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INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN ZAWADA // Interview by Jay Chapman

Im not really too sure how much of an introduction this guy need. And by this guy, im taking about the designing powerhouse that is Jonathan Zawada. We were oh so very luck this week to be able to catch up and rack the brain of Zawada and have a chat about his work, his life and the end of the world. So grab yourself a nice warm cup of coco, turn that radio down get to know Jonathan Zawada that little bit more. Enjoy.

Hello Jonathan, Good day? To kick this off why dont you tell us a little about yourself, how you got into this game and what you prefer for breakfast? I'm a graphic designer and illustrator and I've been lucky enough to run my own show for the past 7 years or so. I started off in high school hand screen printing tshirts in my bathroom and selling them to my friends, along side which I had an after-school job at a traditional animation studio where I did tweening and clean-up art. Somehow things continued to gather momentum and I've been able to make a living from doing stuff with imagery ever since. My breakfast preference is toast, muesli with fruit and yoghurt, and a nice homemade cup of coffee.

Your work is incredibly broad and in many different styles. Do you start with a style in mind or allow it to come into its own on a project to project basis? The style always seems to come out of the inherent demands of each individual project. Printing or budget prerequisites general help limit my options a little and from that point on it’s a matter of me honing in on what I've been finding interesting at the time and figuring out how I can explore it further. I tend to get pretty bored pretty quickly if I have to keep working in the same medium with the same style so switching it up really just helps to keep me on my toes.

I was recently approached by WorkSafe to take part in their Big Mouth Project which was basically a completely open brief so for that I kind of focused in on who their target audience was - 15 - 24 year old males - and then picked a medium I thought would appeal most to them - street posters, zines and tshirts. The breadth of application then helped me decided on a simple 2 colour pallet and range of scales helped me decide on the visual style, a kind of staccato stipple dot. The subject matter then came out of laterally exploring their key message of 'Speak Up. Be Work Safe' and trying to do it in a way that would feel like it was a part of the audience’s environment, growing from it rather than being beamed in from the outside.

Already with an impressive range of clients including the likes of BMW, Coca Cola U.S & Universal Music, who else would you like to work with and what project would you like it to be? My absolute dream job is and always has been to do an album cover or a music video for Bjork. I reckon that about 50% of my design education has come from the work that has been produced for her and the universe that has been manifested around her is something I would love to be a part of.

You've been involved with the record label Modular for some years now, designing cover art for
The Presets, Muscles and more. How did this relationship come about? I was lucky enough to know Kim and Jules before they became The Presets and I had made a website for their previous band, Prop. They asked me to have a go at designing a cover for their first EP once they had signed to Modular and I guess the label liked what I came up with as well. Modular started asking me to have a go at different little pieces of art, flyers for events and posters for tours and eventually I found myself working on cover art for a bunch of their bands like Wolfmother, Bumblebeez and Muscles, events like Nevereverland and merchandise and magazines.

Let’s talk about mediums. You've got plenty of em! What's your favourite? Personally I love to simply work with pencil and paper - and that's generally what I lean towards when I'm working on my own stuff. Commercially though I really have no preference at all. It sounds like a bit of a cop out but they really all have their own benefits and draw backs and tackling the inherent challenges in each is what keeps me interested. That's the huge advantage of the age of working digitally, so much of the technical side of art production has been removed and it really allows you to happily chop and change between a much wider array of styles than ever would have been possible in the past.

You recently started up Trust Fun. Tell us about this project and how it came to be? Trust Fun really started up about 3 or 4 years ago now. I suppose it came out the frustration that my friend Shane Sakkeus and I felt in not ever being able to get some of our more adventurous and exciting commercial concepts over the line with our clients. The first things we did were a little range of hand-dyed silk scarves which was a reaction to the shear amount of graphic tshirt prints I was designing for people like Ksubi, Insight, Something and Modular - it all seemed really forced and didn't seem to me like it was really making the most out of the benefits of working with fabric and I think we just wanted to get our hands dirty again.

The other project that really solidified the formation of Trust Fun was the creation of a comic book called Petit Mal that is made from the backstage photography from Paris, Milan and New York fashion weeks.
We both felt that this was an idea that really embodied the way we thought fashion journalism should be being done.

Really, I guess, Trust Fun is just about adding fun back into work and finding some areas in what we do that we can really get excited about and challenge ourselves with.

What does Jonathan Zawada do to relax? I don't get too much time to relax really, I spend most of my waking hours working. If I do get the chance though I'm very partial to Mario Kart on the Wii, to the point that I wake up most days with the song stuck in my head. My wife would totally disagree but I'd say that I generally don't need to devote time specifically to relaxing because I'm lucky enough that my day job involves a lot of drawing which, for me, is the most relaxing thing in the world.

