John Warwicker - Co-Founder of Tomato Design Company

Design company Tomato

( .tomato.co.uk ) was founded in 1991 in London by John Warwicker, Steve Baker, Dirk Van Dooren, Karl Hyde, Richard Smith, Simon Taylor and Graham Wood. In 1994, Michael Horsham and Jason Kedgely joined.

tomato specializes in: Architectural Design, Consultancy, Drawing, Education, Electronic Interactive Media, Film & Commercial Direction, Graphic Design, Fashion, Motion Graphics, Music & Sound, Strategy, Branding & Identity, Photography, Publishing, Title Sequences, Typography, Writing.

In 1997, tomato interactive was formed with Tom Roope, Anthony Rogers and Joel Baumann. Tota Hasagawa joined in 2001 when tomato and tomato interactive became one and the same.

Baumann has since become Professor of Interactive Media and Communication at Kassel University in Germany and is still a member of tomato. Roope is a lecturer of Interactive Media Studies at the Royal College of Art in London.

Currently, tomato has studios in London, New York, Tokyo and Melbourne.

Laura Schwamb interviewed one of tomato’s founders, John Warwicker. Aside from his involvement with tomato, John Warwicker’s book “The Floating World,” is expected to be published by the end of 2006. He also works with the band “Underworld,” with tomato co-founders Karl Hyde and Richard Smith. Since 1989 Hyde and Smith have been “Underworld” and have released 7 albums to world-wide critical acclaim and had their music featured in several movies, the most notable being the film“Trainspotting,” for which tomato created the title sequence. tomato creates all the band’s sleeves and videos. Released in 2000 ‘Everything, Everything’, Underworld Live was released on CD, Vinyl and DVD. The DVD was at the time one of the most technologically sophisticated DVD’s released and went on to achieve Gold in its own right on the Japanese Music Charts. Apart from the accolades and awards Underworld in 2004 was voted the most influential Dance/Techno band in Japan in the last 20 years.

Some of tomato’s clients include:

ABC (Australia), Adidas, AOL, Bacardi, BBC, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Scotland, BMW, Casio, Chanel, Clinique, CNN, Coca-Cola, Daidaiya, Dell, Downsview Park (City of New York), DoCoMo, MTV, Nescaf

Translating Company Collateral to PowerPoint

As a PowerPoint user, it is sometimes necessary to accurately translate a company’s marketing collateral to slide format. Often, this information arrives in the format of a company brochure, or copied blurbs from the website, or a long Word document bogged down with New Age sales jargon and irrelevant “stuffer” copy.

It is your job to find the needles of information in the haystacks of hype, to reduce lengthy paragraphs to mere phrases, to provide your audience with only the information they need to know. Brevity is your goal, bullet points your craft.

When tackling these projects, which can be nothing short of arduous for lengthy documents spread across multi-page presentations, there are some best practices and tactics to make your life easier and the final product better.

1. Read the content several times. Sometimes it takes a few takes to understand exactly what is being said, especially if the copy is technical in nature. This step is especially critical for freelancers, who might not be as familiar with the corporate messaging as an in-house designer or marketing support person.

2. Print the document out and read it from paper. This can help comprehension, and makes it easy to highlight passages or make notes.

3. Highlight key passages. Look for “power words.” These are the words or phrases that pop off the page, are descriptive, and reinforce the message with color and purpose. Use these words in your PowerPoint slides. For instance:

“In the past year, the company sales team has achieved a ten percent increase in numbers, well beyond initial projections. Leveraging our recently implemented database, profit margins continue to rise despite several personnel additions and our office expansion initiative.”

Could be:

* 10% in sales over last year

* Better than projections

* Profits rise despite expansion

4. Bullets are always better than full sentences. They are punctual and easy to digest. Never use full paragraphs unless you specifically want your audience to not read what you have to say.

5. Trim copy to get to the core message. Eliminate frivolous and clich

Finding the Right Printer

To produce thousands of copies of a fifteen page brochure at a rate of one page per minute with men working 24 hours a day would perhaps take over a week. But to produce the same quantity of brochures using your desktop printer would take over a decade! Clearly, desktop printing is not really an option in terms of cost, quality and speed. Hence, when you need large volumes of brochure or catalogs to be printed, it is perhaps a good idea to let the professional handle the job for you. There are, however, several things you need to consider in choosing the commercial printer for your particular print job.

Perhaps one of the things you need to consider is the kind of printing process used by the printer. Do they use offset printing or maybe digital technology? Is letterpress and screen printing also available? After you have decided on which printing process to use, you now have to determine which printer has the right equipment. Find out the number of colors they can handle, how long they can do the print job and what other equipment and services do they offer. Also, find out what kind of print job each printer specializes and what types of binding and folding equipments they use.

But aside from determining which kind of printing method and printing equipment is appropriate for you, it is also essential to know what kind of workers will work with the print job. Understand that although the printing company has the right equipment and printing technique it does not mean that the equipments and facilities will make great print jobs. Look for samples of work of these printers and focus more on their printing technique not merely on their design process. Also, look for clean colors, smooth text and focused images and graphics.

It is also a good idea to visit the printer to get a good feel of who you will be working with. And when you meet them face to face, ask them what you want to know about their service. You can ask questions such as how many presses they have and what are the capabilities of each; how long they have been in the business; what software they accepts and what kind of payment they receive. You can also ask their previous customers for feedbacks to know if they are able to meet their customer’s printing needs. It is essential to know this information ahead of time so you would not regret your choice later on. When you are able to find the right commercial printer, they will be able to make your printing job look great.