- Today I have a story to tell you.
It's a story that involves snow, whiskey, tartan,
and some learnings about the design process.
Are you ready?
(relaxing music)
The Scottish Tourism Board, Visit Scotland,
sent me on a trip to the Highlands recently.
It was a lot of fun, it was very beautiful.
They wanted to show me an authentic piece
of Scottish life and design,
and now I wanna show you some snippets of my trip
and what I learned there through a design case study.
My lovely host for the trip was Claire Campbell,
and well, you know what, I'll let her
introduce herself through this clip
that we filmed in her studio.
Claire, tell us what you do.
Like, how do you introduce yourself to people,
yourself, and your business?
- Okay, so, I introduce myself as being
a disruptive designer within the world of tartan.
- There we go.
- So, it's really, for me, it's about focusing on an idea
that I'm really, really passionate about,
but also thinking about the future,
and how we can take something that's so famous for Scotland,
but how we can actually take
a 200 year stereotype and redesign it.
- Claire runs Prickly Thistle, which is a design studio
that creates bespoke tartan designs for clients,
and I don't know about you,
but tartan is just one of those things
that I had never given a second thought
to the design process of before.
It always kind of just existed.
But that's exactly why it was so fascinating
to spend a weekend with Claire
and learn about her process for designing tartan,
and her approach for giving a modern take on tradition.
- [Claire] I mean, for me, I see tartan as one of the most,
kind of, ancient forms of identity,
and I think that's become sort of--
everyone's aware of that,
whether they think of it consciously or subconsciously.
So, when I see some do-- at this point of time,
we're most famous for kilts.
So, somebody will see somebody in a kilt,
they're at a wedding, they're at a rugby match,
they're anywhere around the world,
and they go, "Oh, which clan do you belong to?"
But then you take it right into the modern context,
and for me, it's actually-- we don't have to stop
at the clan system, and then it's all belong--
it's not all about actually looking back,
it's thinking about every day,
or every person, and every business,
anything that has a personality has a story,
and the most amazing thing I find about a tartan
is actually you can take any story, you know,
of any length or any, you know, random aspect,
and turn it into cloth just by picking out
those key elements of inspiration that give you colors,
and then the other key elements of inspiration
are the things that give you numbers,
and you start to kind of blend them together,
you order them in such a way that it can read like a book.
And you just take somebody's story
and you turn it into design.
- Claire took me for a tour of Johnstons of Elgan,
which is a wool mill that creates
beautiful fabrics and garments,
and they actually make a lot of
the scarves and things for Burberry
and (inaudible), which is pretty exciting.
I got to see the process from start to finish
of how fabric is woven and how tartan cloth comes to life.
And then, we went to visit one of Claire's clients,
Tomatin, which is a Scotch whiskey distillery.
I love whiskey, so it was fun to get a tour
and see how it was made, and of course,
do a little tasting afterwards.
But it was also fun to see the tartan decor
hanging in their showroom, and to know that Claire,
who was with me, had designed it.
Now, something that I say a lot, because it's true,
is that design is not just about making things look pretty.
Design has purpose and it has meaning,
and that's why I love the way Claire talked about
her approach to tartan design.
Like she said, when she chooses colors,
she's taking inspiration from the client's story,
and, like, the number of rows,
and the vertical and horizontal lines
come from numbers that are a part of the story.
It means that every design decision has meaning behind it,
and it's a really interesting way of
giving yourself design constraints.
So, I got Claire to tell me a little bit more
about the tartan design for Tomatin Distillery.
So tell us about this Tomatin tartan.
- Tomatin tartan, yes!
- What was the, like, the color inspiration
and the number inspiration behind this?
- So, their story, so they're a corporate story,
so they have a brand identity that they want to engage
and share with all of their customers.
That's everybody that loves their whiskey,
that's everyone that loves coming to their distillery,
that likes to read their story.
So, they came to me at a point of
when they were rebranding the whole Tomatin product.
So, it had a very distinct colorways
that had been the same for a number of years,
and they had really wanted to, sort of,
engage with a whole new audience
and really sort of come out in a slightly more
kind of modern, softer sight to the Highlands,
which is one of their key straplings.
So, they presented to me one of their marketing briefs,
which was them going through that thought process
of all the new colors, and they also gave me a brief about
the history of the distillery, and all the key features,
and what people loved about Tomatin.
They loved that it was one of
the highest distilleries in Scotland,
they loved that so many people lived on-site.
You know, anyone that visits the distillery
will drive through that little village,
which is the Tomatin village. - Which we did yesterday.
- Which we did yesterday, yeah.
You know, and because it's 1000 feet above sea level,
we had lots of snow yesterday.
