Kate Dawkins — Light Thinking - Plymouth Design Forum

Kate’s presentation charted her formative years growing up in a creative household, with her father working as a designer and her mother possessing a strong passion for creativity. This greatly influenced Kate as she progressed from school into higher education studies, gaining her BA (Hons) in Graphic Design at Gwent College of Higher Education.

But it wasn’t until her Master’s Degree at Central St Martins, and the influence of visiting lecturers from the legendary creative studio ’Tomato’, that Kate started to explore the idea of motion in the context of the graphic design discipline, “I had a Mac and a camera and I just started to play!”.

After graduating with her Master’s Degree, Kate’s career took off in spectacular style with the agency Intro, where she spent over 13 years developing from an emerging design talent to a fully-fledged creative director working for the likes of Nike, SKY and Sony Records.

It was to be an identity and motion graphics project at Intro, involving a re-released Elton John track, that would ultimately transition Kate from a graphic designer into an events and live performance creative director, with her work gaining recognition with Elton John’s tour director leading to a freelance commission to design Elton’s entire live show.

The experience of working on such a massive scale with the Elton John production gave Kate’s career a new trajectory, evolving to become an independent freelance art director. With stints with globally recognised agencies such as Imagination and Jack Morton, Kate’s reputation as a bold, visionary creative grew, delivering ground-breaking projects for the likes of Ford, Land Rover, Adidas and Formula 1.

But it was her work with Crystal CG International in 2012 that was going to put Kate into the international spotlight as she took on the role of Lead Art Director for the opening and closing ceremonies at the London 2012 Olympics. The brainchild of Danny Boyle, these incredibly complex events, with over 100 individual pieces of content to create, manage and art direct would test anyone’s creative abilities, but Kate Dawkins delivered. In a world-first, the audience became the pixels and a jaw-droppingly stunning visual display was delivered that might someday be equalled but is unlikely to ever be bettered.

In 2016, with a number of projects delivered in a post-Olympic freelance capacity for brands such as Intimissimi and Samsung, and working with performance artists such as Ellie Goulding and Pharell Williams, Kate took the big leap into the world of business, starting the eponymous Kate Dawkins Studio. Transitioning from a creative ‘gun for hire’ to a new world where full responsibility would be taken for both vision and execution was set to take Kate’s work to a new, stratospheric level.

Working on incredible, engaging and immersive content for iconic events such as the King’s Coronation, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the Earthshot Prize and the Festival of Remembrance, as well as commissions for commercial brands such as Cisco, Talisker Whisky and MTV, Kate’s new studio was regularly breaking new ground when it came to the vision and scale of the vibrant canvases that they were able to create.

A BBC commission in 2018, to commemorate the centenary of the horrific battle at Passchendaele, would result in the creation of a moving, hour-long motion graphics and video production, on a massive canvas (the Cloth Hall in Ypres), which would lead to ultimate levels of creative recognition, topped off with two, coveted, BAFTA awards for the best Live Event and Entertainment Craft Team.

Kate’s humility, set against this backdrop of delivering truly amazing creative content is astounding when experienced first hand. Not only did she give the PDF audience a snapshot of her process and how she works on a day-to-day basis, but we also got a sense of Kate as a person; down-to-earth but driven by excellence.

This was summed up as Kate shared a personal project for One Dance UK, which tackled the serious subject of male suicide, where she brought together contemporary dance (a particular interest of Kate’s) and bold, energetic motion graphics for a production entitled ‘Invisible Threads’. Her passion for this project, which she cited as probably the favourite piece in her entire portfolio, showed that Kate’s not chasing awards, just the time and space to deliver the best work possible for subjects that she’s intensely passionate about.

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