Brahma, a Brazilian beer brand, had an idea.

In preparation for Carnival in Rio earlier this year, Brahma created a cell phone that partiers would be okay with breaking or losing. As the Carnival’s biggest sponsor, Brahma took on the challenge of preserving the carefree revelry inherent to the festival by devising a phone stripped down to just the essentials— the ability to call and SMS text, a GPS and transportation app, as well as an 8-megapixel camera. “This innovation lets party-seekers leave their high-tech worries behind, ensuring the celebratory spirit remains unbroken,” the brand shared in a statement.

Brahma leaned into the comedy of the Brahma Phone concept in their marketing campaign, playing up that the phone is bare bones and undesirable, and that’s the whole point. “Meet ‘Brahma Phone’: A phone created by a brand who understands everything about Carnival and nothing about cell phones,” they proclaim. “We thought of a phone that is so bad, with only the features that no one would want to steal,” said Nicholas Bergantin, co-CCO of the São Paulo-based creative agency Africa Creative, who worked with Brahma on the campaign.

“Brahma is more than a beer; it’s a brand that solves real problems for those eager to celebrate life fully,” elaborated Sergio Gordilho, Co-President and CCO of Africa Creative. “This project perfectly encapsulates our approach to meaningful engagement with our consumers.” And engaged they are! The Brahma Phone has proven to be a major success as the most viral Carnival brand action of the year and is becoming a festival must-have.

Bolstered by this initial success, the Brahma Phone initiative is poised to spread far beyond Brazil and Carnival. Brahma and Africa Creative are keen on sharing the Brahma Phone with attendees of other events similar to Carnival, where phone theft can kill the buzz. Brahma’s mission to problem-solve, exemplified by the Brahma Phone, is just revving up; they want to continue enhancing audiences’ experiences with innovations that prioritize letting go, simplicity, and the essence of celebration.

Push’s visual character and personality shine through in the spacious counter of the capital ‘G,’ inspired by Thorowgood’s Seven-Line Grotesque (1830), and a lowercase ‘a’ (reminiscent of Plak, 1930) that presents as both squat and tall. Speaking of the letter ‘G,’ there’s also a looped American version, an open-looped Danish version, and a two-story Grotesk in the lowercase set.

Across its eight weights, seven widths, and 56(!) styles, Push showcases a blend of the Old and New—a type chameleon for the designer’s toolbox. The range of possibilities across the width, weight, and shape spectrum gives designers typographic versatility for today’s multifaceted, complex, and multi-media brand applications.

Push was created by Swiss designer, Christine Gertsch out of Fontwerk, a Berlin foundry known for helping brands stand out with type.

Drawing the best from the past century of type design, Push has been a labor of love to create a typeface that works hard under any conditions and will endure the test of time.

Christine Gertsch

Fontwerk tapped Rocket & Wink, a design-art-graphic-brand-bureau-agency-whatever (their words) from Hamburg, Germany, to create a video campaign that showcases Push in all its glory.

That’s why when I came upon photos of the new RIXO location in the Marylebone neighborhood of London, I was instantly captivated and had to learn more about the unique design concept and those behind it.

RIXO is a contemporary clothing boutique specializing in bohemian sundresses and vibrant prints. Their new Marylebone location brings the whimsical energy of their clothing to life, with brightly colored architectural motifs organically illustrated all over its otherwise crisp white walls. The saturated color palette and hand-drawn line quality create a pop-art-like look, infusing the space with a playful take on classical design elements. Illustrator Sam Wood developed this aesthetic in partnership with the design studio Cúpla, helmed by Gemma McCloskey. I reached out to Wood and McCloskey to learn more about the process behind their design concept and what it was like bringing such a fresh take on retail space to fruition.

(This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

What was the development process like for this distinct store design concept?

Sam Wood: The initial process was driven by Gemma. She approached me after seeing some of my work with Claridge’s and other clients in the UK and asked me to devise something bold and colorful that told the story of RIXO in a distinctly new way.

