• Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville
• Push Pin
• Fletcher/Forbes/Gill
• Andrew Altman, typographer. " Pioneers of Modern Typography by Herbert Spencer that's full of stuff by Kurt Schwitters and Apollinaire, that inspired me to think that typography could be something else. Ed Ruscha , who just paints words, or Ian Hamilton Finlay, who was a Scottish artist who did a lot of type in the environment.
• "What is your system and how did you 'make it up'?

Basically by asking for advice from older designers as we went along. The ironic thing now is that as time's gone by, people phone us up. For instance, Jonathan Barnbrook is a good friend and he worked for us when he was a student. But he'll still phone me up and ask a bit of advice.

What challenges are involved in art-directing an environmental project, such as your Flock of Words collaboration with artist Gordon Young? Normally a graphic designer would sit with a Pantone book on their desk. But I was sitting with different bits of concrete, different bits of metal, and me and Gordon would be going: "What could we make this bit out of? That would be good out of granite."

The design was so expensive that we had to go back and work out cheaper ways of doing certain bits. It took five years from the idea to it actually being built. It wasn't just the design; it was to do with lots of engineering and local government issues. t took nearly two months just to artwork the whole thing: to take the final design and break it down to the components that I could give to manufacturers who were cutting the granite in Scotland - they were cutting the steel in Hull, and then all of that had to be put together. It was a massive learning curve. It was a fantastic project."

• Wolff Olins
• Alex Trochet
• Fallon ad agency, "Everything they do turns to gold!" Milkatraz, get milk board game.
• Pablo Bernasconi
• Rosie Arnold, BBH
• via Victoria Buchanan, CD Tribal DDB
  • "How am I going to make the user want to click on this?"
  • "How am I going to entertain them long enough to deliver this message?
  • How am I going to keep them interested for a month?
  • How am I going to send them a text message that excites them enough to come to a website?
  • How am I going to get them to watch a TV ad and then follow the link through to a website?"
• What makes a good interaction art director, via Victoria Buchanan:
  • SENSITIVITY to:
    • The execution
    • the tone
    • the style
    • all the assets;
    • you're often dealing with photographers,
    • film,
    • typography
    • colours
    • styles
    • developing an idea and executing it visually.
• Toshio Iwai . He's been around for years doing interactive and gestural interfaces, controlling sound with your arm movements and things like that and making music and interactive video spaces.
• Daniel brown behind the Play/Create stuff.
• Nathan Leigh Horrocks

CC-Lab's creative director explains the art of turning a staged event into a total brand experience

• Take us through your role in a typical job, like the Smirnoff Experience featuring Faithless for example.

I worked with an independent strategy team called Independents United. We created an idea for building a campaign for Smirnoff around an experience akin to what the brand is about.

• So the first idea was, effectively, a very simple one: vodka's drunk at night, it's drunk in nightclubs, so that's where you do your stuff; you don't do anything around sports, you don't do anything about buying from the supermarket. Smirnoff is about having fun - it's about having original nights out. That's my role in a typical job: I work with the strategy team to create a creative expression of whatever that strategy is.
• So you find a band.
• It's not even that. It would be something like, if we are going to get a band, we're not going to allow them to dominate the event. It will not be 'The Faithless Night'. It will be 'Smirnoff Presents Faithless with a Russian Orchestra'. So for that Faithless gig, for example, we took them to Moscow, we put them with a Russian orchestra, and they re-scored their entire set for a one-off show. Hence, you get a TV platform off the back of that - a TV show runs on Channel 4, Smirnoff have got their 3,000 punters there, and we've got a global PR platform. So it's like a multidimensional campaign.
• Dan Malone, Bitmap Bros.
• Fallon . Agency behind Cadbury Gorilla, Sony Bravia campaign.
• ART: Mark Elwood