JOHN WARWICKER

  Creative Director & Founding Member, Tomato

Since its beginning in 1991, tomato has continued to explore the boundaries of expression through a widening range of media and environments. It has established a global reputation for innovation and emotional expression through both its commercial work and personal experimentation.

Recent work has included live sound reactive TV idents for TV Asahi in Japan as well as the more orthodox elements of the corporate branding; the world’s first ever-responsive, ever-changing corporate identity for Sony’s Connected Technologies; an award-winning Interior design for the flagship stores for the Italian Fashion designer Alberto Aspesi; a 43m x 7.5m live painting for the dance band Underworld (who are also founding members of tomato) at their recent, large scale concert at the Makuhari Messe in Tokyo; the writing of and filming for a multi – (28) screen immersive environment for the Barcelona Expo (2004); Communication consultancy for the Antwerp Fashion Expo; tomato is currently involved in both consulting the government of Sapporo on the potential of its creative generation, how to sustain and amplify this generation and is undertaking every form of this project’s communication as both a cultural and economic entity.

Tomato’s work often involves either one or a combination of the following – Architectural Design: Consultancy: Drawing: Electronic Interactive Media: Film & Commercial direction: Graphic Design: Fashion: Motion Graphics: Music & Sound: Strategy, Branding & Identity: Photography: Publishing: Title Sequences: Typography: Writing.

Technology is seductive. Its possibilities stimulate our insatiable curiosity but it is a hollow shell without the emotive poetics of story-telling. This interest and commitment to story-telling – whether it be type on a page, a drawing in mud or the most ‘advanced’ technologically enabled environment – is the basis of what it is to be human. It is what connects us all and our self to our being. It is the thing that connects disparate cultures and different eras, and it an endless thing. Together, what is being ‘said’ and how it said, not only communicates but also teaches us about our selves. The chalk drawings in the caves of Lascaux, as an example, still fill us
all with wordless wonder.

Warwicker graduated in Graphic Design from Camberwell School of Arts and undertook a research Masters into ‘Electronic Interactive Media’ at Birmingham Polytechnic at the end of the 1970’s. He has been consultant to the European Design Committee of the British Council and to Demos think-tank, advisors to the British Government. Most recently he became the first foreign member of the Tokyo Type Directors Club and has been made an honorary Professor at the Department of Architecture, Building and Design at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS).