Will Mower

Will Mower is a graphic artist, designer and printmaker who divides his time between working on freelance projects for clients, and making things in his studio. Since completing a BA in Graphic Design at UWE in 2014, Will has worked as a freelance designer for clients in the arts, events, and publishing sector. He also dabbles in branding, poster design, campaign development, and digital and web design. The other side of Will’s work is mostly self-initiated; focusing on the creative process and how play can be used as a tool for creating and generating new ideas. He states; “I’m very interested in modular design and a lot of my work involves using a toolkit of elements that can then be put together to create a variety of outcomes“.

Printmaking plays a large role in his personal work, as he enjoys the “immediacy and hands on nature of it“. One of the tools Will uses most often is a set of large rubber stamps in a variety of geometric shapes. The process is similar to block printing, and his ideas often develop from experimenting directly on the page. The geometric nature of the stamps makes creating multiples of a design simpler, and he can print large graphic pieces without the need for a press. After graduating, Will first landed his first design job as the designer for Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival. During his final year of his studies his work had focused on exploring the role play takes within design, leading him to investigate how a tangram could be used as a tool for generating basic symbols and graphics. It was in his first year of working that Will decided to re-visit this idea as a side-project. He had a set of geometric shapes made up out of wood, and started using them to come up with simple designs. Initially, he would lay the pieces out, and then mix them up and start again, but as his experimentation developed Will wanted to find a good way to capture the process, thus discovering a love for printmaking.

After a few years at Brighton Dome, Will moved to London and started working as an information designer for TDC, a way finding and branding strategist working largely in the transport sector. Whilst there, he started picking up bits of freelance work from contacts he had made through his previous workplace; “I started feeling this was more the way in which I wanted to work, and so decided to take the jump into working full-time as a freelancer“. Making this switch provided the space to begin exploring the other side of his work in a larger way, so he rented a space in creative studio, where he now spends a couple of days a week experimenting with printing, and working on new project ideas.

Will’s bold and modular-constructed prints juxtapose influences from artists such as Alan Fletcher, and the 1920s Isotype designs of Otto Neurath. “I really like pictograms and bits of every day design, and find a lot of inspiration comes from walking around and finding bits of old type or a small graphic on something that could easily go unnoticed” describes the artist on his inspirations.

Alongside selling his artworks through his website and independent art shops, Will also occasionally runs workshops; “It’s really exciting seeing how others use the things I’ve designed in different and there’s a lot of fun in sharing this approach to printmaking with others“. He is currently looking forward to working on some larger-scale mural pieces, and creating more interactive artworks. Will has recently completed a project called Moveable Castle: an online building tool that mimics a modular set of printing blocks he designed. He aims to set this up so people can design something online that he can then recreate in print with blocks. Going forward, the printmaker is working on connecting the two sides of his practice; incorporating elements of his print work and graphic art within his freelance projects.

www.willmower.com
@will.mower

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