GM: When I first stumbled across Sam’s Instagram page, his use of color felt really bright and fresh alongside his beautiful, fluid style. I knew instantly Sam would be perfect for the new Marylebone RIXO; his handwriting lent itself to enveloping the whole space while still allowing it to breathe.

SW: After I had taken a look at the other RIXO stores and got a feel for their story, it was a pleasure to bring something of Marylebone to the space and interpret that in my own line. I spend a lot of time in the area because a local gallery I work with is down the road, so I’m always roaming about looking at the mishmash of architecture from Gothic Revival (which was the basis of the alcoves) to Neoclassical (which was the basis for the floral details). I hope the eventual style reflects the multiplicity of the area and is a playful reference to how I see things existing alongside each other.

What was the rest of the collaboration process like?

GM: We had an initial meeting where I discussed the concept, design, and materials being used in the space. One of the threads from our concept for Marylebone was this nod to classical London architecture; therefore, creating illustrated paneling with a whiff of Jean Cocteau was the foundation of the design. Within this framework, it was important to give Sam the breathing space to be creative, and it was exciting seeing him embrace the concept and bring his own stamp to the design. 

Once we had reached the final internal designs, we decided we needed to use these on the external windows to fully embrace the concept. When Sam was actually onsite doing the mural, it was a very fluid process, and we would discuss colors and tweak a few things with the benefit of actually being in the space. We also added in some of the pendants which sit centrally in the space and look great.

Did you first map out the design digitally and then bring it to life on the store walls? What was it like free-handing the motifs? Nerve-wracking, exhilarating?  

SW: I am a stickler for being analogue early on; I work on full-scale drawings on paper, which gives me an idea of how the motifs will work at scale as well as the tones and quality of line. The client does not always see these, but they are an essential part of how I conceive of a design and have the confidence to execute it. After this, I can mark up the digital renders to hone the design so the client can get a full idea of the vision.

A great deal of forward planning and preparatory drawing goes into making sure that when I put the pen on the wall, it’s all where it should be. That’s an essential collaborative exercise, in this instance, with Gemma, who was fantastic to work with. Building sites are often chaotic places, which is a far cry from my day-to-day in the studio, so yes, it’s a heart-in-mouth moment every time with the first mark on the wall, but I do get a kick out of it!

Is this markers-on-walls technique a style you’ve done before? Or was it specially created and executed for this particular project?  

SW: I’ve used Posca markers for years in various contexts, they have such a nice uniformity of tone, which is ideal for bringing to life a design which needs to keep its clarity and “poppyness.” I used them for the first time in a mural context last year for Bryan O’Sullivan Studio, painting a celestial ceiling which is still on show in their gallery on Brook Street Mayfair.

Ordinarily I use a brush and acrylic when doing murals, so it was fun to what is possible with these works in the medium.

How did you feel at the end of the process after drawing your last line, stepping back, and seeing the completed store? 

SW: It’s always a moment of thinking, “Is it finished now?” There’s always the possibility of another line, filling out this corner, or changing that line. I habitually look for flaws in a work, and the “finished product” is always an opportunity to see how everything has worked together. It’s a strange feeling to hand the thing over— after a couple of days of the room being yours, it now belongs to the client and, of course, the public, who interprets it in their own way. That’s why I love working so spatially— the works sometimes divide people, but once I’m finished, that’s down to the viewers.

What sort of experience do you hope shoppers have when stepping into this RIXO store? What sensations do you hope they feel as they move about the space you all created? 

SW: So much of what I do is about storytelling and creating places where people can escape in some way. Here, the murals are front and center in the design and are a key part of the store’s identity. I hope anyone coming into the space gets a sense of the layers of detail that go into evoking the story that RIXO wants to tell, as well as how my own journey as an artist marries with that.

GM: We want the shoppers to feel invited like they’re stepping into someone’s living room at home. We didn’t want a sterile interior, which can sometimes be intimidating for a shopper. There is also a sense of escapism with the store, which we hope the customers find uplifting.

