Oliver Dyer and Sara Bignardi on the passion and purpose behind Skew’s work with Van Gogh Museum

Guys, it’s great to catch up. Before we explore your style guide for the Van Gogh Museum, what made this an interesting brand to work on?
Sara Bignardi, Creative Director, Skew: This was a dream collaboration for us. I lived in the Netherlands and I’m super passionate about the Van Gogh Museum – and museums in general. I think the Van Gogh Museum is one of Europe’s best museums because you don’t only go there and check out Van Gogh’s amazing paintings – it’s more than that… The whole museum tells a story. You learn his process and in way that you really feel very involved. It’s a unique experience.

Oliver Dyer, MD, Skew: We’d done so much work for UK cultural institutions and it was really gratifying to get recognition from one of the most major global institutions – and one with the highest profile individual artists. It was like a vote of confidence in the work we’d done to date.

What did this style guide need to do for the Van Gogh Museum? And how did you get to grips with what I imagine could be quite an expansive brand collection of art?
Oliver: The initial brief was to take the licensing program in new directions. They’d seen how we were able to reinterpret artists in fresh ways. We’d been able to draw out different stories and tell them in different way… We’ve used different aesthetic directions and that opens up new categories for clients.

Sara: I remember Marijn told me that awareness of Van Gogh was much higher than the awareness of the Van Gogh Museum, so part of the plan to raise that. The other thing was to ensure the guide tells the story of Van Gogh – the artist behind the paintings… The paintings are so beautiful that the tendency is, of course, to make them the focus, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. And we wanted find a way to use some of his less famous paintings and give them a moment of glory because they deserve the same love as the big well-known pieces.

“The ultimate proof of the effectiveness of our work is that products get made and people buy them.”

And Van Gogh’s letters were a big source of inspiration too, right?
Sara: Absolutely. We know everything about his paintings because he was writing about every single detail, particularly to tell his brother. So yes, the letters are equally important as the painting.

And to your previous question, there are so many themes in his work to draw from… We wanted to highlight elements that were core to the DNA of the brand, but could also resonate with the target audience we had in mind… Themes like pain, love, light and darkness, mental health…

Then we asked, who are the cluster of people that we wanted to engage with? People that maybe are not necessarily already engaged with the style guides that the Van Gogh Museum was already doing. For example, one of the targets we were really interested in was nature lovers and people interested in outdoors products. Another was kids… And actually, his sketchbooks were a huge source of inspiration. One is from before he was thinking of becoming a painter. That had these funny drawings he was doing for a little girl that was living next door. It was perfect – a perfect story we could tell to a child about being creative and ‘painting outside of the lines’.

Brilliant. On that, is there a particular piece of creative from the guide that you’re especially fond of or proud of?
Sara: I’d say the illustrations that are at the heart of the Shoe Palace collaboration. We wanted to get across the feeling of Van Gogh’s sketch work in a way that could be reproduced commercially. That meant doing something that’s almost unthinkable – trying to embody Van Gogh in our own handwriting… Reproducing hand sketches from his drawings in a way that’s really contemporary.

Oliver: It’s testament to the quality of his draftsmanship and the playfulness of his line that it still feels as fresh today as it did when he sketched it.

What does it feel like to see your work out there on products in the real world? It must be tremendously satisfying and quite exciting to see how it’s utilised by different licensees?
Oliver: Skew is all about effectiveness. The ultimate proof of the effectiveness of our work is that products get made and people buy them. If we weren’t seeing our stuff out in the world, there’s no point to Skew.

“We wanted to highlight elements that were core to the DNA of the brand, but could also resonate with the target audience we had in mind.”

Does working on a brand for a project like this change your perception of it? Do you have a different relationship with Van Gogh now than when you started?
Sara: My computer is sitting on a stack of book on Van Gogh and I read all his letters – some of them made me cry. And to have had a chance to look at all the paintings and all the sketches… I feel very involved with the brand and appreciate him even more than I already did. And as a creative, it really inspired me because I learned a lot from his journey… I could really feel special connection to him.

Oliver: When I see Van Gogh, I respond to it like a child every single time. It doesn’t matter how much I know about the artist, it never really affects how I feel about what I see in the moment when it’s in front of me… And I mean that in a good way. I always come at it completely fresh.

Do you feel the wider heritage sector still boasts untapped creative potential ready to be unlocked, much like the Van Gogh team are doing right now?
Oliver: I really do, actually. I think it’s absolutely huge. You’re talking about culture, and we’ve not got sick of culture. There’s new heritage all the time. The first wave has been focused on quite a lot on history, artifacts and things that people are familiar with… But that’s just the first wave in what I think is going to be an endless fascination with re-thinking what’s gone before. People are never going to get tired of that.

And there’s always a different way of looking at it. Were we were to start again – as we are about to with the Van Gogh Museum – the present is different, so how we view that past will change again… That’s just going to continue. We could do this forever!

Great answer. Sara, Oliver, a big thanks again and congrats on what you’ve done with this brand. And I should add that if folks want to know more about Skew, they can head to: https://skewstudio.com/.