eboy interview

The first time that they ever created a pixel city for a big league client was working for Adidas in 2002. This time the job came through the agency Leagas Delaney. “Adidas is a very popular brand. A lot of designers like it and wear it themselves – it was a very good client,” reveals Smital.

For this image there wasn’t only the self-imposed limitation of working pixel-by-pixel to deal with: the agency wanted a greyscale city that worked alongside the theme of the ad copy. “It’s great that it’s black and white!” says Sauerteig. “But it looks rather empty compared with our latest works.”

The piece brought eBoy to greater prominence in the industry, and while working for big brands isn’t the most important goal for Sauerteig, Vermehr and Smital, it does help on a number of levels. One is artistic freedom. Clients come to eBoy for their style, and tend to trust them to do their thing. Secondly, the money is good. And finally, the big brands spread their work to broader audiences.

“If you do advertising for a bigger company, then a lot of magazines and other people see it and you get commissions based on this. It advertises us, and at the end of the day we get more money working for bigger clients,” explains Smital. “Of course, if you work for clients like this you have to avoid certain elements. You can’t have any violence or naked people in the picture, but you know that and you don’t do it, so it’s OK. We can do it in our own pictures.”

While Adidas introduced eBoy to sports shoe fanatics (and thereby designer studios around the world), it was the clothing designer Paul Smith who took them into the world of fashion. He discovered their posters in Magma Books in London and purchased some, which were used as decorations at one of his shows. Initial contact was made in 2003, and Smith travelled to Berlin to meet them. They began work in 2004, and the clothing came out in spring and summer 2005.

“It was just a very, very nice collaboration to work on,” Smital discloses. “He was very enthusiastic and nice – really interested in all the designs, and yeah, it was great. It was the first project where we did something for fashion, so it was a new experience. It gave us the chance to do something on real, three-dimensional objects, not just in print.”

“It wasn’t much different, really,” adds Sauerteig. “We only made the designs and not the fashion itself. Paul Smith gave us a lot of freedom. We did many different patterns – with flowers, birds, masks – for the designers to choose from, and we did a London cityscape. The small parts of the city like the people, cars and coats of arms were used all over the collection.”

i have highligted key sections, these sections bring to light how they feel about commercially driven design and and insight into how they became so big, and from getting one job they gained more and more.