After having spent most of 2001 without a proper job, living off my savings and the occasional freelance gig, things were about to change. In January 2002 whilst checking my list of agency sites to spam with more pathetic pleas for work I discovered that Kleber had a job opening for a designer…
Kleber had always been high on my list of agencies to work at, so I didn’t waste any time emailing them. I waited the obligatory week before emailing them again to see if they received my application. Three weeks passed without a reply. I’d learned from experience that if you haven’t had a reply after a month, your chances of hearing anything positive are small so I put this job application on the back burner and continued freelancing and worrying about ever getting a full time job again…
Luckily I still had some work keeping me busy. Publisher Friends Of Ed (of the 4×4 books) got back in touch asking if I was interested in working on more books. They paid well, and since I was desperate to keep cash coming in I accepted. Soon enough I was writing a few chapters for a new book on Advanced After Effects 5.5, even though my AE skills were too basic for that kind of book. I didn’t take long for the editors of the book to realize I was blagging my way through timelines and filters, so they thanked me for the work done, paid me a cut-off fee and that was it. I still got comp copies of the book when it came out though, with an “Additional material by…” credit (even though I never found out if they actually used any of my material)!
Design of a site for the Dreamweaver book
A little later however they offered me another book, this time about a subject I did know something about: websites.
Together with Dave Smith (one of my 4×4 co-authors) I started working on a book showing you the ins and outs of designing “Visual Websites With Dreamweaver MX and Photoshop”. Dave and I really got into it, creating fake sites for the book and we quickly started writing a few chapters. Halfway through Friends of Ed pulled the plug — Macromedia had announced their MX 2004 suite, making our book in one swift move obsolete. Oh well, we got paid for our work.
Still from my Lost In Space 3D reel
Meanwhile I was working on pitches via Lost In Space for commercials and working on a 3d showreel. Nothing that earned me any money, but at least my portfolio grew, I gained some valuable exposure and I met new people in the biz.
March came, and out of curiosity I checked Kleber’s site again, when lo and behold, they posted a “We’re still looking for a designer.” message! I immediately emailed them an “I’m still looking for a job” email, explaining I contacted them back in January etc etc. A few days later I got a reply inviting me for a meeting and a portfolio review at their basement office in Central London (Fitzrovia).
Kleber’s Central London basement office around 2002
The chat went well, and I got invited back the next week for a “try-out” afternoon. They gave me the brief for a band site they just completed and asked me for my interpretation. At the end of the day, it seemed they liked my take on the site and a quick chat after work later I went back home. A few nervous days later I got a call: I got the job!
The next week (if I recall correctly) I started my new job and looking back, it seems everything kind of took off from then on.
Of course, as soon as I had started, my inbox piled up with emails from agencies I’d emailed 5 months ago who all of sudden wanted to meet with me (“Thanks, but you’re too late!”) and I finally managed to get a paying gig via Lost In Space which made for a few sleepless first weeks at my new job. I was working at Kleber during the day, but in the evenings I had to animate a PR movie for Websense — full PAL resolution in AE, on a tiny iMac. Because of the tight deadline, Lost In Space kept calling me at Kleber. And when I mean “at Kleber”, I’m talking about the office phone since I didn’t have a mobile then (I know, right!), and I remember being told that this couldn’t really go on obviously. Remember, this was something like 2 weeks in my new job and here I was blatantly taking freelance calls at the office! Pretty surreal looking back now… I stepped down from Lost In Space, so I could focus all my attention on my new job.
Stills from the Websense animation
Before that though I had to finish the project I was working on — impossible to do on my iMac alone. So during one sleepless night I worked from the Lost In Space office in Central London, then a place in South London (a friend of Lost in Space who offered to help out), and ended up in a post-production facility in Soho during the early hours of the next day before going back to work. But it finished the job, and that was my Lost In Space adventure over and done with.
Of course I’d be lying if Kleber was the only thing that kept me occupied since. The Summer of 2002 proved to be one of the busiest periods in recent years. Digital Vision approached me to work on a follow-up to the enormously successful Infinity series.
Image from my Inphra collection for DV
The first collection I had done for them was a lot of fun (and quite lucrative as well), so I didn’t hesitate to get involved for a follow up collection. This time however, I decided to create a complete collection on my own, instead of teaming up again with my pal Steven. I set out to create the 30 images during the two months in the summer. Thirty images quickly turned in to around 40 or more because of revisions and rejections. On top of that, Steven and I had started on a motion collection for DV as well — which was basically a version of our Infinity images, but animated. So here we were, each creating around 40 images and 15 to 20 video clips in the summer, meaning I spent every waking hour in front of the computer.
Both collections launched with the obligatory launch parties and press coverage, but personally I feel that we killed the whole style by doing the 2nd series and kind of oversaturated the market with these types of images. I don’t think it reached the popularity of the first collection — because by now everyone was doing them — and I haven’t seen anyone succesfully marketing follow ups or similar images later. It burned me out too. After having spent an entire summer creating image after image I was done with it, and gave me a feeling of “been there, done it, move on”.
Plan B Science & Entertainment v2, 2003
During that period (as if I wasn’t busy enough!) Ashley Wood and I formed Plan B Science & Entertainment, a design collective that was doomed from the beginning because we were both too busy with our own work to really make it work. It lasted long enough to get us finally together in Sidney (at Semi-Permanent 05) before we pulled the plug and moved on (we’d still do stuff together though).
In the summer of 2003 I started to get itchy. Up until then I had been using my personal/experimental site ximeraLabs as a portfolio space on the side (via sub domains), and I wanted to separate the “work” bit from the “play” part. More importantly, I felt I wanted to put my name to my work, instead of an obscure domain name. And so, in July 2003 I launched this site at the MadInSpain conference in Madrid.
Kleber’s East London dwellings
Meanwhile Kleber had moved out of its basement dwelling and moved to “trendy” Shoreditch for the next few years — first camping out at our friends Lateral, then settling in a little office of our own for the next 1.5 years — until we decided to get rid of the office space in 2005 and become a “virtual” company. Since then we all work from our own homes and stay in touch through the wonders of modern technology.
The Muller/Kleber/Mrs and Mrs M/Mam Tor design studio 2006-Present
What else is there to say? Since then things have been going great. Kleber has been going from strenght to strenght and personally, I can’t complain either (working from home is such a luxury!). In 2004 I became involved with independent comic/book publisher Mam Tor (by basically calling out Liam Sharp on a comic forum and saying “My design is better than yours!”), and subsequently published some award-winning comics — which led to much more comic related stuff in the years that came, culminating (so far) with the massive Comic Book Tattoo I designed with my wife Liz.
So that’s it. 1998 — 2008 in a few blog posts. On to the next 10!
