I have a small black and white picture of myself sitting at a desk in my first year of school. Apart from being a black and white image (something all design-minded people prefer) I love it because my mother has scraped my hair to one side and tied the tightest satin bow she could tie. Every morning my hair was tied with ribbons in a similar way; some variations were allowed – maybe pigtails, headbands or ponytails. Fortunately for me, my mother was a style hunter and fashion lover extraordinaire, who, to this day, cites her all time favourite fashion purchase as a black antelope beret bought at Le Louvre in Collins Street in Melbourne on her honeymoon. Within a few years I had amassed a huge pile (mess) of ribbons: Swiss cotton velvets, French double-faced satins, textured grosgrains and petit grains.

And so my love and fascination with ribbons began – not with the zest of a self-obsessed collector – rather as an admirer of their beauty and brilliance as a decorative exclamation. What started as an appreciation became a ‘signature’ design tool embraced throughout my working life. I suspect I may have purchased or specified over one million metres of ribbon for numerous design projects.

Our work in temporary event and set environments could be considered to be at the decorative or ‘lightweight’ end of the design spectrum. Lucky us. The creative and commercial freedom of this area of design is unlimited and inspiring. So it was with some excitement and slight concern (would this be considered a design piece or a tragic craft project?) when I thought that the centrepiece of a fashion catwalk (LMFF 2006) might be a chandelier made almost entirely from black French satin ribbon.

With the blessing and encouragement of my favourite sponsors and immediate collaborators – Divine Show producer Yolanda (“I don’t have to worry about this, do I?”) and my dearest graphic designer (detail queen and my niece, I’m proud to say), we set about creating a chandelier five metres wide by six metres high for an audience of 10,000 people over a week.

The under-structure was a hexagon made from a super lightweight aluminium from which hung 1.5 kilometres of our favourite black French double-faced satin, hand-sewn and hung in 325 separate pieces with laser cut diamonds of perspex as end pieces. The chandelier took six hours to install and weighed only 268 kilograms. Our modern drama was hung. Super scale, commanding, iconic.

Its tight graphic geometry and gravity meant each ribbon – normally flimsy and soft – became straight, architectural and steel like. Who could have imagined such strength and drama could come from such a ‘lightweight’ design project!

First published in Inside Magazine.

Collage by Liz Wilson

It releases you from expected physical realism and gives you the blank canvas to express the emotive heart of your idea. Abstraction also helps you to avoid designing kitsch or naf scenography because it lets you play on a higher ground. Abstraction can guide you to create original and fresh views of repeated themes.
Dismiss the realistic, blur the physical lines where the walls, floors and ceiling meet, over take them with your design, remove all reference to everyday human scale and then mess with scale, make it super real, micro or hyper real but don’t make it physically understandable

Now you have a chance to create a visual narrative that immerses and transports your viewer to another world, your audience are smart, they’ll get it, they’ll know your playing .

I’m obsessed with finding the visual and emotional essense of any concept expression we are working on and abstraction lets us play in a whole new playground.

Collage by Amanda Henderson

If your designing something original, you’ll be making it up as you go along.

Sure you’ll have some loose client brief and ideas in your plan but there will be that awkward but addictive moment when its just you and your favourite tool (it’s always a pencil and paper for me) and some kind of endless possibility that needs to become a vision and then a delivered project on time and on budget.

Very soon you’ll be sharing your ideas with your client and that’s where it gets tricky.

You’ll need to see this part of the process as a beginning because your ‘endless possibility’ is now going to get a big fitness test as its flung from corridor to corporate corridor pulled apart and put back together in some form only vaguely reminiscent of your work from a week ago.

This may feel creatively vulnerable at this point. It’s fine for your client to see this, in fact it’s your job as a collaborator to make sure they understand that if you are creating an original piece of work there will be many unknown threads yet to be explored and tied down.

If you can educate your clients about your creative process over time this can lead to some significant magic being created as your clients become collaborators, they share your vision and become your visions greatest ambassadors turning difficult logistics into a dream run and manage upwardly like seasoned diplomats.

In my world the best most original work is produced by teams that are comfortable with a creative process that allows loose moving parts for exploration along the way to magic being created, after all we are all making it up as we go along and that’s the truth.

Collage by Emma Hofstede