- We did have a lot of snow.
We're going on a whiskey tour and it's snowing.
- So, it's a really high distillery,
and you know, the fact that it was formed in 1897.
At one point, it was the biggest producer in Scotland.
So, it's got a really, really interesting history.
And they wanted to embrace, with their modern thinking,
about what their brand was, they still felt
that tartan was really important.
So they, like me, had embraced that, you know,
we can turn this around, and we respect clans,
we respect that space, but we can do more with it.
You know, there's so much unwritten
in terms of the future of what the tartan cloth is.
So, with all of that sort of brief information,
the colors, I was looking at the kind of
the different strengths-- sorry, the different maturity,
the maturation processes, from the 12-year-old
to the 14-year-old, you know, their distinct colors
that they use for their different brands.
- And is that the colors that we see in here?
- So, this is the colors that we have in here
with the claret, and the green, and the sort of dark brown.
This was all in their brief, which was covering
the different ranges from the 14-year-old Legacy range,
the 18-year-old, et cetera.
I've picked up four colors in between because of,
the guide was saying about Monolith Mountains,
but there's the sort of space side rim
that surrounds Tomatin, and within the space side rim,
which is a high range of mountains, there's four minerals,
so we had four minerals built into there.
We used the 1000 feet above sea level
to give us this big band of colorways.
1897 is reflected here, these two brown colors which are
these colors which you'll find in any
of the marketing or packaging for Tomatin,
they use these two base colors in everything,
so we use that as the founding year.
So, in here, this cross is reflective of the 1897,
18 yarns and 16 yarns being nine and seven,
pulling in there together.
These 30 here, these 30 yarns are actually
each of the houses for the staff,
and all of these houses have been charged
with that kind of angel-sheer impact,
this kind of alcohol vapors are eventually
consumed by a fungus that presents itself
in a gray charcoal coloring,
so this is their little block here.
- So, that's how you get the different, like,
the sizes of each check, in a way.
- Has a specific meaning.
And it's definitely a process of working through
what looks nice and what doesn't look nice.
So, you know, I did a number of iterations of designs,
and it was all about coming together
with something that presented, to them, that the--
to have a sense of pride of be-wielding it,
they would be showing it to their customers
in their visitor center in their corporate
and their packaging, so it had to look right.
And, obviously, that extra story comes from--
if you ever find it, this is everybody that lives here,
we're, you know, we're so proud of our Tomatin team,
we're so proud that we're so high above sea level,
this is our signature colors coming in
turning you brown, just things like that.
So, yes, it's really sort of playing around
with all of that detail, and--
- Putting them together in way that looks nice.
- And it's always, for me, it's really important
to work within that boundaries because you want to keep it,
kind of, true, from a design sense, that, you know,
if you're saying you're building a design
based on all of these facts,
then, you know, it's working within that.
So, it presents challenges, but I think that's good
for designers that you actually have boundaries sometimes,
because I think it causes you to be more creative.
- Definitely, I find it's the hardest thing in the world
to design when there's no constraints,
and you can do whatever you want.
And then it's like, "Where do I start?"
And you start finding constraints for yourself,
and putting them in place, so yeah, it makes total sense.
(relaxing, jazzy music)
- This beautiful building that we typically use for,
well, adventurers to the farm.
- [Charli] And it's where you want to build a mill.
- And it's where we want to turn it
into a mill, yeah, absolutely.
If some of you, right on the other side, want to walk?
- Yeah, let's do it.
So, Claire's currently running a Kickstarter campaign to--
woo! Hello, birds! She's got one of those
Kickstarter campaign to build a mill right here.
- You just can't leave any textiles in there at all,
so for me, it's (inaudible) to bring back to the community,
and this is the building I'm hoping
to turn into that main thing. - So, watch this space.
I want to say a huge thank you to Claire for talking to me
about her process and for inviting me into her family home.
It was absolutely lovely, and I found it really inspiring
to hear about how she works and how she's putting those
modern twists on something very traditional,
and I hope that you found that inspiring, too,
and that there's some little pieces of her process
that perhaps you can take into your own designs,
like getting color inspiration from the client's backstory,
and you know, building patterns out of that, too.
I just think it's a really cool approach,
and it's something that I'm looking
forward to experimenting with.
Scotland is an absolutely beautiful place,
I loved the whiskey, I loved the snow, the scenery,
and the restaurants that I ate at,
the hotels that I stayed in, it was-- it was a lovely trip.
So, thank you very much to Visit Scotland
for sending me on it and giving me this opportunity
to share this interesting piece of design process with you.
Give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it,
and I will see you in the next one. Bye!