tado www.​tado.​co.uk

Intro­duc­tion

TADO is Mike and Katie, two hard work­ing, tired-​eyed, happy folk living and work­ing together in Sheffield, UK. TADO began in 2001 whilst the pair were still at uni­ver­sity, after grad­u­at­ing they set up their own studio and began work­ing fever­ishly to carve a nook for them­selves in the ter­ri­fy­ing world of free­lance.

Their work revolves around a few simple ideas – enjoy­ment and con­vey­ing good feel­ings to the viewer. This has proved a very suc­cess­ful for­mula as the pair have a pretty impres­sive list of happy clients and have exhib­ited their demented art­work around the globe!

If the move­ment known as the cute vec­torism move­ment sud­denly came to an end; would you change your style?

We like to think that we’d adapt our style and keep it cur­rent! When we look back at our own work from one and two years ago we can see quite a few dif­fer­ences in style, so we guess we’re shift­ing and tweak­ing our style pretty much con­stantly. One month we’ll be into pretty swirly-​gloopgloop shapes, the next month it’ll be dry, cracked zombie mush­rooms with mag­gots coming out from their heads. We get bored very easily with our own work so this tends to push us in new direc­tions anyway. If the cute vec­torism move­ment were to die a hor­ri­ble death we’d prob­a­bly just go with the flow and see where it took us… or we’d just go work at the Tesco next door. We’d prob­a­bly get paid more there too…

How many toys do you own and do you play with them?

Far too many. We’re pretty sad really – we don’t even have enough room to dis­play them – we have to rotate them now! And yes, we do play with them!

I read a few of your older inter­views while research­ing TADO; Lounge72, Pix­el­sur­geon, Toy­tas­tic, YNTGOM and Vinyl Abuse. After com­plet­ing my research I came to the con­clu­sion that your work­ing rela­tion­ship seems too good to be true. So, do you ever argue and more impor­tantly have you ever fallen out?

Haha – Yes! Of course we argue! We tend to squab­ble a lot about work stuff – but never seri­ously. We know each other too well so have become each others harsh­est work crit­ics! We’ve never fallen out though and we’ve never had a ‘proper’ argu­ment despite living and work­ing together 24-7.

How much would it cost me to hire you for 24 hours?

Wotcha got? We’re open to cold hard cash, bribery, good food and offers of holidays.

Apart from illus­tra­tion what other things are you into?

Hmm… we have very boring lives we’re afraid. We enjoy trundling up to Leeds to go see bands play with our friends, moun­tain biking, look­ing after our fish­tank and restor­ing our stu­pidly small Japan­ese Honda car.

Who are your favourite artists/illustrators alive today?

We like so many dif­fer­ent people for dif­fer­ent rea­sons and our fav’s change con­stantly! We’re rub­bish at naming names but long term inspi­ra­tions whom we always look to would be people like Chiho Aoshima, Chi­natsu Ban, Murakami of course and all the other KaiKai Kiki artists. In terms of design­ers and illus­tra­tors, we’ve always loved Genevieve Gauckler’s work, Geoff Mcfetridge, Friends With You, Nathan Jure­vi­cius, Devilrobots… the list could go on forever.

Does Jon Burg­er­man smell?

We’re happy to say that Jon has been a good chum of ours for quite a while now and we’ve never noticed any­thing par­tic­u­larly pun­gent about him, even after hang­ing around him for sev­eral days at a time. We were astounded by how spot­less his snazzy house is actually!

Although he did get a rather nasty and now leg­endary case of the bum­bums in Dublin recently, the real smell test will be in a couple of weeks when we’re off to Paris with him. Fancy food, a few cans of fizzy pop and all the excite­ment of an exhi­bi­tion open­ing in a small crowded place. Who knows what might happen!

Are you involved in any col­lab­o­ra­tive projects at the moment and is there anyone you would like to work with?

As we just men­tioned we’re off to Paris very soon for the open­ing of a show we’ve been work­ing on with Mr Burg­er­man. The show is called Imma­ture Minia­tures and will have lots of snazzy things in it. We’ve been work­ing on a fun ani­ma­tion recently as well with some friends of ours from Portsmouth called Kinetic Mesh. They’re proper clever and made our evil mush­rooms dance!

Who would we like to work with? We’d like to work with Honda to develop one of them mental con­cept cars – like the one Murakami did with Nissan! Or per­haps Sheffield City Coun­cil. We reckon we could do a pretty fun job of spruc­ing up some of our cities less utopian areas! Or Hard Gay (Razor Ramen) in Japan. He’s our hero. We’d love to design a cos­tume for him! Hooooooooooooooo!!!!

Have you ever con­sid­ered cre­at­ing a fea­ture length animation?

We’d love to do some­thing like that one day. We’re not sure if we’d have the patience for it though! By the time it was half way through we’d prob­a­bly have got bored and wanted to change the begin­ning bit. A friend of ours has been work­ing on a large scale ani­ma­tion for a loooong time now so we know how much time and painstak­ing work goes into such things. It should be pretty incred­i­ble when it’s fin­ished though!

What’s next in the pipeline for TADO?

We’re off to Milan in April for a big MTV schindig out there which we’re pretty excited about – it’ll be the first time we get to prop­erly meet a few of our bud­dies too! We’ve been work­ing hard on some new toy projects too with both Kidro­bot and our friends Dan&Dan so these should start appear­ing pretty soon. Some fun cloth­ing col­lec­tion stuff as well from Kidro­bot and Nike.

In the bits in between we want to get fit again (too much time sat infront of screens – haha!), and finish off our little car!

Mars bars or Snickers?

Snick­ers for Mike, Mars for Katie please!

Jook Jook or Pang Pang?

Both of course!!

Popeye or Bluto?

Bluto we’re afraid!

Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to talk to LCSV4

Thank you very much for having us!

You can see more of TADO’s work at
www.​tado.​co.uk

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Cats: Animation, LCS Interviews
Tags: Chinatsu Ban, Dublin, Fancy food, food, Genevieve Gauckler, Geoff McFetridge, Haha, Honda, Interviews, Japan, Jon Burgerman, Katie, Leeds, little car, Mike, Milan, MTV, Nathan Jurevicius, Nike, Nissan, Paris, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Sheffield City Council, Tesco, United Kingdom, www.tado.co.uk