Shed Sessions: Al Mitchell

For those who may not be familiar with everything your job entails, what types of work and projects fill your time?

I’m the “blank sheet moment” guy. When a project or a new client first comes into Potting Shed, more often than not it’s me who gets things rolling. Certainly with brand design and a lot of the animation content, my job is to create something out of the raw materials and information that clients come to us with, to express what they do and who they are to the outside world.

Can you describe how the design industry looked when you began building Potting Shed - was there a specific gap in the market you aimed to fill? 

I was living in Australia at the time and designing surf, skate and snowboard magazines, so it wasn’t client-facing at all, and I had loads of creative freedom. When my family decided to return to the UK, there really were no agencies on the island that were doing the sort of work I was interested in. That’s not to say that it was all bad, just very advertising and sales-focused rather than design-focused. The gap we saw was to the power of craft and beauty and its ability to deliver a message whilst adding value to clients and products.

Outside of work, surfing is one of the ways you spend your time. Where are the top three spots you’ve surfed? 

The Maldives: A lot of non-surfers are surprised when they find out the Maldives has amazing surf; it’s incredible in the right atolls and the water is like a swimming pool. 

Queensland: I lived on the Gold Coast for 7 years and - although it’s now a lot more crowded than when I was there - it’s still an amazing place to be a surfer, with probably the highest standard of “everyday surfer” you will see anywhere in the world. My local at Burleigh Heads still holds a special place in my heart even though the crowds and the rip get pretty nuts.

El Salvador: I’ve been there a few times as my best friend lives there. It’s becoming more popular now because it is safer, but when I first started going, it was pretty rough and ready. The water is so warm that it’s like being in a bath, and there are point breaks galore, plus the people are amazing.

Following that, you’ve travelled to lots of cool places. Can you share a travel story with us, or give a recommendation?

Push yourself out of your comfort zone; you will never regret it, no matter what the experience is, good or bad, because you will have grown by the end. This applies in all walks of life, but definitely in travel. Surfing has taken me to Peru, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Australia, NZ, Fiji, France, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, USA, Morocco, Indonesia, Taiwan, New Caledonia, Hawaii and probably a few I’m forgetting, but it’s the ones where I’ve been nervous to go (like El Salvador and Nicaragua the first time, when they were a lot less stable than they are now) that have fed my soul the most. Once the panic subsides, it feels like everything is in technicolour and everything is new.

Top Tip: Probably the Telo Islands in Sumatra if you’re a surfer are hard to beat. If you’re not a surfer (or even if you are) Central America is amazing; it’s a bit like Europe in the sense that you can visit so many different countries easily because none of them is too vast.

Do you have an all-time favourite piece of branding, logo, or design?

That’s a little like choosing a favourite child in that… it depends, and either way, you wouldn’t admit it! Brand design and what it means has massively evolved in the past 10 years and it’s so much more than just a logo on some headed notepaper; it’s an entire ethos and ecosystem and the most enjoyable projects are the ones where we have had a chance to really explore that comprehensively. That said, I really enjoyed the initial work for the Jersey Opera House and some of the beer brand work we have done for both LBBC and Winslow.

If you had to pick a standout project you enjoyed working on from the past year, what would it be and why?

Probably all of the work that the studio has done for Tekex because the whole team has embraced it and grown it collectively. From the brand and event animations to the amazing new website that Luke Vidamour has recently built for a truly exciting venture that goes from strength to strength with endless possibilities.

During your career, what have your biggest motivators and challenges been?

My biggest motivator is to always be evolving and never stand still. In recent years, this is more of a prerequisite than a belief, as our industry and the techniques for producing what we do continue to be turned on its head; but at the core of all of this, the idea and the authorship remain the same. Beautiful work with no heart, idea or direction is just noise, and the noise is getting turned up around us relentlessly. Our job is to cut through that. The other huge motivator for me now, at the grand old age I am, is the people I work with and learn from daily. If you stay open to those younger than you and their capacity to educate you, you will always continue to grow yourself.

How do you see Artificial Intelligence developing over the next 10 years?

As already mentioned it will continue to place incredible power in the hands of the individual but without an idea it will always have little value. I think it will destroy specialists and reward generalists because there is almost nothing that can’t be done by one man with a good idea and a laptop. It’s easy to make work look great, it’s really hard to make it mean something. 

Favourite tool right now?

This sounds like a cop-out, but whatever is the right tool for the job. If your default is always to just use the same tool, it will limit your thinking. That said, I love using AI MCP plugins to help control and create procedural processes within more traditional creative applications, like After Effects, so that you can keep precise control over each step, instead of surrendering it all to a prompt. But brand design is my true love, and there’s nothing like a pencil and paper (and maybe a bit of Illustrator) to bring to life EXACTLY what you have in your head, it’s the only way to have total control over the end product. When you are at that “blank sheet moment” and you’ve been banging your head against a wall, the inspiration finally dropping is a magical moment.

And for the final question, what would you like Potting Shed’s lasting impact on the industry and community to be? 

We grow ideas and we execute them with craft, empathy and precision. I hope we have helped raise the bar of the creative landscape in the Channel Islands and made it a better place to live. There is some great work out there from local individuals and agencies, and I like to think we have made others realise that you only have to focus on doing good work yourself (not denigrating others to try and get ahead) if you want to grow. Good work tends to lead to being asked to do more good work.