Here is an interview with Costin for AdvertiseIN magazine. The interview appeared in March and it can be see on page 36.

AdvertiseIN: You were a member of Advice Student Organisation. Now it comes, obviously, the question, why ADVICE?
Costin Oane: I wasn’t thinking a lot when I joined ADVICE. The choice came from a simple reality: advertising can not be learnt in college.  Advertising should be teached by people who works in advertising field and also from individual effort. More than that, when I got in ADVICE and I started to get in touch with the advertising people, I realized that the entry in this field involves connections. No matter how talented you are, if you are out of any networking is almost equal to get started from the beginning. I can associate the experience in ADVICE with my entire student experience. I found exactly what I missed: friends, team work, sense of usefulness, experience, respect and fun. And to be honest, there are few choices in life that I have taken alone, without being influenced or helped, and ADVICE  is one of those choises. I wouldn’t give anything  instead of this complex experience, in which I was involved with all my heart, I lived at maximum intensity every project and all the friends I’ve known there I still  meet them very often.

AdvertiseIN: What have you learnt from the projects that you took part?
Costin Oane: My experience from ADVICE showed me that advertising is not only what we see on TV and more of that, not all the people are creative for advertising. Everyone wants to work in advertising and everybody wants to be creative. In ADVICE I learned that is not only enough to have ideas. You need to ask a team, not only the art and the copy. You need people to sell your idea and bring money, people who deals with IT and online, people who can handle with logistics and graphics, etc.. It’s a whole team work and any excess of individualism may compromise a project. This is the first lesson that I learnt: the creativity achieved by ‘ping-pong’ with others, and the teamwork, have high chances of success. Satisfaction of a successful event is so great, I can guarantee it.

AdvertiseIN: When you felt that is the moment to try your powers in advertising agency?
Costin Oane: To get into a small agency, it’s not very difficult. I’ve also tried my powers in advertising agencies. Horia, my brother knows this feeling better, because he worked in more than four agencies, one of it was a naming agency. The truth: if you are passionate about graphics and you want to become art, and you get into a small / medium agency, then you find out that the entire agency stays in you. If you get sick, the agency can not pay his deadline. And it is quite frustrating to see that you are alone and more than that, you are the most required in the agency. And about the financial part, no comment. Already I feel nauseous when I hear that the best salaries are in advertising. But I do not know for how many it is this fact?

AdvertiseIN: You didn’t follow a Fine Art Collage, you were a student at SNSPA, and besides this you were an art. How is it possible?
Costin Oane: Advertising is a job made by people who aspire to become artists, but it is rated by people who aspired to be scientists. Now is coming the following cliche: ‘you have to know the rules before breaking the rules’; and to know these rules you have to do the art school. I do not think so, because I’ve never learnt the things that should not. I create what it gives me meaning, perhaps a student from Fine Arts College will remind me that I violated some rules of design. The fact of not knowing the rules, that helps me.. Rules are olny doing to remove a great exceptinal design away.  An art student who had been studied 4 years Monet and Picasso, it is hard to believe that he would think of something else without related to them. The same thing for  those who end the IMB and work in a corporate firm, while an entrepreneur starts a business in a garage.

AdvertiseIN:Why visual identity? So how did you get started to create ‘fairy tale logos’?
Costin Oane: Being 2 twins brothers, the identity problem has followed us almost everytime, starting from school, college, friends, etc.. I think nobody gave such a big importance to visual identity. Together, we have dealt with this lack of identity,  that’s why we were treated it as a problem in shaping our personality and identity. The story is very beautiful as how we managed to be treated as two different people. ‘Being different’ is the key to success in everything. And we understood, we wanted, without any training in this direction. After we finshed our study, after two years of activity in ONG student, our experience in more than four advertising agencies and naming, plus scholarships abroad, we decided to get our own business, a creative studio where we create visual identities, more precise ‘fairy tale logos’. To create logos, from our point of view, is the last challenge for a  print designer. Logo is the highest form of simplicity and refinement. To be simple, is not an easy job at all. Only after you made a ‘fairy tale logo’ for your client, you can say that you understood what it means a layout for print, a design, a business card, etc.. In other words, you understood almost everything.

AdvertiseIN: Are you one of those young advetising people that have decided to split up from the agency’s work and to start your own business, in this case your creative boutique, BroHouse. What let you make this transition?
Costin Oane: Education creates only good civil servants. The single desire of a  terminalist student is to engage and promote himself. ADVICE  and my experiences  accumulated in agencies convinced me that it can be something else. BroHouse started in 2007, but completely different from now when we were offering a full range of services. But since  2008, the primare service offered by BroHouse is creating visual identities and logos. By doing the execution, you may sell the project better than anyone else. I hate to be identified only as a designer.

AdvertiseIN: And if we come back to the stories, do you think that logos are immortal?
Costin Oane: Nothing is immortal.