Sam Winston

18 Mar 2011 / Professional practice

Sam Winston describes his practice as fine art through design skills, using words, typography or books. Thus he uses design creative practices to do something else, not design.

For him, commercial work is boring. Usually, when working commercially, people arrive to a point where they don’t learn anymore, where they have to comply with the client and that means that they are just working to earn money. For Sam, this is not the main goal of working. He mentioned three main influences for his attitude to work: Alan Fletcher who defended design as authorship, where the designer has a voice; Ken Garland, the author of the manifesto “First things first” and Ron King from Circle Press. The work should have some meaning, should always teach something. Therefore his practice is based on self-initiated projects and handmade experimentation, allowing “mistakes” to take part of it. He sees that as “the poetry of my body”. He mentioned that the more he was asked to work digitally, the more he created handmade briefs for himself. Intuition also plays an important role in his work, as it’s a very interesting way of learning. Everything is part of the learning experience.

Sam is passionate about words. So he decided to make a living out of that, exploring and engaging with language at different levels. “Language isn’t solid”. He plays with the meaning of words or ways of communicating, whether is the concept of dictionary, as the container of everything you can say or write, or the internet where knowledge is superficial and based in links between words.

When at first we look to his extremely beautiful works, there is no apparent logic or reason behind it. But after observing them deeper there are always stories to read, conclusions to take, something to find. Sometimes it's also partly information design.

Finally he pointed out the importance of structure and organization when working alone and always reflect on what and why we’re working on.

“My practice is my end goal because I learn from it.”

http://www.samwinston.com/