A Tale of Two Cities: Studio DBD on BCNMCR
StudioDBD's Dave Sedgwick talks us through the history of his design event BCNMCR and why he's bringing the best of Barcelona's design scene over to Manchester for one last time.
WORDS by Evie Friar
PHOTOGRAPHY by Drew Forsyth
EF What inspired you to hold the first BCNMCR and why was Barcelona your
city of choice?
DS I went to Barcelona on my first ever college trip as an art student back in the nineties. I’d only been abroad once before and it took us hours to get there. I remember waking up in the morning and being free to explore Barcelona with a camera and a sketchbook. It was all so different to what I was used to. I fell in love with everything about it and was completely obsessed by it; I think I have been ever since really.
Then, my wife’s a translator, and she was working there for about six weeks in 2012. She suggested that I came out and joined her but said she’d be working during the day. So I thought, “Why don't I get in touch with some design studios and actually go and see them?”
I remember emailing quite a few of them before I left and a few of them responded. The first one was Lo Siento Studio; a guy called Borja Martinez. I went out to see him in his studio; it was a massive design studio with loads of really cool work. We were just chatting and then the conversation slowly got to a point where we didn’t really have anything to say to each other and I was thinking I have to fill this silence with something. I literally had no plans to do this. I just went, “How about an exhibition of your design work in Manchester?” And he was like, “Yeah, absolutely. I'm well up for that. I love Manchester!” I went to see a few other agencies and they all agreed to do it as well. So I came back to England in 2012 with this idea and I was like, “Right, I'm going to do a design event. I have to do it now. I have to follow through with it.”
EF What was the first event like and why do you feel like now is the time to bring it back?
DS It was brilliant. I think about 500 people came to the launch. There was work on display; we printed it all so there was actual physical design objects like wine bottles, books and packaging. Then, the next night, we had the talks. I'd charged about £9 for a ticket, which is just madness. There were four speakers; Lo Siento, Hey Studio, Mucho and Mayuscula Brands. Hey Studio were just starting to take off; they’d done some stuff in Monocle magazine. I think I had about 110 tickets and they sold out in 25 minutes, which was brilliant but I should've charged a bit more for them!
That was in 2013. The exhibition was on for two weeks in a bar TwentyTwentyTwo and we did the talks there too. Loads of people came and it got picked up on lots of design blogs, so it wasn't just people from Manchester; people came from all over the country.
I really enjoyed it so I decided to do it again in 2014. I think we had about ten design agencies from Barcelona involved in the 2014 event and about six came over to actually speak at the event. We still did the exhibition at TwentyTwentyTwo, but we did the talks at the Hallé St Peters, which is where this final event is going to be at. It’s a big venue, and it's a really impressive space; it's where the Hallé Orchestra performs so acoustically, it’s amazing. I still kept the price really reasonable; I wanted to make it accessible for students and young designers, not just have creative directors and business owners there.
2014 was the last one, then in 2015, my daughter was born, I got busy with being a dad and I got busy with my own business. Then I got asked to organise design events for a client of mine, a company called Foilco, and I ran those events twice a year. The years went by and Covid came along and it made me re-evaluate my job and what I was doing. I felt like I needed a bit of a challenge again. I realised it had been ten years since that first BCNMCR and I remembered how much adrenaline and excitement that had provided and I thought maybe we should bring it back for one final ten year anniversary of the project.
EF You keep calling this the “final one”. Are you sticking with that?
DS Oh absolutely. It 100% is the final one for this concept, in terms of Barcelona and Manchester. I’m really conscious of the fact that I’ve absolutely done everything I can with the Barcelona-Manchester connection. Everybody will ask me why we’ve not done a Manchester event over in Barcelona. I think the main answer to that is that it's a lot easier to organise an event in your own city. As much as I’ve made loads of connections with Barcelona agencies, no one's ever said, “Oh, we should do the same thing over here.” I think you just need a bit of help to do it over there. You need more support.
I'm not going to say never in terms of the concept of two cities coming together. Maybe a design event in Manchester that features speakers from another city, whether that’s Paris, New York, Milan, Copenhagen. I still think it's a good concept and it's got potential to grow. For this event, I’ve designed a book including interviews with all the speakers, their designs, articles, things like that. It features 60 creators from Barcelona. To be honest, I think that book draws a line under that particular concept.
EF What was the process like curating all the content for the book and then ultimately designing it as well?
