(((O))) Interview: Fraser Briggs of Misc Print Co

Fraser Briggs is no stranger to the (web) pages of Echoes and Dust as his band Still have featured in reviews and a previous interview. As well as being guitarist and vocalist, Fraser is also an artist, designer and producer of physical merch catering for his own band as well as many others, most recently featuring heavily on releases from Floodlit Recordings. Gary Davidson managed to rouse Fraser from his sick bed to talk about the day to day of working on the design side and how diversifying from simply working with bands is essential to make ends meet.

E&D: At what age did you get into art and realise it was something you were good at? Did you pick up a crayon and that was it or did it start later on?

Fraser: I always really liked making stuff but it was probably when I was choosing GCSEs and there were so many things that I didn’t want to do, but I definitely wanted to do music and art. Everyone I knew was going to uni and I kind of liked the idea of going but I knew I was going to have to do something that I really wanted to do, even if that meant there may not be many job prospects after. If it’s not something I’m going to really enjoy then I’m not going to stick at it. A lot of my A levels were English language and art so it was either writing or art and I ended up applying for an illustration course as that seemed like the perfect marriage of words and image. I hated it, so I changed to fine art and that’s how I got here.

E&D: When you changed to fine art could you see prospects from doing it over illustration?

Fraser: About two weeks into the illustration course I realised it was not what I wanted to do. I’m not saying I was majorly lied to but the course wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I realised at that point that I wanted to do a lot more stuff, I wanted to work bigger and I wanted to make loads of different things and the illustration course felt very confining in its parameters. I’d made loads of friends on the fine art course so I spent all my time in the fine arts studio and managed to switch courses. That’s kind of the biggest positive change of my life, I think, doing that. I’m still miserable, but everything was great for three years.

E&D: When you look back from what you do now to the fine art degree, is much of it involved in your day-to-day design work?

Fraser: Yes, I think actually the further away from uni I get, the more I’m getting closer to it. I’m getting back closer to the work that I was making. I was always exploring text and image and recontextualising those. I’ve actually just been working on a job recently that was a collaboration with a German photographer and the work that I’m making for this feels like the work that I made in my third year and it’s really exciting.

E&D: After uni what kind of jobs did you have, did you manage to avoid having to work in McDonalds?

Fraser: I worked at McDonald’s when I was 17 before I went to uni but after graduating I did the classic move of becoming a barista in a specialty coffee shop. However, I was super fortunate in my final year as Hull was announced as the City of Culture in 2017. By the time I graduated I walked into loads of arts jobs that I probably wouldn’t have gotten if I was anywhere else. It was the perfect, right time, right place scenario. I did a lot of engagement jobs, a lot of workshops. I worked on the Turner Prize and spent four months doing nothing but sitting watching an exhibit about coral and making sure no one touched it. It was just me. It was the best job I’ve ever had just invigilating this exhibition. I just sat and read for four months straight. It was amazing and I got paid more money per hour than I’ve ever been paid since.

E&D: Your current role revolves around Art Link Hull, what does that entail?

Fraser: Artlink Hull is a community arts charity and it’s a really amorphous kind of body. I rent a studio there and for a few years I was a part-time caretaker for the building. That was a safety blanket and helped with a mortgage as it was guaranteed money per month and I had been freelance for so long and meant I didn’t have to worry too much about a job falling through or if I’m struggling to find things. The new role I have is working with underrepresented, marginalised communities to give them access to art and centered around making things together. There are also quarterly exhibitions from artists from all over the world. Screen printing workshops are a big part of that as well as looking at income generation for the charity and running other workshops. I’ve been renting a studio there since 2021 which changed my business loads because it meant that I had access to visual artists and I work with a lot of artists that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. I get to work translating painters work or videographers work into screen prints and experimenting and exploring things, all with the intention of trying to raise funds for the organisation.

E&D: What does a day in the life of work look like?

Fraser: It changes every day because there’s such a variety of jobs that I take. I could be spending all day just doing designing work, I could be spending all day just printing. With Artlink there’s meetings and workshops, again that is a mixed bag and no day is the same, and for me that is great. When I left uni I was really adamant that I didn’t want to do the same thing every day, I need variety and to have interesting things that I can jump to. Some days are 14 hour days and I need to print until I can’t feel my fingers anymore. Then there’s some nice days where I’ve done a couple of hours of design and now I’m just going to have the afternoon off.

E&D: As well as Artlink you do a lot of work with bands and labels and a lot of the output on the musical side is screen printing. At what point in your life did that become an interest?

Fraser: I enjoyed screen printing when I was at uni, but the irony of my journey is I didn’t actually do a lot of screen printing when I was at uni. After 2017 and city of culture jobs started to leave Hull there wasn’t really anything that I wanted to do and the only printing studio in the city was being liquidated. I thought if I was to stay here I would have to make a job for myself. The first idea really was to set up a screen print studio, it didn’t have to make me money, it just had to cover the cost of me having a studio which would then afford me the opportunity to keep making stuff. It took a few years but relatively quickly it got to a point where the amount of time that I was spending on printing for other people meant I didn’t really have the time to do the stuff that I wanted to do, but the pay off was I was paying rent and I could afford to do stuff. So that kind of became life.

E&D: You have had some work for some large corporations such as BBC and HBO. How do you find the difference between working with a band and then working with a big job like that?

