Case studies & awards

Wildlife Art for the Antarctic Centre – Surface Active design pARTners’ good art achieves standout 1991 competition win in national competition.

This 1993 design led project celebrates a Christchurch wildlife conservation success story: Orana Park’s exotic species top five. The retail market of the garment trade is tough, for an open range zoo like Orana Park, with one foot in the recreational experience sector and the other in the tourism sector. This demanded that the design industry’s very best way of developing the Park’s new T-shirt range be used by Surface Active art-to-wear.

Craig Fletcher is a ceramic artist whose technique is to hand paint water colour washes over low-relief ceramic sculptures. Simply framed they are a painted sculpture, a sculptural painting.

Hyper-real graphics like the Jewel Gecko make a vivid impression. Why? Because people relate to them! Dramatic lifelike renderings of wildlife produce a prompt and typically positive response in a person’s mind. People relate to real things and enjoy them most. It is the route to impactful “SurfaceActive” memorable wildlife-art-to-wear.

Commencing late 2004, my role was well summed up as “Arty”—as my colleague, the seriously fun and hard working CEO Tim Scott had nicknamed me when we first met professionally two years prior while I was the Creative Director at tattoo brand management who contributed to landing the Pionair account.