As Instagram launches a dedicated @design channel, London designers and crafters talk about the platform’s vast influence
We speak to five designers and crafters about how the social media platform has changed the way they do business and influenced their work
Jono Smart
Jono Smart
@jonosmart, 84.5k followers
Instagram is part of daily life, for sure. I joined when I started my studio three years ago. I wasn’t a full time potter back then, I was a garden designer and it was a hobby, and it just grew really quickly. Now it’s 100 per cent how my business works. Every lead, every commission, all my direct customers come from Instagram. And they’re from all over the world. I’ve had restaurants in New York, Argentina and Japan find me through Instagram. I wouldn’t have a studio without it. It’s been completely life-changing. I’ve had people following me the entire time that I’ve just got to know. I’ve met quite a few of them in real life and they’ve watched me grow from not knowing what I’m doing to now so I can’t pretend to be too professional. I’m not putting on a professional face, it’s more behind the scenes stuff – “This is how I am”. I make for about three months, open up my shop three or four times a year and it sells in one or two days to people on Instagram.
I look at what people have liked on the app to work out what colours and shapes to make more of. I have to be careful not to let it creatively drive me, as people can only like what you put in front of them.
I travel to meet other Instagram craftsman and some of them are my best friends now. It’s a big part of my personal life, too. @floriangadsby is the best potter in the UK, but I also love @woodwoven and @hopeinthewoods, who makes the most beautiful spoons. Learn to take good photographs, it’s the best thing you can do to make sure your business grows. Instagram bypasses traditional routes to market. By not having wholesalers in the way, you’re keeping 100 per cent of what you sell. That means potters and craftspeople can survive, so it’s made a huge difference to the living a potter can make.
Karl Meier
Craig & Karl
@craigandkarl, 62.3k followers
It’s the go to place now for the visual world. If you’re not on it, there’s a whole visual culture you’re missing out on. I follow observational accounts because that’s how I felt Instagram used to be before the commercialisation of it. I’ve noticed in my personal world friends who were on Instagram in the beginning were thinking about imagery and funny photos and now you just see brands. I guess you just notice it in the way your feed changes. It’s evolved into something else now, which is kind of inevitable.
That’s why we just try to keep ours observational and it’s mainly just me and my partner Craig Redman doing the work, it’s our world and the things we see and do. We don’t try to make it too much about one thing. People might be less inclined to go and look at our website, but if they see it on Instagram first then they might go there to find the rest of the work. I don’t think we would have shown us in the process of doing the work before, because there was more focus on the finished product. But now, especially since Stories, if we do an installation we like to walk you through it. It’s less precious, which is nice.
Previously to this there wasn’t a way for someone who was just interested in design to get in touch with you and say ‘I like this’, and it’s nice to get that feedback. Another thing is that everyone’s references are laid bare for everyone to see on this platform, so if someone says ‘this reminds me of this’ then it’s quite obvious if they’ve taken inspiration from somewhere else. Also, you get to see a show in New York they’re talking about even if you’re not in New York.
Fernando Laposse
Fernando Laposse
@fernandolaposse, 2,590 followers
I’ve never been very technologically adept so I got on to Instagram quite late. I did something for Selfridges two years after I graduated from Central Saint Martins and they were the ones who prompted me to get into it. Maybe a year ago I started to see it as a professional thing rather than a social thing.
I have my website, which I’ve had since before I graduated and through checking analytics I can see that 80 per cent of traffic comes from Instagram, so I get a lot of commercial use out of it. Instagram has replaced the design blog. At the end of the day, it’s the same phenomenon, it’s just that Instagram is so immediate and people are constantly scrolling through it that the flow of images you’re exposed to is much larger. There are pros and cons, of course.
A lot of my posts are about what happens behind the scenes, before the finished product. In my latest project, I’m working with indigenous farmers in Mexico so it’s a social venture as well as a design one, a research-heavy project. No one will have the patience to go through the whole thing on my website but if it’s done in small doses with videos and images, I think that’s really engaging. I can be constantly reminding people of the project and drawing it out instead of putting it all out there in one go.
I rarely shoot anything on my phone. I do my own photography with a DSLR camera and record high resolution video that I then edit, so I don’t post every day, but it’s well produced.
Grace Winteringham
Patternity
@patternity, 63.1k followers
It started off as a platform to share photos of the patterns my partner Anna Murray and I were seeing every day. We’d marvel at the mundane and find beauty in the banal, sharing our own inspirations and journeys. Liv Taylor, our head of research and digital, curates the content to reflect our way of thinking and being – it’s now a showcase of everything we do.
We use Instagram as a way to connect with our community and talk about our philosophy, our projects, events and research, and we post most days. A core part of our philosophy is the idea that pattern inspiration is everywhere, and noticing a simple stripe, or a blossoming cloud can lead to a more positive and creative life. We have a global following, and it’s so inspiring to see how our pattern-loving community use #Patternity to share their own pattern finds and unite the world through pattern from Thailand to Toronto, Helsinki to Hawaii.
Celebrating the natural world is a key passion of Patternity and we love the @cloudappsoc for sharing the wonders of the sky above and @thebush__ for inspirational greenery and architectural plantscapes that highlight the patterns and colours that cross between the natural and manmade.
@teddyco is a brilliant pattern spotter in Tel Aviv. @parley.tv are also a favourite for their work raising awareness about our oceans and their projects that tackle the challenges through design.
Matteo Fogale and Laetitia de Allegri
De Allegri and Fogale
@deallegrifogale, 2,031 followers
Matteo: For us process is very important. Everything we do, every material, has a story and there’s always a reason we do something, so we like to share that. Hopefully, it means people see greater value in what we do and appreciate the craft behind it. I think that’s very important, not only for our designs but for design in general. I think nowadays there’s more awareness and people want to know where things come from and how they’re made. A few years back people didn’t care much about it and bought things that were mass-produced. Now craft is more appreciated. We’re showing pieces in Milan with Living Correiere, and they contacted us on Instagram, so it’s interesting how people connect there now, rather than email.
Laetitia: We always say that we get more business from Instagram these days than we do from our website. Even walking around Milan, everyone’s talking about seeing your work on Instagram. Every time we’ve met someone and asked what they do, we go straight to their feed and start following them, so for us it’s a way to see how other people work. I’d say it’s pretty essential for people to be on it. And it’s a way to grow the community. Visually, it’s really inspiring because you can see what’s going on in different places. Our feed fills up with Australian design and US design and it’s really interesting. It’s great because it reminds you that you’re sharing your information with the whole world, too. Everything is linked together in a much more practical way.