What was it that originally inspired the ‘a love letter for you’ project?

Being on the train as a youth and seeing girls look at the graffiti on the rooftops facing the elevated. Even though they always looked at the graffiti, they weren’t all that interested in talking to me about it, so I thought about creating graffiti that girls would want to talk about, for the lovers who’d want to talk to them.

The murals are both romantic and inspirational, did you want the pieces to have a deeper message to society or were they more designed just to make people smile?

Yes to both

The pieces are more like the painted advertisements of the 50′s than conventional graffiti do you think that you would have had the same kind of acceptance for the project if you had gone down the route of conventional graffiti?

Graffiti is only graffiti if it’s non-conventional. Once graffiti coalesces into convention its just decoration. My graffiti defies convention, pretension and prevention. The guiding influence in Love Letter are two distinct schools of painted American letterforms, Sign Painting and Graffiti. I’ve painted graffiti that looks like signage and vice-versa. In Love Letter, we followed the basic rules of sign painting, but we used spraypaint and graffiti’s palette and speed in order to maximize the impact and fun.

Other graffiti artists such as Banksy have taken their artwork out of it’s original location and taken it to other cities around the world, would you ever try and recreate the love letter project somewhere else?

I started Love Letter in Dublin and Belfast. Letters like these overcome all distance. It might be the distance that gives them power

You have had some interesting comments about the murals one women commented ‘If someone did that for me I’d like it better than being taken to Red Lobster’ what is the most interesting comment you have heard about the project so far?

I don’t know, is busting out in tears a more interesting comment?

You can find out more about the ‘a love letter for you’ project on their website, I have picked a few of my favourites but essentially they are all awesome.

Squidge Magazine: How did you get started in design?

Morgan Gibbons: Well I guess you could thank my mum for that, pretty much as soon as I could hold something she’d stick crayons in my hand to keep me quiet. When I was 5 my younger twin brothers were born and I found myself having to keep myself occupied, so I’d sit in my room and draw spaceships and cars for hours.

As I approached my teens Hip Hop and Graffiti were just arriving in the UK from the States and this immediately caught my interest. The manipulation of text in graffiti was so inventive I had to get involved. This is probably where my graphic design skills started proper as I find I’m still using skills I learnt then for work I do now. School was typical with nothing to note apart from being suspended on the last day for tagging up all the toilets and getting caught!

After school I started A Level Art and BTEC Art & Design which I didn’t complete due to personal circumstances, so I started working full-time in restaurants and sports shops and the like – I was 19 at this point. 2 years passed until my step-dad asked if I wanted to take a job at the newspaper printers where he worked. This was 1992 and when my career in graphic design started. I was at the printers for 5 years and this gave me good knowledge of what can and can’t work in print. I meet a lot of designers now that don’t know much about the print process and this shocks me.

After working at the printers in the pre-press department I decided I wanted to learn more about desktop publishing so I worked my way through various companies over the next 10 years to get the relevant skills… newspapers, fashion agencies, internet agencies, creative agencies, marketing and promotion agencies and advertising agencies. I ended up starting my own company and freelancing here and there. This led to SEGA.

SM: Apart from whining about wrong logos and colouring in pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog in-between the lines with blue crayons, what do you do day to day?

MG: Firstly our Head of Creative Services would fill me in on any pressing tasks for the day, and then I’d check over my emails. As we oversee creative for all of Europe and Australia there may be assets to supply or problems to solve from any of the local offices. My role is then divided between hands on creative artworking which usually involves talking an existing piece of artwork for a front of pack or advert and re-purposing it for our European customers, and managing the artworkers in the studio and helping them produce their particular job.

I love what I do as it can be so varied, from designing the logo for a game to making a design for a promotional item such as a T-Shirt to searching through our archive of artwork to find the packaging for an old title that we’re re-releasing on another platform. I’m also responsible for the templates that come in from Microsoft (360 and Games for Windows), Nintendo (Wii and Nintendo DS) and Sony (PlayStation 3 and PSP). I make sure everyone is up to speed on how a title would be produced using them if they’ve changed.

SM: Do you get much creative input in terms of the boxed designs or is it pretty much already set in stone?

MG: It all depends on the title in question. Usually on titles developed in Europe we’ll have more creative freedom. This is not always the case though.

SM: Do you still keep up with your own artwork or is it just a work thing?

MG: I wish I had more time to do my own art but with work and two children it’s not very easy finding the time. Saying that I recently got in touch with some of my graffiti mates on Flickr and that got my creative juices flowing again. Every Sunday morning my daughters and I sit down and do some drawing together, I can practice my graffiti skills and get to teach them as well.

SM: When was the last time you went out to bomb up Brentford?

MG: That’s wishful thinking; I gave up illegal graffiti activity almost 20 years ago!

Apart from being quite obviously hand made pieces of art, they’re amazing work from an artist duo – Anderson Augusto, also known as SÃO, and Leonardo Delafuente, also known as Delafuente – based in the Barra Funda neighborhood of São Paulo. The artists started the project with the aim of changing and transforming their daily lives.

So here’s a selection of my favourite images from their portfolio. You can read more about the artists and their objectives on their website here.

One drawback to this set up is that the museum becomes the scene of a scavenger-hunt as visitors attempt to see all the Banksy works, not wishing to miss any of them.  Whilst this is understandable, and perhaps when you have gone out to look at Banksy works, it is difficult to concentrate on the traditional  fine art and cases of china that are also available for viewing, it seems a bit sad to rush past Bristol’s collection for the famous Banksy.  Thus perhaps this second half would be much more effective if one did not expect to see Banksy pieces nestled amongst the permanent collection. Overall “Banksy vs. Bristol Museum” was definitely worth the wait.  It is a stunning example of humourous art that also manages to comment on politics, consumer society and the status of art in the modern world.  Banksy’s work is simple and accessible making it both effective and allowing people to engage with the pieces on many levels.  This is a fantastic opportunity to see a large amount of Banksy’s work in one place. Reassuringly, all that you can buy in the exhibition shop is the aforementioned Wall and Piece and exhibition posters.

The Banksy vs. Bristol Museum exhibition is on until the 31st August 2009, and admission is free. For more information visit the Banksy website here.