Excerpt from an interview with Conor Clarke on 01/12/2023.

Conor Clarke is a Director of Design Factory, an award-winning design studio based in Dublin. He has served as a board member of the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design, and the Institute of Designers in Ireland. His work has featured in international publications such as Who’s Who in Graphic Design, Graphis, Novum Gebrauchsgrafik, and the New York Art Directors Club Annual. He was the recipient of the Catherine Donnelly Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to design in Ireland and is the Course Director of Design West, an international summer design school located at the ATU Connemara campus in the beautiful village of Letterfrack in Co. Galway, on the West Coast of Ireland. (designwest.eu, 2023)

• SK: What do you think is the best shape?
• CC: Oh yeah, good god. square.
• SK: Square? how come?
• CC: Dunno, it just, it just seems resolved. I don't like spheres. Circles I sometimes like.
• SK: Yeah, squares, do you use grids?
• CC: Sometimes.
• SK: Not always?
• CC: Not always.
• SK: Once you have grids squares make sense. But you like squares maybe because you like logos?
• CC: If I'm in an art gallery and I see, you know Joseph Albers or something I just kind of feel, I just like, or Malevich i just like that stuff. If I see a Kandinsky and all those squiggles and circles it just, that just kind of upsets me a little bit.
• SK: That's a bit chaotic?
• CC: Yeah. And even if I'm looking at Vermeer I can see some kind of square structure and logic, for some reason that always appeals to me.
• SK: Things are a bit organised when there's squares around?
• CC: Yeah. And really great artists who don't work that way I look at their stuff and think well that's just beyond me.
• SK: Its something else?
• CC: Yeah. so yeah.
• SK: At least you didn't say triangle.
• CC: Oh good god. Good god no.