Build

Consider the old saying, "A new broom sweeps clean, but an old broom knows the corners." Not that Michael C Place, once of Bedale, North Yorkshire, now of Clapham, South London, is exactly an old broom, you understand. But as a man born at the tail-end of the sixties - and having worked in the pre-digital heyday of London's Bite It and Sheffield's infamous The Designers Republic - Place knows a thing or two about design. The sweat and grime, the knives and spray-mount...   

"That's the sort of arrow in my quiver that potentially a lot of people don't have," he says. "The first two jobs I had, we didn't even use computers. I have a very honed knowledge of the print process, so you know how you do things, or why you do things. Now it's just a case of press a button and it prints."   

He laments the loss of that traditional, getting-your-hands-dirty education. "I get mails from people who know I'm a bit of a print nut, and they'll say, 'How do you do this?' Or 'What's that?'," he says. "And you just think: 'Wow! These people have just come out of college and they don't know this?' I know the computer is important, but I think there's a school of thought that what you do is buy a computer, do a nice bit of design, press the Print button and it comes out at the end looking nice. But there's so much more to it than that..."   

Understanding how to mix colours, reverses, overprint, and mastering a range of skills from the days of bromides and tracing paper photocopies, has certainly helped Place build up an impressive body of work. Currently, Nike, Lego and a yet-to- be-announced magazine redesign project clamour for his attention.   

Bite It!

Place's complete approach to his craft began at the age of 14, when his art teacher noticed the boy's aptitude for drawing and suggested he pursue design as a possible vocation. His first step was a foundation course at Scarborough - where the young man discovered his true calling: record sleeve art. It was the mid-eighties, and the likes of Neville Brody, Malcolm Garrett and Vaughan Oliver were showing the world just how innovative and exciting album covers could be.   

Intrigued by the possibilities, Place took an OND in Graphic Design at York. "The tutors were very good in that they really helped you to do whatever you wanted to do - the career path you wanted to take," he recalls. "So I did really well, and then applied to Newcastle University. They said it was a very hard course to get on. I got in there, and then had the worst time."   

Back then, the course - an HND in Graphic Design - focused highly on mainstream graphic design. "It was tough, because I didn't want to do that," remembers Place. "I just wasn't interested in doing wine labels and the usual. But just through personal belief that I could succeed, I used to do my own projects and just muddle through the coursework. I came out with an all right portfolio."   

He got a job straightaway in 1990 doing record sleeves at Bite It! in London, working with the company's founder Trevor Jackson. Bite It!'s client list included record labels Champion and Gee Street, homes to such celebrated acts as Robin S and The Stereo MCs.   

"I just rang him up, because I really liked his stuff, and he said he wasn't really looking, but he needed somebody," Place recalls. "So I did a year-and-a-half at Trevor's, which was fantastic: a real steep learning curve; he's a real good guy."   

Place believes his style at the time - a mix of collage and cut-up type - appealed to Jackson. But then news reached him of a company based in Sheffield, a company he'd already worked for while studying at Newcastle: The Designers Republic. He instinctively knew his material would suit them even more. So in 1991, Place moved back to Yorkshire, where he spent nine prolific years working for the highly influential design company.   

Towards the end of the nineties, Place began to feel restless once again. Nine years on, things were looking different at The Designers Republic.   

"Just before I left, work was leaning towards advertising kind of stuff," says Place. "There's a level of compromise when you come to big advertising jobs and I hate compromise. I guess I just thought it was a good time to stop, because I knew I was going to set up on my own and I didn't want to water down anything I was thinking about. It was an appropriate time for me to do my own thing."   

Travel the globe   

So in 2000, Place left The Designers Republic and, with his wife, went travelling around the world. "It was nice to get away from the computer and, you know, live life a bit and enjoy ourselves and not worry about doing long hours. When the biggest decision was 'What are you going to do today?' and 'Where are you going to have your dinner?'," he explains. "It was a real recharge of batteries and just a fantastic time."   

Of course, this couldn't last, and in late Summer 2001, just after 11 September, Place established Build.   

"I think it was strange coming back and having to get back into work, where you've got to do things at a certain time," he recalls. "Getting back into working a computer's easy - it's like riding a bike - but it was hard to start thinking about things in a graphic way again. Once I got back into it, though, it was fine, and I really started to enjoy it again. I really enjoy it so much more now, more than I have ever done."   

Currently, the creative bike-riding is largely handled by a G5 Mac, Photoshop and Freehand MX. "I'm completely anti- Illustrator," he says almost animatedly. "It's just a horrible clunky thing. It's almost like Freehand is a bit of an old-school thing. It's probably the first piece of software that we used, so that's what I use. I'm a very staunch Freehand fan."   

He's even more staunchly behind using a sketchbook. "Every single thing starts its life in my head, and then goes through to pen on paper. I can't stress that enough," he says emphatically. "Always. Sometimes I can sketch my ideas, because they can be quite simple. But because some of my work is complex and detailed, to actually sit down and to draw the thing would be almost impossible. So I make notes. So it will be, like, 'Remember this type doing this' or 'Chair upside-down, fused with comb.' So my sketchbook's a real mix."   

Building a reputation   

Place's uncompromising approach has certainly won him fans. Although he currently has agency representation by This is Real Art (TiRA) to find work, he's won several of his latest jobs by the sheer quality of his portfolio. An art director at Nike's European operation was a fan, which led to Build's famous speed billboards for the 2004 Olympics. Similarly, the company's US HQ was home to another fan, which led to Build being awarded a job to design a logo for the next NBA Big Thing, Lebron James. Place is also responsible for the design behind the innovative Sony Ericsson t610 screensaver Dead Format. It's based on Place's interest in the form of manufactured goods, from which he draws much of his inspiration.   

"I tend not to go: 'Today I'll have half an hour's inspiration'," he explains. "For instance, doing the Dead Formats thing came from just looking at a tape and thinking that it would be interesting to take that to bits and create something else out of. I don't enjoy looking at design books. It's so boring, because you're just following other designers."   

Place is also moving into the world of motion graphics. "I was very anti-motion at first, but I'm actually quite enjoying it now," he confesses. "It's something that I can quite get into now, but not as much as print. Print will always be my first love."   

There are plenty of fonts jostling for pole position in his portfolio now, including B FUQ (its name was derived from its rather painful birth). "I have always threatened to get a website together for Build, but I never liked any of the fonts that were available on the internet for it," he says. "So I designed a font specially. The idea was that it would be only available to me, just on my site, and that's it. And it was a font that nobody else could have and I think looks really beautiful. It's a pixel-based font, designed specially just for the internet. It took so long to create, with help, to actually get it properly functioning for dynamic text. It's like black magic to me, honestly."   

But when the site failed to materialise in a hurry, Place decided to sell it, to prevent the proliferation of cheap imitations.   

Despite the countless accolades, the head-hunting by Nike and others, the hordes of admiring Sony Ericsson users and Creative Review readers, Place isn't likely to let success go to his head. He's perfectly happy to keep his corner clean in a humble and hard-working way.   

"I'm quite a practical person," he says, "so I really just enjoy getting on with stuff and not talking about it. I really just enjoy doing the things and hopefully I can let the work talk for itself."