Making a NoiseFive
From its earliest days, necessity forced Attik to realize that experimentation is the catalyst for keeping creative work groundbreaking. Noise has been key to the agency's success.
First established in Northern England in 1986 when Co-Founders James Sommerville and Simon Needham used a £2,000 bursary from The Prince’s Trust to set up shop in the unused attic of Sommerville’s grandmother, like other startup graphic design companies, the two Batley School of Art students quickly faced challenges in trying to attract quality assignments.
Knowing that success would require more than talent and a catchy name, the young men committed to self-publishing an ambitious, collectible printed piece that would set the creative bar as high as possible.
Hoping to attract higher caliber work, clients and collaborators, they set about researching and exploring all their ideas, working after hours and on weekends to bring their best conceptions to life in print at any cost.
“From our earliest days, Noise formed a key part of our commercial design process, as necessity forced us to realize that continual experimentation is the catalyst for keeping creative work groundbreaking,” Needham began. “Over the past 23 years, we’ve had opportunities to work for leading brands, including Scion and Lexus through Toyota Motor Sales USA, Adidas, Coca-Cola and Heineken. Looking back, it’s clear to us that our dedication to Noise has been a key to earning us our best business opportunities.”
In 2007 the firm became a subsidiary of Dentsu, the world’s largest advertising agency brand. Also, at a 2004 Buckingham Palace reception held by Queen Elizabeth and The Duke of Edinburgh honoring the British design industry’s contributions to the life of the nation, Needham and Sommerville joined England’s most notable architects and fashion, industrial and graphic designers as honored guests.
Having self-published its first three Noise publications (the first book appeared in 1995), ATTIK’s NoiseFour was published by HarperCollins Publishers in New York. Today, each past Noise edition is widely considered as being among the most important graphic design references of its era, and while NoiseFour was accepted into the permanent collection of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, NoiseFive is already set to be catalogued for reference within the British Library. Since ATTIK first announced the forthcoming publication of NoiseFive last year, their microsite has logged over 80,000 visits, and design blogs from around the world are reflecting great interest in ATTIK’s newest release.
In contrast with the popular trend of books being mass produced or delivered as e-books, the self-published NoiseFive has been handcrafted by ATTIK’s principals in a return to the best traditional production values of print, embodying the firm’s ideal that there should be no compromises in great design, regardless of the economic challenges faced.
To execute their ambitious plan of offering hundreds of pages of print design using nine unique paper stocks and featuring more than 40 print finishes (including rub and reveal heat sensitive inks, hot foils, silver latex scratch-off inks, fluorescent screen print and hi-build gloss varnishes), ATTIK enlisted Evolution Print, James McNaughton Group, and Celloglas as their NoiseFive publishing partners.
“The way we run our business, we do our experimental thinking/exploring in our own time, on our own budgets,” said Sommerville. “With NoiseFive, we have forged ahead in producing a book which is commercially unviable… as a testament to our confidence in our own voice, our passionate beliefs, and our loyalty to the ATTIK brand. We could easily have left Noise to drift off after Noise Two, Three, or Four, but determination to allow our teams to push their creative boundaries resulted in this new book.”
NoiseFive also presents a detailed, first-of-its-kind retrospective on the company and its principals, written by noted branding and marketing industry journalist Karl Greenberg. As Sommerville explained, “Since people have been asking us for years about what motivates us and how we manage to go about running a business while staying creatively inspired, we decided to openly reveal the highs and lows of the agency, which has experienced several boom and bust economies over the years since 1986.”
"NoiseFive makes you think," said David Butler, VP Design, The Coca-Cola Company. "What would happen if the world's biggest brands were all design-driven? The scale of impact on business and culture could be incredible. With NoiseFive, I am reminded of ATTIK's relentless focus on innovation and look forward to the future we're designing together."
ATTIK’s self-published NoiseFive is now available at selected specialist bookstores around the world – and directly from ATTIK for £65 plus shipping. A number of signed limited-editions are also available by ordering from http://www.attik.com.
Evolution Print was chosen as the print partner to ATTIK in producing NoiseFive.
The James McNaughton Group is a major supplier of paper, board, plastics and other substrates to the graphic art and printing market in the UK and Ireland.
Celloglas is NoiseFive's finishing partner, and showcases several of their creative processes including Thermochromic Ink (rub and reveal), Photochromic Ink (Light Reveal) & Fragrance Bursts, supporting ATTIK in bringing print to life. Specialists in decorative print finishing, Celloglas are the largest print finishers in the UK, having been established for over 50 years.