#michael horsham

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TYPERADIO.ORG | MICHAEL HORSHAM OF TOMATO

Typeradio's most recent posting was an April 2011 interview at 20plusX in Munich Germany with Michael Horsham, owner and partner of Tomato in London, UK. Tomato is a multi-platform multimedia development company that takes on both commercial and research-based projects. Horsham refers to his staff of ten as a group of "fantastic people" skilled in the areas of music, fashion, architecture, graphic design, advertising and film.

Michael Horsham graduated from Brighton Polytechnic with a degree in Design History—which he admits has played an important role in his design career in terms of perfecting his personal design processes. After completing his undergraduate studies, he obtained his Master's of Arts and did freelance writing on architecture for various London newspapers and the British Broadcasting Company. While working on a project for the BBC, he befriended a Tomato executive which lead to his current position at the company.

Horsham expertise in music, design and advertising are put too good use in various applications at Tomato. He explains that the three mediums co-exist in the world together and doesn't ever get into a specific mindset when working on his projects. He has written and directed television commercials, developed corporate identity systems, designed newspapers and logos, and has also designed multiple book exhibitions. He noted that he doesn't do or prefer one medium over the other, he works on whatever project his skills are needed.

Michael Horsham's early desire to collaborate with other design-minded professionals expanded his knowledge of many different mediums. It's amazing how far exploring personal interests can expand one's career opportunities!

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Type Radio: Michael Horsham

I listened to an interview with Michael Horsham on Type Radio tonight. Horsham works in a studio called Tomato. It was founded in 1991 as a group made up of artists, designers, musicians and writers. Within this group, there are ten active members working to develop cross platform, multi-media projects that are commercial and research based.

Currently he is working on a number of different things. He is out working on the communication and identity of an architectural project in Seattle, Washington at the moment. A question was brought up about how they work together. Horsham explained about how all ten of them don’t always work together. It’s usually five or six, but depends on the job and what they want to do. They see who is free and interested in working on that certain job and put them on it. I feel as though this is a perfect way of going about this situation. If someone is not interested in a certain task, why not give it to someone that is excited about it.

In about an hour Tomato receives about seven e-mails relating to internships and people working in the studio. The reason why they don’t hire in any of them is because they can’t support the interns if they are not always in the studio. The problem is that they have a studio, but no one to manage it. Horsham goes into discussing what sparked his interest in design. He received a degree in the history of design because he was interested in how things come to be. After that, he started writing about the history as well as architecture. After starting to work with Tomato, Horsham stated, “Luckily I was surrounded by fantastic people and picked up what I know now by the studio context.” He is absolutely correct. You don’t learn as much as you would until you are actually put into the environment.

After listening to the interview, I browsed around the archives at Tomato’s website  (http://www.tomato.co.uk). The works I enjoying looking at included, “Rhopalic”, which was a typographic piece created in 2010, as well as “Nouvelle Vague” that was a series of releases in 2008. Tomato has works in the categories of film/television, installation, print, products and branding.