Anthony Dart
“As you can see, I am not too sure where my creative juice comes from. We moved around a lot when I was a kid; in fact, I started a new school every year while I was at high school! Maybe when you move that much, you become pretty adaptable and creative with things?”
“Life as a kid for me, was all about surfing and skateboarding, so I guess both of these scenes must have had an early impact on my sense of graphic design. Anyway, I loved drawing so much I enrolled in art college.What I didn’t know at the time, was that classical training and the art of doing everything by hand was going to basically make me redundant in the new age of computerized commercial art.”
“After leaving college, I went to a post company for a job. They said that they loved my portfolio, however I had zero computer skills and so they knocked me back. Now I had to go and find a bottom feeding job where I could learn some computer skills. My first job was with a sign-writing company cutting vinyl lettering first by hand then on the computer, I think this is we're I became aware of lettering and typography for the first time.”
“I think coming out of school and experiencing such a massive disappointment, instilled in me a discipline and aggressive streak to succeed that still drives me today. I have always applied the 100,000 hour rule! Craft and process are all encompassing factors in my work. I become completely enveloped in what I do; so it’s a good thing I love my work. I can safely say, I will always be a life long student of design.”
“My first big break came through Rob McLennan who was Executive CD at Lintas back then. I knew him first as the front man for a local band NFOH and never imagined we would work together one day. Fortunately, he could see beyond my portfolio and understood my potential. Rob set me up as a junior art director working with one of their copywriters on campaigns for Dulux Paints, Iveco Trucks and one of the big local banks.”
“As a junior art director its pretty tough to get onto TVCs, so after doing only one spot in a couple of years, I decided to move on! Unfortunately these corporate accounts just didn’t give me the scope to be as creative as I really wanted to be.”
“At the time, I had just started to play around with 3D. I saw motion as a playground where I could be totally free in a creative sense. Motion to me, represented a place where anything was possible and I could do everything from design, animation through to shooting. So when TBWA offered me a job as an art director in their digital group, I figured it was a good move. They must have loved my work, because pretty soon they made me Creative Director there at TBWA Digerati.”
“But still, Digital then was not what it is now and I still felt frustration as I wanted to take more creative risks. I just hated the restrictions that came with working in digital and all those different people doing bits here and there. It was so fragmented and made the work feel less creative.”
“For the next few years, I jumped around like I had some kind of attention deficit disorder. I kept working with different ad agencies looking for the sort of work that appealed to me most.”
“Then I had an opportunity to work with a post group called Clearwater. These guys were doing some of the most inventive work at the time and were connected to an entire hub of creative companies. I figured that this job would give me so much more creative freedom than print and web campaigns could ever do, so I took a leap of faith.”
“I remember my first day as Design Director, and I got the brief for Gladiators, the reality game show. My job was to do all the imaging and openers and closers. The only problem was, I didn’t even know what PAL was let alone what an opener was! Fortunately, manuals were books back then, so I just took stuff home each night and crammed my head full of jargon, The learning curve was steep indeed .”
“Being in the television industry was very different to ad land. There were no real mentors to explain stuff in that world. I can remember directors literally screaming at me while I was trying to lay down tracking marks. It was a pretty aggressive culture. In fact, they had these t-shirts printed with,’There is no crying in television!’ Kind of sais it all really.”
“After having worked in both broadcast, post and ad agencies, I really felt it was time to become more experimental with my projects and to really push creative boundaries! So I started Ontwerp.TV along with the founder of Global Mouse back in 2004. After a short while, it became apparent to me, that if I really wanted to be autonomously creative then I would have do this thing independently of any other agency.”
“For the next four years, we developed a great little boutique studio that was becoming well known for doing really inventive work. In 2008, I decided that if I wanted to push personal creative boundaries further without limitation and added financial pressure, then managing a studio in the traditional sense was never going to leave me enough time to experiment.”
“Nowadays, we keep the whole thing real simple and just focus on making the work as creative as possible. We need to stay true to the core values of our art, and for the last four years that’s exactly what we have been doing. All of the film directors, art directors and CDs that work with us now, really want to be inventive and want to push things to the limit.”