As part of this imperative, JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles has an on-site gallery space where they host rotating exhibitions that celebrate Japanese culture and highlight creators who embrace Japanese aesthetics. On view now is “DESIGN MUSEUM JAPAN | Bridging Design and Life,” which I had the delight of personally touring.

DESIGN MUSEUM JAPAN features six Japanese creators—Tsuyoshi Tane (architect), Tamae Hirokawa (fashion designer), Koichiro Tsujikawa (film director), Tetsuya Mizuguchi (experience architect), Kinya Tagawa (design engineer), and Reiko Sudo (textile designer)—who have each conducted in-depth research into six Japanese design treasures that exemplify the design culture of a specific area of Japan. The show breaks down the back stories of each design and its connection to the region, brought to life with insights from the researchers.

I was particularly intrigued by the research of textile designer Reiko Sudo, who dove into athletic uniform development at a sports manufacturer in Toyama Prefecture in the Hokuriku region. This exhibition section displays the three position-specific jersey designs Team Japan wore at the 2019 Rugby World Cup. The jerseys’ fabric, worn like a membrane, was formed three-dimensionally using heat. It is lightweight, tear-resistant, and dries quickly.

Deeper into the exhibition, I came to Kinya Tagawa’s research, which explores the creative process of product designer Sori Yanagi. Tagawa focused his investigation on Yanagi’s cutlery collection, which the designer fashions from single strands of metal or other materials.

Another standout section for me was film director Koichiro Tsujikawa’s research into spinning tops at the Japan Toy Museum in Himeji, Hyōgo prefecture. As our first contact with design, toys embody design in its most primitive form, and spinning tops, in particular, have the power to attract, elate, and entrance humans

DESIGN MUSEUM JAPAN will run at JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles through April 14. Entry is free, so you can save your money for the carefully curated gift shop in the front.

Images of the exhibition are courtesy of the author.

Conran Design Group (CDG), a prominent brand and design consultancy under Havas — one of the world’s largest global communications groups — has unveiled a distinctive new brand identity. Positioned as Havas’ flagship brand and design network, CDG introduces an exciting purpose: design to inspire progress.

This purpose is not just a tagline but a guiding philosophy shaping every aspect of Conran Design Group’s identity. The brand adopts a striking typographic approach spearheaded by Jean François Porchez, a French type designer recognized for his work with Le Monde and the type for the French Olympic team. The new logo emphasizes that design is central to business and everyday life. Meanwhile, bold iconography captures the essence of its diverse locations, showcasing the brand’s global presence.

The rebranding effort extends beyond aesthetics, reflecting an evolved proposition that integrates sustainability across its offerings. With a renewed focus on brand strategy, design, experience design, and communications, CDG aims to deliver meaningful progress for businesses, individuals, and society.

“Fundamentally, the new brand places design at the heart of the offer; it’s central to our name, history, and future and reflects an unwavering belief that progress needs to be designed. The new marque, with the D at the centre of the C, is at the core of the identity and a shorthand for our positioning. It feels confident, full of personality, and culturally relevant,” says Lee Hoddy, Executive Creative Director.

The launch of Conran Design Group’s new brand identity aligns with the introduction of Citizen Brands, a study and accompanying framework designed to help brand leaders achieve balanced growth in an unbalanced world. The study offers a comprehensive brand and design strategy to guide leaders in creating brand experiences catering to both individual preferences and societal good.

CDG’s reinvigorated identity reaffirms its legacy and propels it into a new era of creativity and impact. With its unwavering belief in the power of design to drive positive change, Conran Design Group seeks to continue shaping the future of brands.

Located within the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland, Tauron Lab stands out as a state-of-the-art new media laboratory in Europe. Offering groundbreaking audiovisual technologies, Tauron Lab provides a unique platform for artists and scientists alike to explore creativity in an immersive environment.

Operated by the Soundscape Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the urban sound environment through research and education, Tauron Lab serves as a nexus where culture, art, and technology intersect. Creative agency Meteora, located in Kraków, was tasked with developing the brand identity for this experimental audiovisual lab — no small feat bringing sound experimentation to visual representation.

