The Work That Made Me: Michael Watson
After studying at the The Royal College of Art in 1995, Michael Watson set up a design company with Jon Morgan called bump and had fun for a decade or so working with the great and the good in the design world. They sold thousands of T-shirts at Beams in Tokyo, helped set up, art-direct and wrote for cult fanzine ‘The Shoreditch Twat’, which later became a Channel 4 TV show, designed touring exhibitions for the Crafts Council and British Council and exhibited art products in shows like ‘Stealing Beauty’ at the ICA, JAM at the Barbican and ‘Ultravision’. In 2005, Michael was offered a job as part of a creative team. Over the years he has worked on brands such as Expedia, Pizza Hut, BA, Unilever, Coca Cola, Bulmers, American Express, Lucozade and BP .
Now Michael is back working with his old CD and friend Neil Dawson. Writing this next chapter is going to be the most fun so far.
The creative stuff from my childhood that stays with me...
There are loads of things from my childhood that are still spinning around in the back of my head. The first thing I can remember, as a kid, is a TV show called The Herbs; it was very cute puppetry with a character called Parsley the Lion. Then there was a cartoon called Marine boy, what a theme song...
My Grandfather was a textile designer and painter. He loved the classics and one of the first paintings I can remember was by Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, ca. 1874.
It fascinated me but I didn’t really understand it.
I think one of the most memorable areas of the arts that caught me in its headlights was TV, especially comedy. Thankfully my Mother introduced me and my brother to the world of Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Hattie Jacques, Dads Army and Eric Sykes. Morecambe & Wise dancing with Angela Rippon....PEANUTS.... threatening Andre Previn and the ice cream vendor joke when they’re both sat up in bed nearly killed me and still does.
The creative work that I keep revisiting…
I revisit a number of creative works on a daily or weekly basis.
The Clash - White man in Hammersmith Palais
The Precisions - If This Is Love
Toots and the Maytaks- -Sweet and Dandy
Aswad - Warrior Charge
The Sensations - Long time me no see you Girl.
Robert Longo’s drawings of drunk city workers dancing always makes me smile. The one piece I keep coming back to is Christopher Wool’s My House which I managed to buy from Counter Editions for a very good price and now hangs in my bedroom. It makes me smile every time I read it.
The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry…
I had always loved advertising as a kid I just didn’t know it was a real job. Being brought up in a small town in Yorkshire in the 1970’s you were either a roofer, builder or a farmer.
The Smash Aliens was a favourite of mine and my brothers.
The piece of work that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*...
This is hard to answer because I’ve made my own fair share of clangers as has everyone who works in the creative world. But Dove’s body wash ad where the black girl in a brown top takes it off and turns into a white girl???? WHO the fuck signed that off?
The piece of work that still makes me jealous…
There’s so much work that make’s me jealous and I’m happy feeling like that, it’s inspiring. I would have loved to have made the Puma after hours social club. The Guardian Points of View advert, tv and print, 1986 and I wish I had made that Dimebar radio advert Armadillo and Dime Bar Warehouse. I still laugh when I listen to it.... its so silly, great radio.
The creative project that changed my career…
Lucozade ‘To do list’ was made early on in my advertising career. We had just joined Ogilvy and were being told that we didn’t belong there by other creatives. I learnt very quickly how advertising worked, it was a baptism of fire.
I was running my own design company with friend Jon Morgan where we made the famous Shoreditch Twat fanzine. A badly produced libellous poorly spelt black and white club flyer that turned into a fanzine and ended up as a comedy show on C4. I loved making that; using images, without permission, having a go at anyone, printing peoples phone numbers. It was total anarchy, 25,000 issues every six weeks. There is a great interview with the club promoter Neil Boorman on the D&AD site that tells the whole awful story.
We weren’t a typical design company. We did real work too, for the Royal Academy and we re- branded Fulham Football Club at the same time as making the Twat.
We got a call from Ogilvy with a job offer. One of the first briefs was Lucozade. We read and answered the brief to the letter (first mistake). Turns out the ECD didn’t like the work and began to get very angry, saying he’d made a mistake hiring. At this point the CD stepped in and saved us. That CD was Neil Dawson who is now my boss once again! Lucozade was a pure design job with a simple, fun idea at its heart. I remember people saying ‘God that’s obvious’ but then wondering why it hadn’t’ been done before.
The work that I’m proudest of...
I’m lucky to have been involved in a number of great creative projects that I am so proud of. Cribs for MTV was brilliant to make with amazing Producer, Kim Parrott. Babies of the Borough was a small community project which came good with Tara Austin and Niole Yershon. However, the piece of work that I’m most proud of was made for Expedia; Luggage Labels. It was pure joy from start to finish, selling it in to the boss then the client, hand making the label, shooting them and then crafting the finished product with Mark Osbourne, head of design and ECD Gerry Human. We spent hours crafting, changing background colours and making stamps again and again. It was a great design job with a strong creative idea.
All of this work was made with my then partner Jon Morgan.
The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most...
The most recent project I’m excited about is APA Laptops for Lockdown. A simple piece made with the lovely Sally Miller, who came up with the notion that the creative industry must have loads of old computers just sitting around unused. Or an IT department upgrading and sending laptops off to be destroyed. Why not donate these laptops for kids with no access to resources who are sitting at home struggling to keep up with online schoolwork.
Design still plays a huge part of my work. I spend as much time thinking as I do designing. For me the two go hand in hand.
