It's a moment that designer Steve Scott says he'll always remember. It was eight years ago, in a shared artists' studio in Sydney's inner west when a friend introduced him to Macromedia Flash' a graphics animation tool that allowed him to animate the illustrations he'd been creating. At the time, Scott was dividing his time between his band, the Telemetry Orchestra and his work as a freelance magazine designer and illustrator in Sydney. He speaks of the moment as if he'd been introduced to a new friend.

'A light bulb went off in my head,' says Scott' a designer, illustrator, animator and musician. 'I thought, fantastic I can do this.' The first thing he decided to do? What any designer-illustrator-animator-musician would: he set out to make a video for his band.

'Videos were so expensive but with this tool all you needed was a good style and you ended up with something that looked professional. You could create all these crazy little worlds where as in the real world of videos it seemed like you would never be able to get that,' says Scott.

Today the 35 year old continues to make stunning animations using Flash and Illustrator; the results spanning design disciplines such as illustration, typography and movement graphics. He's made a name for himself as a talented animator and is part of the Pod Film stable in Australia where he has created music videos for popular Australian bands such as Silverchair and Salmonella Dub. Scott relocated to London in 2005 where, in addition to his video work, he's developing animation series' and working on commercial advertising projects for companies such as Nokia.

Scott is also still making videos for his band. (Being his own client, he says with a laugh, had its pluses and minuses.) He took three months to create the video for Suburban Harmony. The results are homage to 1960s pop graphics and animators such as Milton Glaser, Heinz Edelmann (Yellow Submarine) and Terry Gilliam (Monty Python); but using contemporary digital tools. Call it retro contemporary if you will, but by doing so, Scott connects the pop style of the generation before him with the flat colourful look that his generation has pioneered using digital tools. It's a marriage that takes the work beyond its retro styling and infuses the digital work with a new kind of optimism in the process.

'All those 1960s graphics had this real nice optimism,' says Scott. 'I think it's because they had a really simple line, simple colours and were quite flat. They make me feel kind of warm inside. Those big blocks of colour just kind of hit you.' Designers like Scott who use Flash and Illustrator are often lumped together in what's known as the vector graphics style, but Scott isn't entirely convinced that the tool can be equated with a look. 'I've been using Flash and Illustrator for a long time now and I remember being really shocked that people were talking about it as a style: Vector style. I was shocked that all these people who used this program were getting bunched together. I think that's wrong. I think people use it in lots of different ways. It's like watercolour.'

That said, Scott admits that the flatness and distinct lines that define vector graphics appeal to him. 'I think you can fight against the program and fight against that look if you want to. But I kind of like that. It's just a taste thing but I like the flat colours and all of that.' Scott cites Tin Tin as an influence. 'In French there is a word that means 'clear line' and it's basically the idea that you use a lot of flat colour, and it's got a very simple line, and I've always loved that. It just kind of resonates, so the flatness doesn't bother me because it's just ingrained.'

The Suburban Harmony video follows a bowler-hatted character as he winds his way home through a dreamy garden landscape as highly stylised lyrics come into view in time with the vocals. The character, Scott says, started out as a doodle in Illustrator.

Scott wanted to keep the project simple by using what was close at hand, and the orphaned character fit the bill. But simplicity, Scott admits, is harder than it looks. 'I kept coming up with these ideas to make it simple, like using text to spell out the lyrics and having these long tracking scenes just bobbing along with the music. I even thought that if I had one long scene, then I wouldn't have to draw a lot of different scenes, but in the end it didn't work that way. I thought that using text would make it really easy because I wouldn't have to do any animation; it's just text and big words and putting it together with this 1960s style, but all my plans turned to dust. However, Scott has no regrets. 'For me that was a one-off experiment. I always loved those sorts of graphics and that video was my way of getting it out of my system.'

You can see Steve Scott's Suburban Harmony video in the new exhibition In your face: contemporary graphic design, 5 August-5 November at the Powerhouse Museum for Sydney Design 06.

Download Steve Scott's portfolio
Sydney Design 06
Pod Films
Generation Flash by Lee Manovich
Cold Hard Flash
Macromedia Flash


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