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Organic, fluid shapes

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Imperfections

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Warm colour palette, texture

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Lauryn Alvarez

“There’re so many times that I accidentally opened the back of my camera before rolling it back in. I get these light leaks and distortions of the photo, and I love that. When some people see that as a mistake, I feel it’s allowing the surrounding and the moment to affect your work even more.” 

In a world led by a modern, contemporary, digital and clean aesthetic, Lauryn appears as a beautiful weirdo, finding wonder in the imperfections.

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Methods

Provokes feelings, connection through seeing imperfections and process

nature, organic, fluid shapes

warm, earthy, muted colour palette 

analog methods to tie memories of a time before digital overload, disconnection, overwhelm, comparison

There’s a grit and texture that comes with analog methods that provide an emotional connection - you can see the imperfections, the strokes in the design which adds another sense aside from just visual, heightening the overall experience

Focus on the imperfections of the process - beauty in the imperfections

being able to see the designers process creates deeper connection and tells a more personal story

Film grain - there is slowness and intention that comes from shooting on film - tells a story, you are trapped in the moment, nothing distracting you - focus on a world with less distractions

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Context

The acknowledgement that over time humans have become progressively more and more disconnected from their environment. Gaining momentum through the industrial era and capitalism we have developed a consumer culture, that focuses on human progression through values based on success, progress, productivity and efficiency. My design practice centres on shifting this paradigm to one that focuses on reminding humans of their humanity by reconnecting people with each other and their surroundings. It does this by exploring slowness in a world that is constantly telling you to speed up in order to keep up. It’s a reminder to connect with our daily lives, opening your eyes to the mundane of what's around us invoking a state of awareness, appreciation, gratitude for the small things and realising the beauty in the world. By creating this deeper connection I aim to reinvigorate feelings and values of love, consideration and kindness helping to shift towards a more sustainable way of living by becoming aware of the destructive outcomes our current resource metabolisms are having on our planet. A reminder that our wellbeing is intertwined with our earth’s ecosystem with the hope to recentre around a more cyclic way of living.     

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Forms and counterforms

- Inspo from Adrian Frutiger and Koloman Moser

- Adrian Frutiger - a sweiss typeface designer

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Key themes

- relationship of capitalism to design

- role as designers

- interdependency and interconnectedness with everything with the main focus on the natural world and how we are effecting it.

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Enzo Mari - Context

Politics infused everything that the designer Enzo Mari touched. 

He produced thousands of objects over a 60-year career, from pen holders and toys to chairs and vases. Each of those items drew inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement, in the simplicity of their form, and from his own uncompromising belief in communism.

Mari was dismissive of such success. “When I design an object and people say: ‘Oh, well done!’, I unfailingly ask myself, Where did I go wrong? If everybody likes it, it means I have confirmed the existing reality and this is precisely what I don’t want,” he told Domus magazine in 1997.

While he strove to make his work affordable, he believed those making the products should be compensated well. Mass furniture, he told Icon magazine in 2009, was “cheap because of the blood of the people”. Nor was he keen on his peers producing high-end design, labelling most as “publicity whores”.

“He refused to play the game of galleries, of the commercialisation of his designs into fetishes,”In 1947 Luigi became ill, and this left the family destitute. Enzo quit school, taking on odd jobs to help his mother. He delivered cabbages, dragging the sacks across town by hand; he worked as a bricklayer, and sold soap. The experience not only fed his politics but also how he approached design. “I would carefully observe the way the simple people I ran into behaved,” he said, storing away memories of how people used and handled everyday objects.

he taught at the Scuola Umanitaria in his home city, the first of several teaching appointments, in Carrara, Florence, Berlin and Vienna. He would tell his students that on graduation their aim must be “deconditioning people from the god of merchandise”.

Worked for Alessi

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Christoph Niemann - Methods

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Christoph Niemann - Methods

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Christoph Niemann

Quirky illustrator

Known for his vast stylistic sensibilities and quick-witted illustrative hand.

He uses drawing to capture the joy and transformative potential of the imagination.

Christoph’s Instagram photos, particularly his Sunday Sketches – a series for which he takes ordinary objects and brings them to life in surprising and whimsical ways.

The Sunday Sketches are an important exercise that keeps Christoph on his toes. These drawings will take something ordinary like a pair of headphones and turn them into a gorilla’s face, highlighters will become lightsabers, and a credit card will become the trunk of a chopped tree. “For me, it’s not about having a goal but instead about thinking: ‘Where does that object take me?’” says Christoph

We have these stock images of life in our head, and only when you start looking at real life and the imperfections do things start to become fun.”

