The Partners have a knack of coming up with award winning ideas, so for their latest Summer BBQ posters, they decided to burn one (amongst other things). We caught up with Kevin Lan, Design Director at The Partners, to find out more.
Hi Kev. Thanks for the taking the time to speak with us. In true Partners fashion, no corner is left unturned when it comes to ‘branding’ The Partners’ annual Summer BBQ – with invitations, posters, signage, decorations… Does it get harder each year to come up with fresh ideas?
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Yes totally. We’ve had a summer barbecue at the Partners for as long as I can remember. Over the last few years we’ve changed the format a little – it used to be just for employees, an opportunity for us to let your hair down in an over elaborate way (ridulous fancy dress). The last three years have been a little more sober and we’ve opened it up and invited our friends and families along to enjoy the fun. Naturally as soon as you start sending invites out to other graphic designers – things start hotting up a little bit…
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Our brief is quite simple, produce the branding theme (ususally an invite and posters/decorations) for the barbecue. Because we want to maximise the amount that we can spend on booze and grub, our aim is to spend as little as possible, so there’s no fancy foil blocked mailers – it’s all about the idea and communicating that idea as simply as you can.
How did you come up with the idea? And how difficult was it to convince people that this was a sane thing to do?
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Funny you should ask that. We have a Friday meeting at work – called the crossed cow (the name of our blog infact). It’s an opportunity for everyone to get together and catch up on any news and events that might have happened in the week, while having a few beers and a bit of a laugh. If I remember correctly, the date was announced at this particular 2c’s and my brain, lubricated with a couple of becks, spat out the idea of burning designers’ objects. I told Greg (Quinton) – the Partners’ Creative Partner, and he loved the idea. So that was that. Then I had to work out how the heck we were going to do it…?!
You mentioned on The Crossed Cow. that burning the stuff was really dangerous, any good stories to tell?
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It was completely unexpected – we didn’t have a clue what was going to happen. We had a whole list of items that we were planning to barbecue and a very small pink barbecue – the kind that you can buy from Argos for about £10. We had a couple of paper based objects that we guessed would just go up in flames; an old Pantone swatch book and the Partners ‘bible’: A Smile in the Mind. We started cooking them and just let the barbecue do the work really. The heavier objects were a little bit more uncertain. We had a damaged iMac that had been sitting upstairs, an old Macbook Pro (that escaped the flames in the end) and a couple of other ‘designer objects’ that had been lying around the studio (pencil shaped awards etc). We put them on one by one and waited… and waited… and waited.
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Of course you soon realise that an iMac, made of aluminium and glass isn’t exactly going to burn so we thought we’d help them along a bit with some lighter fluid and a mini blow torch. Yes, it was super toxic and not exactly the most eco-friendly of things to do, the iMac made all kinds of cracking and popping sounds as it was heating up. Anything could have potentially could have come flying out. But luckily no children, animals, or designers were harmed in the making of these photographs – we got some truly stunning objects out of it, and set about photographing them.
Did you really burn a D&AD pencil?
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It wouldn’t have been a designer barbecue if we hadn’t have burnt the real things!
To view the posters in high-resolution, and for more information, visit The Partners’blog – The Crossed Cow.
