tomato coolies

What is it about Tomato? Its members have been called the most influential British designers in the Nineties, and a quick straw poll of young designers produced comments like “their work has become a visual and aural metaphor for today”. The team has also been described as variously “difficult”, “brattish”, “charming” and “pretentious”. But two things about Tomato, and they may well be related, are the sheer originality of the work and just how hard it is to categorise them. It’s even hard to say how many people work there; the number hovers around the seven or eight mark.

On paper the facts seem straightforward enough. Tomato formed in early 1991, a collection of friends with experience in graphic design, video and music setting up together and seeing what happened next. Five years later their impressive client list covers the globe: they’ve produced commercials for Levi’s, Nike, Adidas and Pepsi; the title sequence for the film Trainspotting; TV titles and idents; radio commercials and print work from logos to album covers. They consulted on the recently revamped Channel 4 identity and two thirds of the band Underworld are part of Tomato.

But there seems to be another side to the bunch, as yet unacknowledged. At a recent series of talks in New York, the group screened a four-minute film made by way of an introduction to the American audience. Instead of the usual showreel of award-winning work there are comedy spoofs of artist-style interviews and TV commercials. The funniest one features Tomato’s Dirk Van Dooren and Graham Wood jogging in the park. Van Dooren is decked out in a tight-fitting blue tracksuit puffing away at a mouthful of cigarettes while Wood sports a woman’s nightie. The targets of the joke are two of Tomato’s sportswear manufacturing clients. Now this isn’t really the behaviour you’d expect of a group which has been accused of taking itself too seriously.

“It’s part of a desire not to confine what we do to categories, and to confound expectations of Tomato,” says Van Dooren. “The point was to capture some of the humour around the studio. We were trying to explain Tomato to Americans, who have no sense of irony, by using irony.”

The refusal to be pinned down in what they do and how they approach their work is a recurring theme in what unites the individuals in Tomato, rather than any one house style. There’s a desire for a constant exploration of what’s possible that’s reflected in the book they’ve just produced for Thames and Hudson.

Eschewing the straightforward approach of a “Tomato’s Greatest Hits”, the book is instead a specially conceived project, each of the group’s members working on their own sections which only came together late in the production. In keeping with the Tomato tradition on their showreel CD-ROM, it isn’t immediately clear who exactly worked on each section. The pieces are derived largely from previously unseen personal projects, some of which have appeared in commercial work under a different guise.

“Originally the publishers wanted a ‘best of’ book, but we didn’t want to do that at the time. It’s not a book about resolution, it’s open- ended,” says Graham Wood.

Appropriately enough, the book is called Process, and mixes images with sections of essays. The blurb on the back describes it as “reflecting the individual journeys and ideas that form the personal and commercial work of Tomato” and it’s hard to argue with that. What the book probably won’t do, with its absence of commercial hits like the Trainspotting titles, is help anyone looking to rip off a “Tomato style”.

Tomato’s John Warwicker tells a story which throws some light on how the group has come to be regarded by some of its clients. Having been commissioned to produce an illustration for a magazine, he sent off the completed artwork only to receive a call from the art editor. The magazine really liked the work, and planned to use it, but was surprised because it “didn’t look like Tomato”.

Warwicker expands on the idea of expectations of the group: “The problem for some people who look at us is that they call what we do design, but we call it something else, almost deliberately to deconstruct that understanding. We have clients who’ve known us for a long time saying ‘Oh, you do that as well. I didn’t know you directed live action, I thought you just did typographic things’, or ‘Oh, you can write, you do strategic reports’. It’s about being absolutely honest, not restricting yourself to one area, and realising your potential and the potential for making marks, because that’s all it is – making marks in different media.”

This commitment to exploring the creative process, not just as it works within Tomato but also outside, has led various members of the group into teaching, but lack of time now limits them to occasional lectures and one-offs.

“It’s great to be able to talk to people and pass on ideas. I never really teach per se, I’ve just been myself. My teaching involves almost trying to wipe away how the students think they need to be, which is basically copying everything that’s going on around them, to go back to point zero and do something truthful,” explains Van Dooren.

“The idea that you can prescribe approaches or answers is wrong. Education doesn’t stop when you finish college,” adds the newest recruit, Michael Horsham. At their studio, they see three or four portfolios a day. No one has ever joined the group that way – but Warwicker doesn’t rule that out as a possibility.

Current jobs include the direction of a live action commercial for Gordon’s Gin, a title sequence for a Tony and Ridley Scott project in Canada, as well as their own ever-evolving personal projects. Future plans include a move out of their cramped office to a space of 604m2 over four floors which will be shared with Anti-Rom. There’s talk of a website, with the content currently under development, and the possibility of a Tomato exhibition at London’s ICA.

So what is it about Tomato? As John Warwicker succinctly puts it: “Something like Tomato is only as good as the experience you bring to it – not from up high, but from people bringing in their music, writing, whatever – and everyone has that potential to bring something to the group.”

Process; A Tomato Project is published by Thames and Hudson, priced 19.95.