It’s an “exercise in looking,” one that appears effortless but actually takes a lot of time, thought, planning and patience. “The drawings are a bit like actors: if you see how many times I’ve tried and erased and planned, it’s boring,” he says.

“Making imperfections fun”

“A drawing is like when you describe something to a reader in three sentences.”

https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/christoph-niemann-berlin-studio-interview

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Spin Design studio was asked to design a cocktail book for the publisher  Corps Reviver. 

L’Heure du Cocktail is a witty, opinionated book of recipes and drinking etiquette from 1920s Paris. It was seen as very avant-garde when it was published in 1927. No French cocktail books looked like it at the time. The content was organised by hours, illustrations, the recipes were created by poets and film-makers.  

Corps Reviver asked Spin design studio to design a new release of the book.  Spin has instead created a beautifully pared-back book of black ink drawings and simple text recipes on coloured paper stock.

“The paper is a hint at the passing of time, the sun setting,” explains Spin founder Tony Brook. “The book suggests the right cocktail to drink at the right time over an evening, and early hours of the morning.

Images were created using ink and brush. “They were inspired by some imagery in the original book. My version is a much more abstract, painterly response, meant to allude to the affects of the cocktails over time.”

The cover also fuses the concepts of time and drinking: “It suggests a clock face, made by painting the bottom of a glass,” says Tony. “The typography, designed by Claudia Klat and Gaby Luong, is very structured and refined, providing a nice, sharp, contemporary contrast to the organic nature of the painting.”

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/spin-corps-reviver-lheure-du-cocktail-cocktail-hour-book-050617 

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Born Naked Book, Editorial by Jun Lin A collection of essays, photographic works, and series of studies on human posture, the book addresses day-to-day manifestations of explicit and internalized misogyny, proposing a perspective on gender where the feminine and the masculine are not in direct opposition.

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Jun Li

Was inspired by words that sparked her interest in Graphic Design

Studied foreign languages and Literatures in Taipai

Wrote something everyday - wasn’t sure what to do with the body of work, though she knew she wanted to make something of it.

Inspired by people making zines so started making zines herself 

This inspired her to become interested in photography and layout design to help her complement the words

Took an interest in the creative process and printing the zines - “I liked the way design brought physicality and dimension to words,” 

Quickly learnt that each delicate creative decision informs the way words are understood. Realising the power that typography, colour, paper stock, size and so on can have on a work, she began to understand graphic design as a language: “It has tone, emotion, accent – and it allows us to say things in a certain way.”

What did you learn through your Graphic Design practice? “I walked away with the lesson that there are no right or wrong answers but rather possible interpretations, and to accept complexity as part of life and work.” It’s an ethos that’s continued to inform her practice to date, a practice of open mindedness and inclusivity.

Now, her pared back work is imbued with subtle meaning expressed through the layered nuances of words. Using her poetry, writing and more generally, the symbolic meaning of language, as a means of kickstarting her designs, Jun’s graphic design practice is both style and substance. She explores topics of written censorship, speech empowerment and language perception in her thoughtful practice. And more often than not, the result takes the form of effortlessly elegant printed matter or typographic explorations.

In Format, a hypothetical publishing house for example, Jun imagines what experimental and conceptual publishing can be in the digital age. “Publications come out in unconventional formats with the aim to create new reading experiences for the reader while prompting the audience to consider the relationship between form and content,” Jun explains. It started out as an exploration into graphic designer-publishers and a curiosity into what alternative publishing can look like in the future.

Jun explores questions such as “What are the differences between reading in print and on the web?”

In response to this question, Jun designed The Scroll, a 400 inch long scroll printed on bond paper and also available in web format. It interrogates how print can replicate the experience of reading on the web, an expansion on Duchamp’s concept of infrathin (inframince) which refers to the minute differences between experience and perception.

In turn, in The Scroll, the printed publication replicates the web. By comparing and contrasting the two different scrolls, Jun highlights the margins between experience and perception. The physical scroll for example has a mighty physical presence in its mere length whereas the digital scroll seems more convenient to navigate. All in all, as Jun hinted to previously, the project was not about looking for the right or wrong answers. “It was really just about asking questions and exploring possibilities.”

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/jun-lin-format-graphic-design-051020