident, they were the obvious choice to design RotoVision's Paper Engineering. The book includes a wide range of paper-based graphic and design projects, for which Multistorey was commissioned to create a cohesive structure. "A lot of the pieces in the book only come alive when you physically use them, unfolding or playing with their structures," Woodrow explains.
"The main problem to solve was to consolidate a very disparate collection of items that were mostly selected for their 3D form, as opposed to their surface aesthetic," Drakeford adds. "So we photographed things with our hands in shot to try and illustrate the interactivity each item demanded and we also shot everything against colourcoded paper backgrounds to add texture and unify the cross section of work shown."
"The book was the ideal project for us," Woodrow comments, "as we could really identify with the processes and especially the time put into each project shown-we wanted to capture the pain of scalpel blisters and paper cuts in the constructed paper text of our cover and dividers. We suffer for our art.
They collaborated with Scarlet Projects again during the summer, but this time it was for a rare, escapist project designed to please no one but themselves. The result was the WH STIFFS stall at the Village Fete at the V&A in August. "This kind of project doesn't come along very often and it's the closest we get to being back at college-being able to piss around and creating an experience rather than solving a problem," Woodrow says. "We made a very lo-fi stall where you could get a Polaroid of yourself as a cover star. People could stand behind one of four frames we made, with a magazine-shaped hole and a plastic cut-out masthead in front of their forehead. It was extremely crude but very effective when seen from the correct angle."
"We were mobbed," Drakeford adds. "Some people who seemed shy in the queue suddenly stripped off for their Playboy covers and we had old ladies pouting for Vogue. It was a very funny couple of days. Some people just didn't get it, though. We had one man standing next to me saying, 'You know you could do that in Photoshop'."