Jessie Wong:  To start, what do you actually make?

James Goggin: We make books, mostly. Shan and I probably spend around seventy percent of our time on books—we’re currently working on up to ten at once, on different timescales. But we also design exhibitions, websites, brands, identities. Basically, if someone comes to us and asks whether we can design something, we say yes. Part of why we love working on design is because we love learning to do new things.

JG: That’s actually the thinking behind the name ‘Practise, it’s spelled with an ‘s’, which in New Zealand and the UK is the verb form. We spent the last ten years in the US where they don’t distinguish between practise the verb and practice the noun. It’s a deliberately nerdy name. Practise the verb means repeating a task and learning from it. As a student graduating, I liked the idea of my career being under the guise of perpetual studenthood—constantly learning. The minute you become ‘Professional’, there’s nothing left to learn. That would be really boring.

JW: I love that. I started Yu Mei eleven years ago when I was studying fashion design in Dunedin. I couldn’t find a bag that would carry everything I needed in a day, laptop, lunchbox, visual diary, charger, makeup bag, the kitchen sink. So I did what any problem-solving student would do and made one. That original design became the Braidy bag. Each bag since has been named after someone close to me who had a need that wasn’t being met. There’s always a sense of utility at the core of it, and always a refined design aesthetic alongside that. Something beautiful, that's actually useful—and speaks to your design aesthetic.

JG: We love being involved before anything is fully formed. Big institutions often come to you with a clear format already decided, this many pages, this size, this structure. But the work we love most is when we’re brought in right at the beginning, when it’s still malleable. For art books, we’re working closely with artists, curators, publishers and equally with printers and binders. We consider all of them people with expertise and creative capacity. So we love listening to all of them.

JW: We had a really beautiful example of that ourselves. Yu Mei grew out of a connection to New Zealand deer nappa, a material that would otherwise be landfilled as a byproduct of the venison industry. Once we understood that material deeply, everything followed from it. And that’s actually how we came to work with Range Rover last year; to help tell that story of material and provenance internationally.

JG: I think it’s easy to think of graphic designers as working flat, on screens, in layouts. But the more Jessie spoke about designing bags, the more it resonated with exactly the way we design books. We consider them industrial design rather than just graphic design. A book involves textiles, glue, and construction. You think about the weight of it. The bodily experience. The eye-to-hand ratio.

JW: Yes, and the hardware on a bag is the equivalent of binding. People don’t think about those decisions, but they feel them. The drop of a handle, the weight of a clasp. When you pick up the Claudia Tote, the handle drop is exactly long enough that you can put it on without your elbow getting caught; with one hand. You shouldn’t be battling your bag strap while you’re opening the car door.

JG: Don’t get me started on glue. I’m obsessed with particular kinds. Books are designed to be read, and yet the vast majority of them, you have to fight to keep them open. We design books that lay completely flat, where you lose nothing in the gutter. That requires talking to particular binders, finding particular cold glues. For me, a book that won’t open is like a chair that kicks you out when you sit down. It shouldn’t have to fight you to do its job.

JW: Simplicity is complexity resolved. That’s something I always come back to. Everything should align in the language and voice of Yu Mei. If it doesn’t pass that test, it doesn’t go in.

JW: So the big question. What is good design?

JG: There’s never one answer. But I think one of them, one of many, is that good design is invisible. If you’re reading a beautifully written essay about an important artist, you don’t want to stop to think about the typeface. If people are noticing the font, we’ve done a bad job with the typesetting. But the word I use most often, especially when I’m teaching, is that good design is appropriate. That sounds boring on the face of it. But for me, sometimes it’s appropriate for design to be radical—for the font to shout. A DIY punk poster in the seventies had to draw attention on the street, and doing something loud was exactly right. Other times, it’s appropriate to choose a typeface that completely disappears. You’ve read five pages and you haven’t thought about it once.

JW: For me, good design is something you just don’t notice. It disappears into the background and lets you get on with your life. The system behind our bags, what we call the Art of Packing, is designed so that moving through the day feels seamless. We have customers who travel to Sydney for four days with just their Claudia Tote. The system works so well they don’t have to think about it.

JW: The UTILITY range came out of listening, customers were taking their Braidy bags to the gym, to the beach, to places deer nappa probably shouldn’t go. We realised people don’t live one neat life, they’re out of the house for 10-12 hours a day. We’re mothers, travellers, professionals, and traverse these worlds at once. So we came up with a considered solution. How do you listen to your clients? And how do you use that to inform what is good design?

JG: When you say graphic design, you think visual, you don’t think listening. And I used to be that way too. I’d hear designers say: ‘I haven’t had any time to design this week, all I’ve had is meetings.’ But as I got a bit older, I started to realise, actually, the meetings are the design. The listening, the talking, the figuring out what something really is: that’s where a lot of the work happens.

JG: I even wrote an essay about it. The idea that if we start to consider the supposedly non-design parts of practice as design, actively listening to people, letting that inform the work, rather than bowling in and saying ‘this is our style, this is how we’ll map it onto your project’—the work becomes more original. The relationships last longer. The clients stay.

JW: I think that’s exactly it. One of my lecturers always said: " Everything’s been done before, just not by you. So you have to interpret it in your own way, create a new perspective that is of this particular moment in time, learned from the past.

JG: You summed it up perfectly. By listening, by allowing all of the circumstances to inform something, still bringing your taste, still steering it, not just letting it freeform; you can’t help but be original. Because no one else but you was at the centre of all those people and circumstances for that particular project.

Club Yu Mei is a community of forward-thinking individuals. It is Yu Mei’s place to celebrate those who inspire the brand and to interact with its community. The Club is an inclusive space by real people, for real people. The Lounge Series has been designed to explore our community’s shared interests and curiosities—to exchange ideas and hear from talented creatives and experts. This edition was hosted in partnership with Range Rover.