European design is stuck in a deadlock

Alexey Fadeyev started his creative carrier in early 1990’s as a photographer. He works in
advertising industry since 1994 and is Co-founder and permanent creative director of Depot WPF
branding agency since 1998. In his lecture on Thursday he took us through some great examples
of vintage packaging design and tried to answer a question why we like vintage so much. We
catched Alexey just a few hours before he left for Portorož.

You’ve made your way from a photographer to one of the most creative art directors, how was that journey?

Being a photographer, I understood that to be successful a photo should not only carry meaning, but also be beautiful, aesthetically attractive. If it’s not appealing, nobody will be interested in it. Thus I realized that design is more important than the meaning we want to communicate. And I devoted myself to design.

You work in branding. Do you love brands? What are your favorites?

Of course I love brands. I prefer attractive and capacious brands, that are understandable without any words and definitions, without advertising or something like that. You feel such brands with your soul and you get involved in their story, their legend, their lifestyle immediately. I can name Innocent, La Cure Gourmande, Diesel… These are the first examples that come to my mind.

Why do you think brands have become so important in today’s world? Whose “fault” is it – consumers, companies or branding agencies?

First of all we should “blame” consumers themselves. Brands are created because consumers want to have something greater than just a bottle of milk, a pair of shoes or a car in the garage. People want brands to be means of self-expression. Today we sell and buy not just orange juice, but a whole context, in which orange juice is included as a material element.

Your lecture at Golden Drum will be devoted to trends. How do they migrate over the world? All around or do they mostly come from west to east?

I will mostly focus not on certain trends that migrate from Asia to Europe or vice versa. I’ll try to show the audience a conflict between two design trends. Let’s call them “asian” and “european”. Those, who belong to the first one, create things listening to their hearts and feelings. Those, who belong to the second one, lean on their heads and intellect, they do things in the way the society wants them to do. From my point of view, European design is stuck in a deadlock. People tend to look for inspiration in Asian design without understanding why it is like that. I guess we need to drive back to our own feelings and roots.

What is Russian design like and what to expect from it? Will it have its own way or become a part of a “global village”?

Russia is a good example of the conflict of trends I’ve just mentioned. We often feel in one way, but try to do in another one, copying things that aren’t inherent and understandable for us. We try, for instance, to implant anglo-saxon design, foreign comprehension of a consumer, but sometimes it’s not appropriate for so-called “mysterious Russian soul”. It’s hard to speak, what way Russian design will follow. We have been standing at a crossroads during last 300 years. We should work hard and try to understand that to create something interesting and intimate to the consumer, it’s not obligatory to copy foreign trends even if they are spread all over the world.

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