TORONTO— "I love my job. Everyday is different. I get butterflies two or three times a week because of what I do."

On Friday, June 1 on a rainy Toronto evening, Alan Dye, creative director of award-winning design consultancy NB Studio in London, UK, shared with a packed house at an Advertising and Design Club of Canada (ADCC) event some of his favourite NB projects and what inspires him about design. Dye was in town for the judging of the ADCC's Directions 2012 Awards.


Dye cofounded NB Studio in 1997; its clients have included Knoll, Channel 4 and the Tate. Many of its clients are in the non-profit cultural sector — and certainly the projects he showcased on Friday evening reflected that. Those projects included the British D & AD (Design & Art Direction) New Blood exhibition ad campaign, in which NB coaxed well-known members of the old blood of British design to participate in a series of faked suicide images.
The idea was to do away with the old blood to make way for the new.

Another low-budget non-profit project, an exhibition piece for the International Society of Typographic Designers, saw NB create an enormous typographic map of London, which NB later made into a jigsaw puzzle. Explained Dye: "The puzzle went viral. It's been featured in Wallpaper magazine. We've sold a great many of them. And we even got an email from Buckingham Palace enquiring about it."


Asked about how NB decides which low-budget cultural projects to take on, and whether he has a sense which ones might lead to bigger things down the road, Dye replied: "You'll get tuppence for doing it, so you just have to decide whether you'll be doing it for the community.  [The projects] could be good PR for you, but you have no idea which project will be good PR." He went on to say that he finds charities are often the hardest clients to work for.

After the formal presentation, Dye was interviewed on stage by Ann Meredith Brown, communications director at Skikatani Lacroix Design and former editor of Design Edge. They spoke on a wide range of topics, including his opinion of the 2012 London Olympics logo (he does not think it is a successful design) as well as his views on Canadian design, which he confessed to knowing little about. "But I'm sure you're all bloody brilliant," he said, adding that he would find out the next day when the ADCC judging began.