KATE MOROSS: GESTALT THEORY
“I get up late but not because I’m lazy, I just tend to go to bed late,” says graphic illustrator Kate Moross, also: “I’ve had to grow balls to deal with money”; “I can embarrass myself quite a lot” and “I went to a séance the other day! I wasn’t allowed to sit in the circle ‘cause I was messing about too much, they were calling out for some spirit or something and I kept on knocking on the walls. I got sent upstairs!”
Amongst other things, Kate Moross describes herself as a workaholic which, if you’ve ever checked out her project list, must seem an understatement to the average eight-a-day worker. Starting out three years ago, Kate began designing eye-catching flyers for a selection of London’s hippest club nights and merchandise for bands like Punks Jump Up, Gossip and Comanechi. Inevitably, it didn’t take long for Kate’s work to become as highly sought after as her clients – she’s since deftly upgraded to the world of commercial illustration. Consider that she’s only 21 and has found time to fit in a degree at Camberwell, and you could be forgiven for any astonishment.
I went to a séance the other day! I wasn’t allowed to sit in the circle ‘cause I was messing about too much, they were calling out for some spirit or something and I kept on knocking on the walls. I got sent upstairs!
“I’ve just finished my dissertation, I handed it in on Thursday!” she says, her voice dripping with relief. “It’s hard at uni when they give you fake projects asking you to work to a brief as if you were working for a client, when you’re actually doing that. I submitted Cadbury’s with my second year work. I felt like a bit of an arsehole but I’d worked so hard on it, I felt I’d justified myself,” she’s talking, of course, about the huge purple billboards you’ve probably seen splashed across the country, proclaiming that ‘the milk in your dairy milk is – yep, milk’, possibly her largest scale project to date and big news for any designer. “It was weird getting texts from people, my stepfather was on the train to Bristol or something and saw loads, he emailed my mother; I think that was the first time he’d ever used a Blackberry! One minute it was just a little picture on my screen and the next minute its twenty feet wide – I was slightly disconnected from it at the time but the feedback from everyone was great.”
Kate’s work is all about rules – whether that means breaking them, bending them, mixing them into strange combinations or strictly towing the line. “I live for briefs,” she explains, at the tail end of what has been a busy year. “I like restrictive briefs in terms of brand guidelines and rules about colours and rules about sizes and things. Imposing rules on graphic designers is always fun because you are restricted but at the same time those restrictions can create really big portals of ways to create work.” Her style is a split between psychedelic, free, hand drawn and coloured organic designs and structured, spatial shapes and patterns – either way, it’s consistently well informed.
“I base my work originally around Gestalt theory, which very simply means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s where isometry comes from, it’s like you can work with just a triangle and make those triangles into a house. It’s kind of the whole basis behind drawing – everything is an illusion, just a collection of lines on a page but your mind makes it into the image or the words or whatever it is that is there.”
Her coming work for Topshop – part of an imaginatively named Kate Moross line – encompasses another of her interests, the marriage of science and design. Six pieces (vests, T-shirts and jumpers) follow a psychedelic astrophysics route in a detailed, hand drawn collection – expect quasi-stellar objects and black holes, once again combining the liberated conception of design to the concrete rules of science. “I think that comes from my A-Levels. I did physics, art and product design and everyone was always like, how does physics relate to graphics? You know, graphic design is almost a science in some ways, quite intangible – I like to think about it that way. It’s important to marry things that have a lot of depth with things that are very visual because how else are you going to explore them and explain them without using a textbook and some equations? It’s fun to kind of push them into surreal visual imagery and see what you can get out of them, and maybe get people interested in it as well.”
Admitting that both the Topshop and Cadbury campaigns landed in her lap, Kate operates without an agency and has no plans to adopt one, incredibly slotting self-promotion into her busy schedule. “I seem to do it automatically now, I’m terrible. I’m just lucky. I don’t know how people find out about me!” She’s also launched a new record label, Isomorphs. First release, from Cutting Pink with Knives comes as a super limited edition 10” green vinyl. Kate explains: “I wanted to directly get involved with the band and focus on the music. I really love music and I thought there was a really good opportunity to create packaging and artwork and a whole product for the record that was considered completely by the designer.”
Aspirations big and small, Kate’s currently concentrating on a New Era hat and getting her work recognised in America. However she’d love to redesign the Bubblicious packaging (“not that it needs to be redesigned, but I would love to! I’d like to do lots of candy!”) and artwork for Usher, of all people.
With things looking set to get even busier, will early mornings become an option? Perhaps not. Good luck Kate!
Charlotte Dunckley [2008]