DS BCNMCR has always been about an exhibition of work and some talks. The two have always gone hand-in-hand. Because I'm ten years older and I'm more tired [laughs], I was like, let’s just do the actual talks this time. Then I went to see a hotel in Manchester about rooms for the speakers and I met this young guy who loved the idea and suggested having an exhibition there too, in exchange for free rooms. So I went away and contacted all these designers in Barcelona about the exhibition. Lots of them replied saying that they’d love to be part of it. And then the guy left. He didn’t tell me he was going and he hadn’t organised it at all even though we’d met two or three times and exchanged emails. Nobody else at the hotel knew about it so it left me a bit high and dry, having already contacted all these designers about an exhibition.
So then I thought about doing a book. An exhibition, once it’s been up, it’s gone. A book has a bit more legacy to it. All the people that I had asked to be in the exhibition; they supplied work for the book. I decided that because it's ten years since the first event, I would ask them all where they imagine themselves to be in ten years, like in 2033. They've given me a response to that and I interviewed about 15 of them as well. It’s being printed now by Team Impression in Leeds and the paper’s all been supplied by Winter & Company; they’re sponsoring the event. Foilco have kindly supplied some foil for the front cover.
I guess the moral of the story is I didn't think at that point, “Right, fuck it! We're not going to do it.” I just changed up the idea and I'm glad I did because I think a book is more tangible and people can take it home and own it. It's a nice way to end the project.
EF Do you find there's more pressure on you as a designer to do the event branding and to create the book when you know that your audience is mainly going to be other designers and creatives?
DS Absolutely. I think that's one of the hardest things because I’ve had to fit in the book and the branding around client work. I didn't know where to start in terms of creating the brand because I was so restrained by that fear of what it looks like for other creatives. Then I was reading a book by James Brown, who was the editor of Loaded Magazine back in the nineties. He’d written an autobiography and he said back then, there was this “get on with it” sort of attitude. We just did it and we didn't care so much about what it looked like or what people thought.
I thought, “I just need to have more of that. Like, just do it, as opposed to like worrying about it so much. I could be doing this for six months if I don't just get on with it.” So I just started designing something and put it out there. I would do it differently, of course I would, but I've kept it quite minimal. The book itself is also quite minimal in terms of design input; I’ve let the pictures do the talking.
EF Lo Siento are coming to speak back this year. Who else is joining them in the line-up?
DS Yes, Lo Siento were the first people I asked in 2012. Without them, it wouldn't have happened. Borja's a great guy and the talk was really interesting in 2013 - they made some live art on stage - so I thought it'd be right to have those guys back. One of the things that's changed a little bit since the first is that it was very much about people I wanted to hear from. Of course that still is the case but I’ve also realised that times have moved on. For example, Cabeza Patata, who are coming; they work more in 3D character animation and illustration. It's not necessarily my kind of field, but I thought that might be really interesting to have those guys as part of the event because it's not traditional graphic design.
I curated it a bit more this time and felt it's only right that we have a wider variety of people. We’ve got Ingrid Picanyol, who is a female designer who works for herself and is producing some fantastic design work. There aren’t many female-led creative agencies, as we know, so I think it's really important to support that. Anna is coming from Pràctica, who are another design agency. She's one of the co-founders but there’s a team of about six of them. Javier Jaén is obviously a creative powerhouse on his own; I think his talk is going to completely blow your mind. He’s a genius. But again, he works more in art direction and editorial design for newspapers and magazines. This year it's a bit more of a wider selection of different types of disciplines and not just graphic design.
EF What do you hope people take away from the event?
DS We've not had many design events in Manchester for a while because of the pandemic. I'm not sure about the rest of the UK, but there doesn’t seem to be as many design events in general now. For me, there's still something really important about getting a group of creative people together in one space and the energy that provides. We are sociable people and Covid taught us that people work better together. BCNMCR is a celebration of that connectivity, not only between Barcelona and Manchester but between people in general.
Obviously I know these speakers a little bit now. They're just genuinely, really nice people and I hope that the people welcome them in the way that we should welcome people speaking it in our country and in our city. In terms of what they take away, I think people will take away whatever they choose to take away from a design talk. I'm sure there'll be some knowledge; they’ll learn something; they'll be inspired. Hopefully they take away a book as well so I can pay for the printing! [laughs]
EF Do you have a dream designer who you'd like to see a talk from that you haven't seen one from before?
DS Oh, that's a great question. I started design in the late nineties and, at that time, there was a designer called Dave Carson who worked on Raygun magazine; that was my inspiration as a designer when I was growing up. I'd never heard him talk, but I went to OFFF Festival a couple of weeks ago and he was speaking at the event. He was also in the hotel bar so I was able to meet him, then obviously I made sure to hear his talk.