Since its official opening in September 2023, Tauron Lab has been a hub of creative activity. The multidimensional space hosts a diverse array of initiatives tailored to cater to various audiences. At the heart of its offerings is Tonarium, a futuristic sound tool that facilitates experimentation with audio. 

The lab also showcases various audiovisual technologies, events showcasing cutting-edge technologies, artistic residencies focusing on innovation, workshops for both kids and adults, and installations highlighting experimental prototypes.

One of Tauron Lab’s key features is its artistic residencies, which provide opportunities for artists to delve into cutting-edge technologies such as three-dimensional sound systems and spatialization methods. These residencies aim to foster experimentation and innovation in artistic expression.

To visually communicate these initiatives, the Soundscape team collaborated with Meteora on crafting a comprehensive identity system incorporating typography, geometric shapes, and dynamic animations, each tailored to reflect the nature of the lab’s diverse events. The goal was to create a transparent identity that enhances, rather than overshadows, the content of each event.

Tauron Lab aims to be more than just a laboratory; rather, it is a dynamic space where creativity knows no bounds and the fusion of art and technology opens new realms of possibility.

Since its founding, National Geographic, or NatGeo for short, has evolved into a multifaceted platform spanning print, digital, television, and more, exploring science, geography, history, and culture. NatGeo seeks to inspire curiosity, foster understanding, and champion conservation efforts worldwide through its articles, documentaries, educational initiatives, and photography.

The globally recognized magazine, which has over 84 million monthly readers, unveiled a significant design refresh this month. This transformation, revealed in the March issue, marks the debut under Editor-in-Chief Nathan Lump and Creative Director Paul Martinez, who assumed their roles in 2022. With Lump’s rich editorial background, including publications like TIME and The New York Times, alongside Martinez’s creative expertise at Travel + Leisure, the duo brings a bedrock of experience to the publication.

The key design and content highlights include:

• New sections, including “In Focus,” a selection of full-page images from National Geographic’s photographers in the field, amplify the focus on photography and visual storytelling.
• Short-form content is now interspersed with in-depth features to create a more varied and dynamic reading experience.
• A larger typeface for an easier read – an intentional update taking reader feedback into account.
• And a subscriber-only cover that features more artful, intimate visuals.

I reached out to Lump and Martinez, eager to discuss the driving forces behind this redesign and their plans for holding 130+ years of tradition, while addressing the evolving needs of print and digital audiences. Our conversation (condensed for length and clarity), is below.

The redesign marks a significant shift in National Geographic‘s visual identity and content structure. What was the inspiration behind deciding to introduce new sections like “In Focus” and the added emphasis on visual storytelling?

NL: We’ve had an emphasis on visual storytelling in our pages for many decades, so while I don’t see our recent adjustments as a particular shift in that direction, we are continually looking for ways to heighten for the reader what is special about what we do. The core of our mission is helping readers to discover and better understand the wonder of our world, and for me, a lot of what I wanted to accomplish with this refresh was to showcase the true diversity of the subjects we cover and what we’re learning about them – from animal behavior to science to history and more. Our new recurring story types are designed to do just that. “In Focus,” a handful of pages at the start of the book, is in many ways a microcosm of that wider approach: we are fortunate to have relationships with great photographers around the globe who are always at work, and this column brings readers a selection of their recent images from out in the field, across the full spectrum of topics of interest to our readers. 

PM: A segment such as “In Focus” truly emphasizes one of our strengths: photography. Placing this at the forefront is not just about captivating the reader with compelling images but also about swiftly propelling them into the heart of the magazine. This seamless transition leads directly into our initial main feature, where we aim for readers to immerse themselves in a deeper narrative.

How do you balance honoring the magazine’s rich heritage of storytelling, particularly through its iconic photography, while also pushing boundaries in today’s media landscape? In what ways does the redesign reflect the evolution of storytelling mediums and audience preferences?

