Global graphics

Career tips

• A designer’s education can be a mix of formal tertiary education at private colleges, TAFE or university. “Some of the best designers have no design education at all, but are great at interpreting visuals,” Skye says.

Skye Vermeesch, creative director, blueandbrown creative

Creating gorgeous images as a graphic designer is a skill that can take you all over the globe. Alex May talks to blueandbrown creative director Skye Vermeesch to find out more.

Graphic design is more than logos or letterheads. What begins as inspiration from a small bowl in a Sydney kitchen can end as dramatic swirls on glass sheets that are 10 metres high and a kilometre long in a Singapore airport.

Vermeesch created her Familia design after noticing the beauty of a coloured Murano glass bowl. Those images now adorn a proposed design for a new third terminal at Singapore’s international airport, as well as canvasses which hang on clients’ walls.

"I liked the organic pebble shapes of that bowl and re-interpreted that in my own way to create Familia, which is the Italian word for family. The way I design is to re-interpret visual messages in new ways and apply it to new things," Skye says.

Vermeesch’s five-year-old company specialises in creating graphic design for interiors, making murals, canvas, glass and commercial furniture for clients in Australia and all over the world.

"That's the thing with graphic design — it doesn't rely on language to send a message. It relies on visuals, and that transcends borders,” Vermeesch says. “Good graphic design distils things to their very essence. A great logo, for example, has to be one single mark that exemplifies everything about a business."

Blueandbrown, which Vermeesch runs with partner Kirsten Brown, have been invited to Japan for DesignWeek, Singapore for the airport project and the United Kingdom to talk with furniture giant Habitat.

Vermeesch trained as a graphic designer at Sydney's Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts in 1987 before heading overseas in 1994 to San Francisco, where she studied and then worked at Tolleson Studio, which had clients in Silicon Valley. “We worked for all kinds of clients — Apple, biotech companies and IT start-ups — doing logos and annual reports,” she says.

On her return to Sydney, sSkye ran her own graphic design studio before teaming up with Kirsten Brown to create blueandbrown. "It is a great job which is a lifestyle rather than something you do for money," she says. "The downside is that I spend all my creativity at work so I’m a terrible cook. I can’t be creative in the kitchen at all."