DR.ME

posted by Emily Gosling February 3, 2021

I can’t pinpoint exactly what the first piece of work I saw by DR.ME was; but I can pinpoint how it made me feel: “whoever these dudes are, they GET IT.” That’s a rare, and pretty brilliant feeling.

DR.ME started in 2010, and as I’ve followed what they’ve done over what’s (shockingly, apparently) just over a decade, their work has always been so aligned with things I love and admire—in both their medium and their ability to incorporate searing wit and joyful playfulness throughout each commission. Their collage, their work with recently disbanded witch house label Tri Angle Records, the Simpsons projects… They certainly tick a lot of boxes.

At the end of last year, the studio’s Ryan Doyle and Mark ‘Eddy’ Edwards (who met having been thrown together for an icebreaker challenge at Manchester School of Art because they were next to each other on the class register), released their brilliantly titled book, Not Dead Or Famous Enough Yet. The 600-page, celebrates the studio’s first ten years and details its growth from the ground up as a staunchly independent outlet.

The title was inspired by a publisher, who once told DR.ME that a retrospective wouldn’t work as they were neither of those things. If anything proves them wrong (about the retrospective, not their being dead or not), this book is it.

“We’d always talked about doing a book that focused on our work, so when the decade started coming into view a couple of years ago it snowballed from there” says Edwards. “We see it as a deep dive into the inner workings of an independent art and design studio but also who we are as people, friends and creatives. It’s an investigation into our collaborative working practice, concepts, influences, secrets, things we’ve learned, our failures and successes of something that’s been our lives for ten years.”

Thanks to projects like the one that involved making a collage every single day for a year, Edwards says “I think maybe we get referred to as ‘the collage guys’… We’re a design studio, yet we also have this collage-based practice that’s as much part of the design process, or as much a part of the studio… It’s a weird anomaly. It’s definitely something that we’re proud of.”

So they should be. Slightly awkward, likely way cooler than they realise (so far, let’s not ruin the magic)—DR.ME, for me, tick many strange-shaped, cut and pasted boxes. Thankfully for them, they tick lots of people’s proverbial boxes; and it’s always been nothing short of a really fun ride seeing what they come up with over the years.

Collaborating from separate studios in Manchester, the duo’s go-to medium has been collage, as played out in the 2014 project, 365 Days of Collage. DR.ME made and sold a collage every day for a year—no mean feat. But they’re really a lot more than just the “collage guys”: clients and collaborations have included Tate Modern, Manchester International Festival and Bloomberg Businessweek; record labels Tri- Angle, Young Turks and Domino; MIDI festival in France, for which they worked on stage design. They’ve also worked on “hundreds on hundreds” of gig and club posters, and published a book with Thames & Hudson and Monacelli Press in 2016, Cut That Out: Contemporary Collage within Graphic Design.

In 2015, DR.ME showed their worn in a solo show, Choice Cuts, at cultural institution HOME in Manchester; and over the years they’ve exhibited globally in galleries such as the Curve in Berlin, Viborg’s Kunsthall in Denmark and in spaces in Brooklyn, Dublin and Barcelona, among others.

They might not be dead, or famous “enough”, but they’ve certainly been busy—and more importantly, have remained incredibly well-liked. Not just collage guys, but nice guys, as the many interviews with people they’ve collaborated with in the past, and former mentors attest. These include artist Mike Perry, art director and designer James Victore and Young Turks-turned-Harry Styles creative director Molly Hawkins, among many more. These are presented alongside behind-the-scenes photography, and texts that “frame certain projects and periods,” as Doyle puts it. “It needed to be more than a picture book; it needed some substance to it… We didn’t want it to just be a catalogue of projects that we had worked on.”

In that sense, the book often feels more like an art piece than a straightforward monograph: text and images are playfully overlaid, jumbled, snaking around the pages every which way. Aside from the inherent design nous of the book itself, in a brilliant move, it also includes five mini eight-page zines including original Art Simpson 2010 and a unseen comic made for Mike Perry’s WAW exhibition 2012.

“The book, through its designs and stories, celebrates doing it yourself, embracing mistakes and keeping independently minded,” says DR.ME. “It’s their own commitment to these traits that mean that posters for DIY basement gigs sit so comfortably alongside work for world famous brands.”