NL: I am extremely conscious of our legacy and of the incredibly loyal, devoted readership we are fortunate to have, and of course that makes you be very deliberate and thoughtful when you make changes. But legacy can also lead you to be too conservative and hold you back from making genuine improvements in the service of your audience. My feeling is that as long as you retain your commitment to telling meaningful stories that align with your brand and meet your reader’s expectations of quality, you have permission to adjust as long as you are putting yourself in the reader’s shoes and thinking about what will serve them best. I thought a lot about what it means to innovate in print as we approached this work and tried to ask myself whether traditional conventions still held true. Years of working on digital content and products have grounded me in UX thinking and research, and I drew on that in this process. Our decision to radically simplify the book structure—essentially, almost the entire magazine is one unnamed “section” that consists of shorter and longer stories mixed together—stems from an understanding that digital and social environments have conditioned us to consume content in more free-flowing and serendipitous way. The story selection and flow are still highly curated, as any great magazine should be, but it allows for more variation and surprise that we think makes the overall experience more pleasurable and engaging.

Design plays a significant role in ensuring that readers do not encounter difficulty with the content.

Paul Martinez, Creative Director

The decision to incorporate more short-form content alongside in-depth features is interesting. How do you navigate maintaining depth and substance while catering to shorter attention spans in today’s digital age?

PM: Many of our decisions revolved around the concept of pacing. Our strategy involved interspersing shorter stories among the longer ones to create a dynamic flow of peaks and valleys for the reader. We discovered that grouping all the longer features together risked reader fatigue, so placing shorter pieces between them offers readers a chance to engage swiftly with the content.

From a design standpoint, we aimed to signal to the reader when they were transitioning from a longer feature to a shorter story. To achieve this, we developed a consistent template for the shorter stories, facilitating a smooth exit from and entrance into the longer features. Additionally, we sought to engage the typographer more in introducing the features to signify the beginning of a substantial story.

Typography plays a crucial role in readability and accessibility, and your decision to introduce a larger typeface reflects a commitment to improving the reader experience. How did you approach this aspect of the redesign, particularly in response to reader feedback?

PM: Ensuring readability is a constant and top priority. Design plays a significant role in ensuring that readers do not encounter difficulty with the content. Moreover, from an aesthetic perspective, we aimed to provide sufficient space for the increased type size in the body copy and captions to breathe. By augmenting the white space in the layouts, we were able to strike that delicate balance and hopefully improve the reader experience.

The subscriber-only cover featuring more artful and intimate visuals is a bold move, especially in an era where digital content often takes precedence. What motivated this decision, and how do you see it contributing to the magazine’s relationship with its most loyal readers?

NL: I am conscious that our relationship with subscribers is a personal one—they’ve invited us into their homes—and that the experience of receiving a printed magazine in the mail and diving into it on your sofa is quite particular relative to other ways that you encounter content in other environments and platforms. On a traditional newsstand, you need to shout, as it were, to gain a potential reader’s attention. In digital, it’s much the same—you have milliseconds in someone’s scrolling to grab their attention. When they’ve subscribed, they’ve already indicated an interest in your content and a willingness to engage. That’s not to say that the cover doesn’t need to provoke engagement, but when you hold a magazine in your hands at home, you are quite literally up close and personal with it. That allows us, I think, to showcase artistry and to be quieter in our choice of image when it’s appropriate, and we deliberately went minimal with type, in a nod to the old National Geographics with type-only covers that essentially served as a table of contents. Our goal is still to intrigue or to move the reader in some way, but we can take a different approach that we hope delivers something tailored to the subscriber’s mindset now that they’re ready to sit down and read.

How do you navigate the preferences and consumption habits of print readers versus digital consumers, and what lessons can other content creators learn from your experience? Any advice for media companies looking to strengthen connections with their audiences in an increasingly digital landscape?

