Behaviour Group / Cadson Demak Press release (2002)
Published as a reference for Creative Café & Graduate Design School Seminar at Chulalongkorn University on the 4th of October 2002 and Cultural Template Design Seminar at Bangkok University (Rangsit Campus) on 18th November 2002
What position does Behaviour Group fit in the Thai graphic design industry and what is your main goal?Nirut :I am not sure about position but I know our goal is to shake things up in the Thai graphic design industry. We are trying to make things different. Look for a different perspective. We hope one day to have more designers look in the same perspective. Even better take a different perspective and try to defense us. Both ways will help in growing our graphic design industry.
Anuthin :Currently we have either designer or educator. Designer + Educator would be my answer. One who creates a design environment that allows people to recognize graphic design as an art. Make Thai people realize that graphic design is more than just advertising and hard a sell tool.
We see many of problems in the Thai design industry and they all lead back to design school. Most Thai people can not even relate graphic design to their life. It is all because designers don't understand how to relate graphic design to todays society (ie. the man on the street). That is why we try to do workshop and work closely with design schools to help generate new designers who "think out of the box".
Pongtorn : Simple! We treat graphic design the way it should be treated. That is the position we stand on right now. We expect to produce good work and be happy. Our bottom line is to see others do the same thing.
Don't you guys do any commercial hard sell graphic design at all? How can you survive and stay in business?Nirut : I don't think we really do hard sell. We know the line between what will and won't do. Personally, I try to avoid hard sell. Most of the time when clients tell me what to do, I tell them to re-think their idea. I always ask them before we start the project, "Do you want to be the same or different from your competitors?". Most of the clients that I have dealt with pick up bad design direction from competitors. They have no clue what are they doing.
So it comes down to practical hard time, "Convince them to try something totally different from their competitors". I have to talk them out of what everybody out there does. If they agree, we will move forward together. I will come up with a design for them. We will compromise and find the best solution within our standard.
Pongtorn : I guess you could say we do commercial design. But!!! It will be commercial job with tons of extra effort to produce. The design has to meet client's need but still fit our standard.
Anuthin : We try to avoid commercial graphic design hard sell as much as possible. Every now and then, we may run into one. They usually end up walking away from us because we do not always do all that they want. We actually have our base group of non profit organization and soft sell clients. Most of the time they come to us just because they understand and want our style.
We are not making a million bucks here. There are many ways of income; education arena, typographic consulting, writing and font sales to name a few. People think we live out of font business alone, It is not true at all. It is just the way we resell our design material. It is more like a "big" side project.
Many people seem to think about Anuthin when they talk about Behaviour Group. What is your role in the studio?Nirut :Well, Anuthin is the core partner and he is more like a representative of the group. Myself, I usually work behind the scene on interactive media and other stuffs. I had been working outside Thailand for too long. It has kind of put me out of reach. Who knows? Now I am back in town, people might think about me instead of Anuthin when they talk about Behaviour Group! Now, this is serious..I hope one day people will think more about us as a group.
Anuthin :I can see that is possible. People see me more like a spokesman just because people think the other partners are harder to reach. Actually, we all have their own responsibility in the group.
Pongtorn :My role?... Originally, I do non-commercial design for my satisfaction and a some of commercial for a living. In the group format, I would be the one who carries most of commercial work client. We agreed that we needed someone who stands in between these two worlds. That is where I come in to make Behaviour idea more simple to public. Then we can expand our scope of work without loosing the edge.
Where does your inspiration come from and what do you think influence your work the most?Anuthin :Just like other designers, inspiration can come from everything around us. For me, I think i got a lot of influence from '80s syn-pop music and early digital age graphic design.
Pongtorn :You might think it is kind of nonsense but I got a lot of influences from '80s action films. For some reason I found them very energetic. All those camp icons/characters and out of date cutting edge props (which are no longer cutting edge for today's standard). Somehow those things inspired me.
Nirut :I would say the same. My influence and inspiration comes from everywhere books, magazines, movies, fashion, emotions, daily life, culture , etc. It depends on how do you adapt all the things and translate them to your design.
In brief, what do you think about graphic design education in Thailand? What do you expect to see from design school? Nirut :Tough one. I think design education in Thailand is not "open minded" yet. There is no right or wrong in design as we already know. There are so many different ways to strike the problem but somehow we did not get to know that fact from school. In my school days, I hardly had a chance to think and explore something new because of the hard sell design projects we got most of the time. If I were the teacher, I would let my students think and explore new things as long as whatever they come up with can solve the problem. Not just do whatever they want to do.
The teacher has to be the one who brings out the talent of the student. Anything that student can do best, you should accept it. Help pushing them up to the next level on their track. Don't judge student's work by what you like or dislike.
I also would like to see more of information exchanged. We should have more symposiums or conferences for professional designers. More group talk-discussions, comments, and suggestions in school. This way everyone will have a chance to exercise their brain cells.
Anuthin :I think it should get to the point that quality of junior year in lead Thai design school has no difference from junior year of lead schools in US or Europe. New way of teaching about relationship between concept and idea. Individuality that could develop to personal graphic language. Input from instructor that will help build up a good designer attitude. Experiment, experiment and experiment....Is that too much to ask?
