RDInsights

In this latest edition of RDInsights, Mike is in conversation with Lucinda Chambers RDI, the British fashion director, designer, and stylist who worked at Vogue magazine for 36 years and is also in demand as a consultant to many major fashion brands. 

Her creative path in that seemingly glamorous world was a combination of mishaps, luck, hard work, dedication, creative imagination and passion for her subject, which she continues in her new fashion enterprise, Collagerie, curating the best of fashion, interiors, beauty and lifestyle.

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In this new episode of RDInsights, Mike is in conversation with Kate Hopkins RDI, the three-time BAFTA-awarded documentary sound designer. 

Her meticulous and imaginative work spanning over three decades in landmark productions like Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and Frozen Planet has enabled audiences worldwide to experience a heightened reality through her extraordinary creative sound work. In 2014, Kate was awarded The Technicolor Creative Technology Award for Women in Film and Television.

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Mike Dempsey RDI interviews graphic designer Fernando Gutiérrez RDI. Gutiérrez's career began in 1986 at CDT Design in London. In 1992, he relocated to Spain and joined Sumer in Barcelona. After briefly returning to London, he formed Studio Graphica in Barcelona with fellow designer Pablo Martin. In 2000, Gutiérrez moved back to the UK as a Pentagram Partner, where he worked for six years. In 2006, he established Studio Fernando Gutiérrez. 

Born in London in the 1960s to Spanish parents, Gutiérrez displayed artistic talent from a young age, often drawing and painting on the walls of his room. Despite being initially directed towards a trade job with the London Electricity Board, his art teacher recognized his potential and steered him towards a different path. Gutiérrez’s unique upbringing contributes to his identity as a genuinely European designer, with a unique way of choosing projects and the clients he works with.

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This archive recording was the very first RDInsights interview. 

It was made in April 2006 with the brilliant designer Thomas Heatherwick RDI, who was beginning to make waves. We all know how big those waves became, with many significant projects now completed worldwide. The essence of Thomas’s thinking and his approach to creativity is very evident in this 17-year-old conversation.

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We return to one of the earliest RDInsight recordings, with the illustrator and writer Sara Fanelli Hon RDI, recorded in 2006. 

Mike Dempsey RDI caught up with Sara recently. She has devoted a great deal of her time to homeschooling her daughter Flora but has also ventured into the world of architecture with commissions from Thomas Heatherwick, for whom she created illustrations of science, art, and literature embossed into the concrete walls of the new Learning Hub at the Nanyang Technological University. For Ab Rogers, she produced illustrations of butterflies to stencil into terracotta along with hand-painted designs decorating the windows of The Royal Marsden Maggie's Centre. And after a decade, she is planning a new book, her first since 'The Onion's Great Escape'.

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This recording from the RDI Sound Archive with Royal Designer David Gentleman was made in 2010 during his 80th year. 

Since then, he has had three new books published, three exhibitions of his work and in 2022, Royal Mail issued a set of six stamps commemorating his work. 

Now, at 93, you will still find him around London or in Suffolk with pen and watercolours capturing the world around him. Speaking recently, interviewer Mike Dempsey RDI, learned that David was hunkered down working on a new book with a looming deadline to meet.

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In 2020 Margaret Howell RDI celebrated her five decades in the world of fashion design. Throughout those years, Margaret has kept to her abiding principles of creating elegant, classic and understated fashion through her love of tweeds, corduroys, linen, wool and cotton, all carefully selected to develop her sense of Englishness with her passion for muted natural colours and patterns. 

Mike Dempsey RDI recorded this conversation in 2007 in a rather busy and, at times, a little noisy space. Today Margaret has 94 stores across Japan, where her work is much loved. 

And her enduring championing of mid-20th-century industrial design has seen her collaborate with products from Ercol furniture and Anglepoise with her special editions of the classic Type 75 range of lamps. 

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In 2018 Mike Dempsey, RDI, interviewed one of the titans of British graphic design and typography, Derek Birdsall RDI.

A few years before that conversation, Derek walked into his Islington studio at the back of his house, where he was about to start work on a new book commissioned by a regular client. Looking down for some time at the manuscript and the accompanying pile of photographs on his Desk, Derek suddenly decided he’d had enough of solving other people's problems, something he'd been doing for six decades. And without a party or farewell wishes, he sold his house and studio and moved to the Kent coast within sight and sound of the sea, where he has remained happily ever since. But Derek's influence on graphics and typography still spreads far and wide. And his story is a fascinating one.

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