Fraser: There’s a lot more talking when working with bands. I think bigger organisations that I’ve worked with, there’s more stress involved because I’m thinking this is a big thing so I know I can’t get it wrong. But a lot of the time what big clients need is very clearcut and they contact me and say we want this thing, we need it by this time, go. There’s no room for questions. With bands and visual artists there’s a lot more conversation and a lot more ambiguity because oftentimes, say with bands, you’ve got four to five people in a band who can’t really decide amongst themselves before they’re actually employing the help of a designer or an artist or a printer. So they’re very different.

E&D: What is your process for working with bands?

Fraser: I like to be in constant conversation about the thing that I’m working on, the brief or the design. I always have an initial chat either phone call or Zoom and we’ll just talk about thoughts, feelings, what kind of things they want but most importantly what kind of things they absolutely want to stay away from. I learned this in the early days that if you don’t have enough conversation, you don’t have enough briefing, you could spend hours making something just for the band to say “we forgot to tell you we don’t want snakes.We can’t have any snakes.” I could have spent five to ten hours messing around with snakes because that seemed like that was the obvious thing for what they were talking about.

E&D: You have been instrumental in the delivery of a physical product for Floodlit Recordings, Joe is vocal about collaborative approaches, how did it come about and are you involved per release?

Fraser: I’m very lucky, I feel very fortunate to be involved as much as I am. I think it’s mainly because I’m printing the physicals for CDs and cassettes. I’m quite fortunate as well that the artists that Joe has been working with appreciate what I make and have agreed to allow me to handle the artwork. Also it makes it easier in the long run as I don’t have to do loads of editing to make something fit for screen printing these specific things that we have for the label, but that’s simplifying it. I am very grateful for getting to work with all these great artists.

E&D: Once the job is agreed do you then go through your own usual process of speaking with each band from Floodlit for artwork?

Fraser: Yeah. It’s no different to any other client job. I’ll have contact with the artist and then we’ll work out what I need to be doing and then Joe is the overseer and that really helps move discussions and decisions on if they need to be made as essentially he is paying for it all.

E&D: Being a musician yourself, do you have a personal preference of doing stuff for bands over the other work you do?

Fraser: I think the teenager in me really enjoys doing band work, more so than anything else. But then I came to a realisation recently that there’s not really any difference between the album artwork as a whole because it’s not just the image for the cover. It’s then supporting assets and logos and kind of the identity of it and then how is that marketed and all these other things that come into it. That is exactly the same as if you’re going to brand a business and its assets, logos, vibe. It’s just two versions of the same thing. There’s no real difference other than the price that I’m setting.

E&D: If you were to focus just on doing stuff for bands, would you be worse off?

Fraser: 100%. Yeah.

E&D: Do you feel screen printing has constraints that doing other artwork might not have?

Fraser: Yes, but a lot of it comes down to how much someone wants to spend. You can screen print a 27 colour image and it looks like a photograph but the setup cost of that is astronomical compared to a one to three colour job. The constraints of price I think have dictated the way that my visual language and my design work has gone in the last six years for my own work, not that I’ve made much for myself recently but for my own work it kind of comes down to speed, time and money. If I can make something well using two colours, then I’m going to go for that option rather than put x amount of time into making an eight colour screen print that I don’t know anyone’s going to buy, let alone, you know, a couple of sales. Even with Still and bands I work with there’s a limit to how much money you can put into something that doesn’t generate any money. When talking about budgets it’s easy for me to approach a band as someone that is in the same situation. I can say it’d be really cool if we could do all of these fancy things however, we can just make something quite striking with X, Y, Z, if we just do this one colour or two colours, you don’t go outside of that, you stay within the constraints and you do it well and you can you can have good artwork. I forget that people don’t know how screen-printing works because obviously I do it every day. When you then try to explain the cost for per screen just to make screens before it’s even been printed. Then it’s the same amount of time to print each of those colours and then you know you need to pay me for each of those hours that it takes. It can be quite difficult to explain that when so much of what we do now is digital so that when you then start talking about screen printing, it can be hard to kind of translate.

E&D: Your output is quite diversified and it isn’t always instantly recognisable as your work. Do you think that is a good or a bad thing for you?

Fraser: It’s potentially not a great thing in terms of brand recognition if you wanted to put it that way, but I am a firm believer that every project deserves its own identity. I spend a lot of time trying to give each job that I work on its own life. Sometimes it looks very, “this is a Fraser thing” but I’m not going to go out of my way to make it look like that if it doesn’t need it. And I think that working with such a diverse range of people over my life and my working life also requires it and I guess being diverse keeps it open to a number of different markets and different things. On the other hand it can be potentially damaging when no one knows that you’ve done it and you need to rely on tags or credits that don’t always come.

E&D: What have you got planned for future ventures?

Fraser: Adam (bassist and band member in Still) is a really good filmmaker and has a lot of marketing experience. We’ve been having a lot of discussions about pooling our resources to offer our services of marketing and branding, artwork and film music videos, basically everything you need for a band. With the experience we have, we’ve done it, we’ve lived it, we live it, we know where you can save money, where you shouldn’t be cutting corners. We know we’re not like the biggest band in the world, but the choices that we’ve made as a band and the way that we do things mean that we have always made profit on tour. Not loads, but we don’t make a loss. With that experience we’re thinking about how we can help other bands do that. Branding, marketing, visuals, creating their own screen printing. I don’t want to put myself out of a job but I want other people to be able to do that for themselves and I want to help people get to that point.