To quote yourself "art is qualitative and design is quantitative", what are you saying exactly? I guess just that design can be measured - it can be a success or a failure based on how well it achieves goals. It's judged by external forces. Art, however is entirely subjective and there is now way to measure its success. Art's motivations are personal and emotional, not academic or financial.

Animals are a recurring theme in your work. Did you have a zoo obsession as a child, or is it something else? I hadn't ever noticed that before! I think that in my design work especially, its all about reaching out and connecting in some way with another human being and although it sounds a little weird, animals and the natural world are an avenue via which you can connect with pretty much anybody around the world - regardless of their individual cultural circumstances.

Do you think Beta Max got the raw end of the stick? To quote Neil Young, "It's better to burn out, than to fade away" - better to be Beta Max and disappear while you're still considered great than to have to gradually an embarrassingly yield to DVD, dumped on the side of the road for hard rubbish day.

You really are a "Jack of all trades", has it always been like this, and do you have any formal training? Formal learning environments don't really agree with me. I quit my bachelor of design course after about 6 months. Everything else I've pretty much learnt on the job. That's the part of work that
really interests me, learning new things and solving problems, which is what I think design is really about at the core. I think when you are in new territory you can hopefully see opportunities that other people might have missed.

You recently took part in the Glory Holes show at Monster Children Gallery. Is exhibiting your work a major direction moving forward? My first few exhibitions were really an escape from the obligations of my commercial work and a way to dig a little deeper. It's a tough thing to keep the two things separate though and while I have a few exhibitions coming up - and exhibiting art is really how I'd love to be able to spend my life, I'm wary about making sure it never becomes my "job" - mainly for the fear that I don't know what I would replace that part of my life with.

From your presentation at Semi-Perminant 2007 and through your own website, you show us your initial thought process and inspiration. What's the reasoning behind this? I've found that in Australia especially there is a strange possessiveness when it comes to art and design - an attitude of ownership and constant talk of people ripping other people off. In my experience nobody is an island and everything comes from somewhere. I know all of my idols borrowed or stole ideas from any number of inspirations and that doesn't mean that they aren't great, it just makes them honest. I think being honest about your influences also helps you to move on from them and evolve them in a much more personal way. European, American and British design all have a concept of their place in the timeline of history and they view that as something to be proud of, not ashamed of.

One of your Trust Fun! sites is fashematics. How did this site come to be? they're all so on point! I actually came up with the original idea for the second issue of Modular's 'M is for Modular' magazine but that never ended up seeing the light of day and it just waited around in the back of my head for a year or so until it all came flooding out when we were trying to come up with content for our blog. Runway fashion can be so incredibly amazing but it seems to be stuck in this weird uptight world that feels closed off to the rest of the world, I like how fashematics kind of brings it back and democratizes it. Now its become a bit of a parlor game for me, something I enjoy doing just to clear my head.

If you could be in the Beetles or the Rolling Stones, what band member would you choose? and why? I've got to say, I'm not the biggest fan of either band but I suppose I would say Ringo Star, he got to fool around with all those model Thomas trains, that looks like it would be fun.

The world is about to implode and there is a spaceship leaving and you can take 1 object and 1 person. What is it, and who would you take? The object would be this WikiReader thing which has all of wikipedia on it (I'm assuming I can't access the internet in space?), and the person would be my wife Annie. No question.

Do you have anything in the pipe coming up that we should know about? There's a bunch of different things that should be seeing the light of day soon. The Big Mouth Project should be popping up around Melbourne about now in the form of street posters and zines - I should say that that's probably the first time I feel like I've actually worked on something genuinely worthwhile because of its message about work safety and helping kids aged between 15-24 feel like they can speak up about it. It’s so important they know this, as these kids are twice as likely to get hurt at work and be hospitalised than any other age group. I really hope my ideas work for that one because its not often you get the chance in design to do something that can really help people rather than just make things prettier.

Other than that I have a new range of tshirt prints for French label Six Pack, as well as an exhibition with them in LA in February which I'm working on at the moment. They're also planning on putting together a book of my work for that show which I'm pretty excited about. I'm finishing off a small range of art for a collaboration with another French label, Surface to Air, which looks like it could also evolve into a bit of an exhibition as well. The Japanese company Gas is also putting together a little book of my work which should come out in the first quarter of next year.

Working with The Presets I've designed a range of sunglasses for Colab which will be available early 2010 and I've also designed a wallet with local Australian company Dosh which should be showing itself shortly too.

Whats your favourite wooden object? My good friend Joe Allen (of Monster Children Gallery) just came back from a trip across the US and brought me back this amazing quartz crystal shape carved from a solid block of wood. It’s the only non-work thing on my desk and entertains me no end.

For more of Jonathan Zawada head here