FOREAL is a young German design studio with a creative focus on illustration and art direction founded by Benjamin Simon and Dirk Schuster. We love their style - it's intense, but super fun and eye catching as the duo strive to transform each of their projects into 'eye-candy'.
What is it about creating 'eye candy' that has you both hooked?
Our ‘eye candy’ represents the kind of work we love to create: bold, colorful, graphic and funky visuals with a twist. Most of our eye candy comes from self-initiated projects so that often the commercial stuff we create is actually based on something we originally created for ourselves. We attempt a lot of self initiated projects in order to explore new techniques and styles. Sometimes they’re based on complex concepts, sometimes not. A lot are created in just a couple of hours and we love to share them on our Instagram to gauge people’s reactions. It’s fun when our little quickies have a much greater impact than the stuff we spend weeks on. Often we go back to our Instagram quikies when working on clients briefs as well.
How did you two meet and how did FOREAL come about?
The first time we met each other was ten years ago at vocational school. Since then we’ve been pretty good friends and together we’ve gone through design school, worked in design studios, freelanced and shared several flats. In 2011 and 2012 we honed our skills at various European studios with a focus on illustration and art direction. We noticed that we worked together very effectively and that we didn’t need another Art Director to get the job done. So in 2012 we made the decision to create our own business. We wanted our own visual language and independence as well as, of course, a bigger piece of the pie.
What's your favourite kind of brief?
We are always happy to see a fresh, new concept. Agencies tend often to use existing artworks for their brands so it’s not unusual that you get asked to copy another artist’s work. Of course you have the ‘creative freedom’ to adapt it, but it’s basically still a clone. That really sucks. So we always aim to convince clients to try something new. It’s nice to see a good idea come about because the outcome wasn’t pre-determined by something seen dozens of times before. For that reason we love open briefs.
Sex references are always cheekily popping up on your Instagram. Do you enjoy pushing the boundaries and testing people's reactions to this kind of work?
We love these sexed up visuals for lots of reasons. They may look filthy and childish, but they’re really honest and natural, and they affect everyone, regardless of cultural or religious views.
As well as this, sexual images are more visible and thought provoking. Within a cross section of mature, corporate visuals, they tend to pop out.
What new technology has you both excited?
We discovered OTOY's Octane Render a while back and it boosted our workflow enormously. Octane is a super fast GPU render engine for our beloved Cinema 4D. It calculates the outcome based on powerful graphic cards instead of the processor. We’ll stop here as we don’t want to go too much into detail with the nerdy stuff ;)
Tell us about Adobe Creative Jam
We learned a new and interesting lesson as we only had three hours to create a complex visual using only stock material (which we usually always try to avoid!) It was an intense experience to work with that amount of stress and time pressure on us. But we really enjoyed meeting all the creatives from other European countries and we made lots of new friends. We’re pretty sure this will lead to some great collaborations in the near future.
You seem to have a LOT of fun working in CGI, is this your favourite medium?
Yes, we love its photorealism and haptic feel which always brings additional values to an illustration. But we also love to work created within other techniques and media. And we love to mix up different styles (e.g. drawn vectors and photographic elements) to achieve a more surreal and catchy look.
What's your go-to place if you're stuck for inspiration?
One of our hidden gems is a book series called The Art Directors Index to Photography, ideally ones from the 80s and 90s. They have a very inspiring mix of photorealism and a retro pop styles.
