Fabio Ongarato is a man who wears many hats: designer, editor, curator, art director, and craftsman. All roles are part of the design equation, says Ongarato, the award-winning creative director of his eponymous Melbourne studio; a six-person design team that has become known around the world for its original and sophisticated work. It's no wonder then that Ongarato sees collaboration and experimentation as crucial to the creative process.

Ongarato's 13-year-old company’s portfolio is eclectic, with print at the heart of the practice and a client list that includes sought-after fashion, art and design clients, such as Scanlan & Theodore, Akira Isogawa and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. (Ongarato also chalked up some serious hipster credibility when he art directed the Australian issue of Big Magazine in 2004.) What's surprising for such an accomplished young graphic designer is that Ongarato thinks the best design happens when designers check their egos at the door. D*Hub caught up with Fabio Ongarato, 35, via email.

Why do you think it's important for design to be a collaborative craft?
I see design as being an experiential process - part intuition and part chance. It's a preparedness to take inspiration from a whole range of influences and a willingness to accept that the solution may lie beyond our core creative team.

It allows us to look for solutions across a range of different disciplines, bringing into the mix practitioners such as fine art photographers, who normally wouldn't be regarded as having a place in design. We think of it as a process of cross-pollination – the idea that an exploration of contemporary art practice might bring a whole new perspective to a fashion campaign, or that bringing in a fashion photographer will provide a different take on a corporate project. The beauty of this approach is the flexibility to work and collaborate with others – be they designers, artists, architects, writers, illustrators, industrial designers and so on.

The process evolves through starting a dialogue with the person you bring in – laying out an open-ended [project] without trying to pre-empt the outcome, and ensuring that the person you bring in has as much latitude as possible.

In many ways there is a high degree of risk, and you have to be prepared to let go. You are never sure of the end result. But this is the exciting part. It's all about transcending established modes and genres, creating the kinds of outcomes that go beyond one's own intuition and comfort zone – it opens up new possibilities and perspectives for our own work and ultimately for our clients.

Collaboration can bring a certain dynamic that is not linear in its answers.
We believe it is a form of juxtaposition and tension that is able to create communication that arrests and invites people to question and interpret.

Take for instance a landmark project that we did in 1997 with the fashion label Scanlan & Theodore. For their 10th anniversary I wanted someone special to shoot the campaign. Working on the concept of questioning beauty and its relativity to cultural perceptions, I commissioned the artist Bill Henson to produce his own interpretation of the collection. The result was a never seen before campaign where art met fashion which created heated debate and controversy. The response was not an obvious one, nor was it one we could have envisaged doing ourselves.

In a presentation you gave at Design Indaba 2003 in South Africa you talked about why a loss of ego is necessary in good design. You said, 'Our role as designers is to create for the client something – a look, a voice, a language – that is unmistakably theirs, but something that the client could never have imagined themselves.' How do you do this?
I always believe that fundamentally graphic design is about problem solving. And with every project there is the idea that you start with a blank canvas – no particular creative solution is ever predetermined.

Our aim is to create something that is unique for the client rather than just delivering a house style. It's about understanding and reflecting the true essence of our clients – but it's also about going beyond expectations and using design-led solutions to give them an edge that will differentiate them in the market.

Working in a small market such as Australia, where you're likely to have several clients in the one market sector, it is all the more important to start from scratch and to be as open–minded as possible with each project. We simply can't afford to impose a house style on our various clients in the fashion industry, say, as they may well end up looking like their competitors.

Again, it's the client's voice we're seeking to articulate, not ours.

How important is the idea of risk and experimentation to the design process?
Without risk and experimentation we can never envisage something new.
We should never forget that design is creative – it is about intuition, it's about serendipity, it's about not resorting to obvious answers.

Unfortunately I see design today becoming hostage to strategy and market research data. I believe that if you want true differentiation in the market you can't rely on what the market already knows, which is what you get when market strategists drive the creative process.

You can see the super graphics Ongarato created for Space Furniture, Sydney, in the new exhibition In your face: contemporary graphic design, 5 August-5 November at the Powerhouse Museum for Sydney Design 06.

Download Fabio Ongarato's portfolio (pdf)
Ongarato
Design Indaba 2003
Big Magazine




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+ Sydney Design 06
+ In your face: contemporary graphic design