Pongtorn :Lacking computer equipment is no longer a problem for Thai teachers and students. Plus the internet allows them to be very up to date on information. There's no excuse not to make a good design. One day people will expect to see your work because it is your work, not because it looks like someone elses. Don't be overwhelmed by hip trend design that won't stay with you.
What change did you see in Thai design industry in the past 10 years?Nirut :Can't really answer this question. From what I have seen lately, it's still pretty much the same. It is just all about new media not new design.
Pongtorn :Recently Design seems to be more meaningful to Thai people. We have more design stores open in Bangkok. More Thai designers have won international competition. In order to lift up society's standard, I would expect to see more original design pieces from Thai designers.
We lost many good design firms in the economic crisis. Today Thai designers seem to care about money more than design for design sake. I can understand that really well. It takes a lot of guts to say "I don't think you need us to do this work". Nothing really new nor innovative after the fall of Sam Nor-Propaganda (graphic design not product design) period.
Anuthin :We're starting to see some new born designers and firms that do everything so "Wallpaper" like. I agree, nothing really ground braking. We seem to go backward on design quality too. The crisis in late 1997 really shrunk design budgets big time. Thai designers have gone nut over years. They don't remember how to do a good design out of small budget. I also agree with Nirut about cranky design skill on new media.
Do you think Type business idea will work in Thailand? Do you have Thai font for sale?Anuthin :Most of the time we use our in-house Thai fonts to do work. We start to have some custom Thai font jobs for major product brand identity. People probably do not know because it is all done behind the scene.
Yes, we do have some Thai font but they are not for sale. There a long way from commercial sale and type foundry operation. Thai people still think of font as a freeware. Plus they can go to Panthip Plaza and get a pirate CD packed with 2000 fonts for under USD $5. ITC and Adobe along with Linotype are the big victim of this crime. Government has done nothing so far for software industry so we have to protect ourselves. It will not get any better as long as Thai people do not value design work in general. That should answer you why we do not intend to sell our Thai fonts.
For commercial sale, we will have to stick with Latin(English) font because there is a market out there. Someday if we find our font in one of those pirate CDs at Panthip Plaza, we probably can not do much but we will sure do something.
What is graphic design's effect on Thai culture today?Anuthin :I don't think people really understand what it is but they know there is something called graphic design and it makes them buy stuff and feel good about it unknowingly.
Graphic design in our country has a problem relating itself to people. People don't understand graphic design and graphic designers don't know graphic design more than their commercial work routine. At the same time, the design industry tries too much to achieve "international" image by copying the look from the west. The result is our graphic design lost its character long ago before globalization. I explained it quite clear in my essay "Identity crisis" published in Bangkok University Design Journal and recently re-publish in art4d (May 2002). According to our society today, you should question me just the opposite. How does Thai culture effect graphic design?
Pongtorn :Very big question that has been around over coffee table discussions. Design in general seems to be unrecognized subject for Thai people to begin with. Although, it established itself everywhere no matter good or bad.
Personally, Bangkok could qualify as a bad environment for design industry because most people have less concern about art. The gap between people and art is getting bigger each year. The lack of public access to places such as museums and good art foundations in school is starting to show its effect on society. The result, people don't know how to get in touch with the art. It makes art less and less important because people can not relate themselves with it.
Issues like this have never been taken care of by any government. I can understand that very well. We have to put up with endless economic crisis and political war but we can not just forget the "Art of Society". We actually have a great culture that provides good source for modern design. Take typography for example, many of us don't know how to treat Thai letters to serve in modern typography. How did it happen?
Nirut :Do we still have Thai culture? What is the real Thai Culture? Those questions sound sarcastic. We easily accept things form everywhere...Europe, China, Japan, and America. It seems to me we have been trying to do graphic design in Thai way which heavily dominated by the west culture. That is why we unknowingly rejected Thai culture because we try so hard to be American graphic. What we see today is a reaction of Thai graphic to Thai culture. Thai graphic just reflect what Thai people want to be.
Do you have any role model?Pongtorn :It is almost impossible to say that I don't have any role model. Yes, I have but I am not going to tell you.
Anuthin :Thai type designer Chao Sornsongkarm the designer of EAC Chunpim. I had a chance to interview him years ago. He designed Chunpim for Thai people to have a modern quality text font. Just wanted to set a standard Thai font, money is not an issue, he said. Shame on us! We are pushing type business around here.
Main stream commercial firms in Thailand label you as an underground. What is your reaction on that comment?Nirut :It does not matter where we are on the ground or underground, what we are, or who we are. We will keep up our work standard. This is my reaction on this comment.
Pongtorn : I really have no problem with that. I just keep working on my track and feel good at the end of the day.
Anuthin :No comment. I don't see it as a negative way to describe us. After all it is just a label. We obviously have different goal than commercial houses. We do different kind of graphic subject to begin with anyway.
©2002 Behaviour Group.
Taken from behaviourgroup.com. No portion of this interview text could be published in any media without direct permission from Behaviour Group.
