Interview with Timothy Alexander
How important is social media in terms of
getting yourself out there and creating an online presence?
It's something that
I've never really made a big deal of, I appreciate the fact that it's important
but a lot of the time I've come across people that seem amazing and perfect
over their Instagram but in real life they're nothing alike. Ultimately it's
not the be all and end all of things, having a very cool looking online profile
doesn't make you any better of a designer.
What’s involved in the creative process for
you?
When its a creative
brief, I'll usually only spend a couple of hours with ideas. But when its
creative on top of strategy, the strategy you can spend an hour and a half
talking about people, figures, the world etc. all of that effects the strategy.
Then you'll have to creative to run through and say this is the print ad, this
is the digital version. It does completely vary depending on the project.
What essentially does a copywriter do?
They take care of the
text, the headlines, the body copy, all the text that appears on an ad. An art
director takes care of look, feel. Together they go through casting a little
bit, together they also come up with the idea. The idea is never just one
person's idea, it's the team’s idea and the ultimately the agencies idea. So
egos are out that door! All the work is the agency's work, if you're feeling
a little more egotistical then you can get your own office space, you put your
name above the door and you create your own agency.
Considering you're such a big advertising agency,
are awards something you actively strive for?
A lot of the work
we've done recently within the past year or so wouldn't be award worthy I don't
think, although we may be sending off one piece for Film Craft. But in terms of
awards for best ad and such, a lot of the stuff we do, we likely won't be
sending in. Saying that, the only one really worth going for is Cannes Lions;
that's basically the Oscars of advertising. It's normally a big film festival,
but they celebrate advertising during that week also. If you ever work in
advertising and produce ads, they have something called the Young Cannes Lions
which I've just entered into this year and from there you get a brief that you
have to solve within 24 hours which you would normally work in a team for. I'm
aiming to choose to work in print and to do that I'll work with a copywriter
and I'll do the art direction to produce ideas and if it wins your phone will
be buzzing none stop for weeks until someone gets through to you and goes
"here's a bunch of fucking money, move to us". To get chosen for
something like this is a big thing, you're up against thousands of other people
all wanting the same thing. D&AD is also another good one to work on.
There's one here in Germany called ADC, the Art Directors Club, very similar to
D&AD. Red Dot awards is another one but is more to do with products, I
actually have one of those for communication for something we did for a satirical
Germany political party. Basically my job was technical realisation,
maintaining the technical side for their stream.
How you sell
yourself is also really important.
As a creative
person you can always fix something, you can always improve it, you can make it
better, always. But there's such a thing called time and that's a pain in the
ass sometimes.
When you work on ads,
or in advertising there is always that knowing in the back of your mind you're
making something. You're piecing it all together, the idea, to going on the
shoot, to then dealing with all the post production shit, which can be a
nightmare, all the cut downs, language variations but then at the end of it you
have some tangible, something substantial to appreciate.
Rule #2
Good ideas get
killed all of the time and there's nothing you can do about that. On a daily fucking basis, you could have the
best idea and it could get shut down, whether it's the vision, the budget or
whatever.
Obviously as designers we get creative blocks
all the time, so how do you best cope with them?
You need a stimulus
for it. Walk around, get outside, do fitness, meditate, whatever you've got
to do. You need something else that's not going to be in your room, in your
office, you maybe need another person to buzz ideas off always helps. Maybe
sometimes look online, but not too much because that can sometimes have the
reverse effect, making you feel bad about your own work when you see really
good stuff online.
What motivates you to push your ideas and your
practicing constantly?
It's the drive for
always wanting to produce something, I always want to make something, I always want to finish something.
Solving problems is exactly that, making something to fix the problem and that
is just the way I've been programmed. Whether I do that with music, if I feel
the need to emotionally get something out there or if I have a business problem
that I need to solve with an ad. Solving problems is something that really
motivates me, it keeps my brain ticking.
Pitching, that's when
things are completely different, it takes a lot of time that you've got to
devote to it. You spend a lot of time going insane, scratching your head for
ideas. On the run up to a pitch, especially during pitch week, you'll get taken
off most projects and will have to put your full effort into the pitch. The
volume of work you do during pitch week can get crazy, re-doing and improving
the stuff you've done already.
So what do actually have to do within that last
week leading up to the pitch?
You start losing
your mind a bit, that goes without saying. You have to refine your ideas and make sure that every visual looks the
best it can. The way that I work, I would normally do really quick sketches and
whack them into Photoshop, roughly lay it out and then that goes away for maybe
6 weeks and everyone's happy with it... until pitch week. "Yeah you've got
to redo this again". Always improving, proof reading, cutting films etc. You've
got to be fast, in that final week you've got to be precise and get things done
quickly. Get that shit finished!
The actual pitch
itself is okay for me, being a musician I'm somewhat used to playing in front
of a few thousand people. Always got to remind myself to speak slowly, less
dialect, which is especially difficult when I'm with someone like you who has
very similar ways of speaking.
Having been in Berlin now for 5/6 years, how is
your German?
We don't go there
about that. I mean I can understand it; I can speak it but I don't really just
because I'm not that good at it. But I've only ever really worked in English
speaking offices, here is the first office where my entire team is pretty much
German but they do speak English to me, just to make things easier. But
sometimes meetings when we all meet up to discuss projects, it usually is in
German so I've just got to understand what they're saying.
But advertising in
general, unless you're going for like a national agency, there you would likely
have to speak German. Since here we have people from all around the world, we
tend to speak English.
Something I'm aiming to do over summer is to
find internships, how would you typically go about getting one?
Do you have
LinkedIn? If not, then get on that and do a shit load of stalking, you want to look for a load of creative
directors. You've seen some ads, a poster or some design work that you love,
you look up that agency then from that agency, who worked on that bit of work?
Normally it'll tell you the creative director, art director etc. for that
project and from there you look for those people. Find them on LinkedIn and
suggesting you coming in for two weeks and then from there haggle your way into
an internship. Even if it's going down to a studio, unpaid, chilling there and
finding out how they work is beneficial.
You'll of course have
to sell yourself along with this. Showing off your work in a PDF, keeping it
concise probably no more than 25 pages max and also a covering letter letting
them know why you want to work there.
What specifically would you recommend including
within your portfolio?
Experience,
education, skills, work but write this in your style of course, allow your
personality to shine through it whether that means using slang words or
whatever. Always have a bit
about each project, but not too much because when you go to interviews you'll
likely talk about these a little more in depth. Each project on mine is just
one page depending on how much work was produced for the project. Even include
little projects, if you can do things such as sound editing pop that in as
well, if you're a musician or whatever put that in, because that'll help sell
you as a person as well.
