The Melbourne-based motion designer discusses procedural software, editorial deadlines and why perfectionism is the enemy of good work getting seen.
“You can look at anything around you and wonder how you could interpret this in design or motion,” says Rob Farmer. A walk after dinner, a flock of gulls, the static hiss of a TV screen – all of it gets filed away as potential creative material. “I often like to find patterns in nature and try to think of them as design algorithms or codes, such as how repeating shapes and forms can mimic those patterns found in nature.”
Growing up in Geelong, an hour from Melbourne, Rob didn’t start university until he was 27. Before that came what he calls “a lot of gap years”: a couple of years in London, a ski season in Utah, stints in retail while he tried to work out what to do with his life. “I think I was always interested in design and illustration and branding, but I didn’t know it was something you could study,” he says.
Once he found it, though, it stuck – he landed an internship at a brand agency in Brooklyn straight after graduating and stayed three years. It was there, frustrated at not always getting to do what he wanted on client work, that he started posting his own experiments on Instagram. “I was headstrong about creating space for my work that was outside the bounds of client work, agency hierarchy, and feedback,” he says. “It’s helped me to better understand design as my hobby, and design as my job.”
When he’s nestling away at work, it will follow a more loose, low-pressure system. Typically this will mean that when an idea arrives, he will grab his laptop or notes app and get a sketch down – “it could be a super rough five-minute sketch, or it could almost be finished in an hour” – then screenshots it into an Instagram planning app, where it sits in a queue of incomplete ideas until he’s ready to finish it.
“If I didn’t have this kind of visual queue of unfinished sketches, I’d forget about them,” he says. It’s also become a working library of sorts, and when a brief lands that needs a certain feel, there’s often something in that queue that already fits. For the actual making side of things, he will usually reach for the Cavalry App. “I like the procedural nature of it,” he says, “seeing how digital parameters like noise, randomisers and more can mimic those patterns in nature.”
When asked about his favourite projects of late, there’s one piece he keeps coming back to which, perhaps unsurprisingly, started as a rough sketch. This piece is an illustration for a New York Times Book Review piece on AI and the em-dash, commissioned by Matt Dorfman. “The original sketch for the piece was this very loose half-baked idea of an em-dash tattoo,” Rob says. “Matt really saw the vision and pushed me to make it better and better.” He’s since illustrated a New York Times Magazine cover and a piece for the Design Museum’s Future Observatory Journal – a full-circle moment for someone who loved the museum while living in London.
Above everything, Matt hopes he’s able to inspire others and wants people to stop sitting on their own ideas. “I hope there’s some inspiration in there,” he says of his portfolio, “maybe others can see something in there and use that as a starting point for an idea of their own. Through sharing my work, I hope I can encourage people to share their work – I think there would be a lot of great work out there that never gets shared because of perfectionism.
“I’m not saying all work needs to be shared or made public, and it’s probably important to have some work that remains intimate, but I think perfectionism gets in the way of a lot of great work being put out there in the world.”
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