The year I discovered Sagmeister

Two reasons to love Hatch are: the quality of work (stunning) and their really exciting + ‘distinctive’ business model. Saw this work for JAQK on Graphic Exchange an age ago but today there is an update and some links to interviews with Hatch founders Joel Templin + Katie Jain with Iso50 + GrainEdit.

Hatch hail from San Francisco (founded 2007) – (selected) words from an interview with Iso50 back in 2009. Images featured on Iso50 + Graphic Exchange.

“Our original intention, the philosophy of the design firm, was to do this 80/20 split; where 80% of our time is focused on client work, building brands for other people — which we’ve always done and always will do — but then use 20% of the time to give our design team creative freedom to explore ideas for new products that we can hatch on our own. Take all of our creative exploration and put it into a product that we release once a year. Here we are, two an a half years later and JAQK is just growing, which is great, but it will be our only hatchling for a while.”

Their process:
“Internally we meet with the client and develop a creative brief together. We always have that creative brief, either they supply it with their marketing dept, we collaborate on it, or we interview them and we make it. It’s a document that states all the goals for the project and puts everything on paper. It takes the subjectivity out of the design, gets everyone on the same page.

From there we pull reference material. We used to collect old things, old books, scan stuff in, photocopy stuff etc. We used to spend hours at the photocopier. Now, with the web and everything else, everyone has folders full of stuff, so we start there. People pull reference material based on the internal creative brief and where we think it’s going to go. Everyone gets the opportunity to talk about why they pulled what they did, and then collectively we try and figure out ways to put it in silos — like all this stuff feels like an avenue we could go, this type, this color, here’s a illustrative thing we could do etc. Within those, there are still a gazillion things you could design, but at least it’s a little more focused. Then they go to town and start designing and we’ll do the same thing; everything gets pinned up and we talk about it, edit it.”

Online interviews: Part 1 + Part 2

Filed under: Design, Graphic, Illustration, Packaging, branding, design, Hatch, philosophy, print, process