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Corporal Identity: Interview With Vince Frost

“My kids are completely free,” he smiles. “I can see beautiful things coming out of them; beautiful paintings and beautiful questions. Then you see schools setting lines to get their handwriting neater, so it looks like an example of how the whole world is set. What does that do to us? It makes our handwriting neater, but it affects the way we think; our free flow. There is a very positive energy that is then made to feel like it’s wrong.”

“What they teach me is their incredibly inquisitive minds; they’re always making things,” he continues. “That’s what we should do as designers. Often we spend our whole life, our whole education, learning how not to be spontaneous, how not to question things. For me the most important thing is to have the freedom to have an open mind; a questioning mind.”

Interpretation, Vince insists, makes all the difference – and taking the time to glimpse the world through a child’s eyes can bring a refreshing sideways angle to almost anything. His D&AD Presidential Lecture the previous evening had kicked off with a holiday snap of two mating kangaroos in the zoo – a scene that at the time had prompted, ‘Daddy, that kangaroo’s trying to carry the other one.’ Ah, the wonder of youth.

Such quirky throwaway observations inform the Frost* Design philosophy as well as tickle his sense of humour. A flip through his little pink book – which boasts a single page of text amidst a flurry of snapshots, part portfolio, part stream of consciousness – throws up more such gems, like ‘NO PARKING’ painted haphazardly on the road, with PAR-KIN-G split three ways as if its creator had scrawled the word with abandon, yet was afraid to go over the lines.

“I just walk around, taking pictures of things,” he shrugs. “I can’t imagine looking straight ahead and not taking everything in. I often wonder what it’s like for people not in the design industry who don’t wonder why things are there, or how they got there.” While he wearily denies any obvious difference between Australian and British design, he admits his physical surroundings are more of an inspiration now than ever before.

“In Australia the graphics are everywhere. They completely surround you. Everybody here is screaming for attention, and you just do not know where to look. And they have flags and banners everywhere – it really makes the city feel alive,” he enthuses. “When I was working in London, it was primarily identities and magazines. In Australia I was introduced to three-dimensional design – signage, interiors and all that kind of stuff – and it was a really fantastic learning curve.”

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