I've been fortunate because doing the events for Folico have allowed me to book speakers myself. I got Graham Wood - who was a designer at an agency called Tomato back in the nineties - to talk one of the Foilco Multiplicity events. I also really like Brian Collins; Collins is an New York agency. He was speaking at OFFF but I'd left by then, unfortunately.
EF What’s currently inspiring you in your own work?
DS I find that question really difficult to answer because I'm not really one for being inspired by something individual. It sounds really corny, but I'm inspired by everything that goes on around me. I get as much inspiration from going down the pub with my mates or playing with my daughter than I do on a design blog desperately trying to get inspiration. That doesn’t work for me. Inspiration has to come from being involved in the world and being interested in things like film, music, literature, podcasts, museums, art galleries...
Inspiration’s a difficult one. It can take over your world if you're not careful. You can be overly inspired if you spend your time on Pinterest and Instagram and Twitter. We all do it but it can stifle you and make you feel quite insecure. I think, for me, inspiration is about living life really, which sounds like some kind of shitty quote - “Dave Sedgwick is inspired by life” [laughs]. But it's everything that's good and bad about life, that’s what inspires me in general.
EF You do seem to really value the research side of your client work. That’s probably where life comes into it; just being curious about other people’s stories in a way.
DS Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. Although, I have done plenty of design where it just looks good. If you’re a designer and you don’t say that then you’re lying. But fundamentally, 85% of the time, I really try and have an idea. I find it a lot easier designing when there’s an idea. I think clients find it a lot harder to dismiss ideas too. People like to feel like they’ve seen something clever or to see that there's a reason for it.
We’ve got AI now and clients have things like Canva. The ability to create graphic design now is more accessible and easier than ever. For me, the one thing that I've got that I value is the ability to come up with an idea for my designs, as opposed to them just looking good. AI can make it look good but it misses that spark; that soul. For me, that's still really important in graphic design.
I know that AI is just a tool the same way Photoshop or Illustrator is, but to create something in Photoshop or Illustrator, you have to craft it and dedicate your time to it. AI is so instantaneous that it loses that integrity. I think what will possibly happen in the next few years is that there'll be some clients who are quite happy to let AI do the design for them and they don't care.
But there’ll be some people who believe in a more traditional form of communication and creativity. I don’t think we should ever lose that ability to create with the human touch. Everything will look the same if we're not careful.
It's interesting and it’s scary. I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm 44 this year. You can blink and suddenly lose a grasp of your career and the industry you work in. It’s really easy to miss the boat on things. I saw that happen to a lot of older designers when I was in my twenties who refused to move with the times. You have to be prepared to embrace it to some extent, but also know that we will never be able to beat the system so you have to find a way to make it work, I guess.
EF In a way, that brings us back to BCNMCR because design events are a great way to help people keep up with what’s going on in the industry.
DS Yeah, and you can’t replicate BCNMCR with AI, as a concept and a physical event with real people. You just can’t. Because of that, I think certain things will always stay and I hope that design events and networking and connecting people will always be there. I don’t think AI can change that. Not yet anyway.
EF I’ve always remembered your ‘yes to/no to’ slides from your talk at Birmingham Design Festival a few years back. What are some things you’re saying yes to and no to in 2023?
DS When I wrote that list, I didn’t overthink it but I think that stuff really resonates with people because you've got to be honest as much as possible in this world. When I started out as a young designer, I felt like it was all untouchable, like there was this amazing community and creative world going on and I was like, “Oh God, I don’t understand it. I don’t get it.” I guess one of the main things was this idea that you had to work all the fucking time and stay late in agencies and refuse to go home at 5pm because that was seen as you being half arsed about working there. I think it's really dangerous, especially for young designers who are just employed by the company and they're not on a profit share or bonus. They have their salary whether they go at 5pm or they stay till 5am.
To answer your question, I would say yes to giving things a go and to allowing yourself to fail. I thought when I did this final BCNMCR, I was like, “Oh God, what if nobody wants to come? What if that moment should have been left in the past? What if I only sell like 50 tickets and it's really awkward?” But I just did it anyway. So yes to taking a chance but definitely no to overworking and to promoting the exhaustive concept of working all the time.
Don’t get me wrong, I work hard but I do take time off as well. I don't work late, I get home about 6pm and I put my daughter to bed. I don't work in the evenings. I don't work at weekends. I’m just quite good at managing my time during the working day. I think when you're constantly overworking, constantly staying late, constantly working weekends, then you've made a mistake somewhere along the way. You’ve fucked up.
So, yes to giving things a go but no to putting pressure on yourself all the time.