NL: Like many publishers, we know that our print and digital audiences are quite distinct, and while they share some common affinities, they are not mirror images of each other. For many years, at other titles, I tried to achieve nearly total platform convergence—with all content designed to flow seamlessly between platforms—but I no longer think that’s the best approach. Increasingly, we take a fluid approach to our content creation, with some stories designed specifically to satisfy the needs of either print or digital (or social) audiences, and then selectively, those stories migrate to other platforms, often with modifications and sometimes in a different medium. It’s more bespoke and requires more care, but if you build the intention into your production process from the outset, you can ensure you’re generating the right type of material and minimize the effort required after the fact. This is an essential part of being responsive to audience preferences. What will work for a certain type of reader or user in one place will not necessarily work for another reader or user somewhere else. My goal with all our storytelling is to maximize the reach and impact of our work, and the way that works is by recognizing how preferences and behaviors vary based on where someone is and their mindset. The through line, of course, is quality – personally, I find this thinking and the process it informs so much more creatively energizing than when I started my career, although it is undoubtedly more complicated. You can’t do everything all the time, so it’s also important to be mindful of who you are most focused on reaching and strategically what you are trying to get out of building that relationship. I think that today, in digital environments, in particular, success is a lot about super-serving more specific audiences and interests. In some ways, we’ve always done this with our printed magazines, so we’re well positioned to thrive wherever we may be because we think consumer-first, fundamentally, and build that into everything we do.

What struck us was Splinter’s graphic quality. The font plays with the limits of legibility, presenting itself as a sort of futuristic dot matrix with opportunities for patterns and graphic flourishes.

Splinter’s visual presentation aside, we love the ride-along on Goyal’s process, which she outlines in the Splinter Diaries. The series is for Universal Thirst Gazette, an online resource for designers, researchers, and students to encourage discussion and interest in Indic type (and type generally).

In her first installment for the Splinter Diaries, Goyal lays out her initial exploration of a grid-based system and how to render the shirorekha (or the horizontal line above the characters), diacritics such as matras (vowel modifiers), conjuncts (adjoining consonants), and symbols such as the kana (क, ठ, with a central vertical stem).

Top: found lettering, the title of a book by Hindi author Devendranath Sharma. The creator of the cover design is unknown;
Bottom: the digitized version.

For now, Splinter supports the basic Devanagari character set and some support for Hindi conjuncts and Marathi and Nepali glyphs. The typeface will expand as it develops to cover the Latin upper case, followed by other Indic scripts. Find Splinter on FutureFonts.

Namrata Goyal pursued her love of type at TypeAtCooper in New York and TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, Netherlands (her thesis explored newspaper type and multi-script typography). At Universal Thirst, Namrata primarily focuses on North Indian and Latin scripts. She also publishes independent projects on FutureFonts.

Indian block printing was put on the map in Jaipur by a craftswoman named Kitty Rae in the 1960s. Known as the “Godmother of Block Printing,” Rae was pivotal in introducing and popularizing this craft in the West. She ran the oldest block printing facility in the region called KIN Fabrics, located in the heart of Jaipur, peddling furniture fabric. In 2016, an American named Sarah Zellweger came upon KIN, a moment marking the genesis of SZ Blockprints.

After Rae’s passing, Zellweger maintained contact with her daughter, Manju, and granddaughter, Yuva, who had taken over KIN. Working closely with Manju and Yuva and KIN’s puraana blocks, Zellweger honed her eye and skill in creating her own Indian block print patterns and then ultimately launched her label SZ Blockprints out of the KIN studios. SZ Blockprints keeps the 4th-generation block printing studio alive, continuing Rae’s legacy in craft and spirit. All of their clothing is small batch, with every piece produced block by block, with each pattern fitting together like a puzzle.

Central to SZ Blockprints is their dedication to the Jaipur creative community. They provide long-term employment opportunities to over 120 skilled and dedicated local artisans, and each of the tassels used in their designs is hand-made in a women-run tassel business in Jaipur. This attention to detail and handcraft emanates from each SZ Blockprints’ design and garment and is the heart of what makes Indian block printing so singular.

Completely captivated by Indian block printing as an art form and the SZ Blockprints’ story, I reached out to Zellweger to learn more. Her responses to my questions are below.

The entire process is so human, so flawed, and that is why I think I fell in love with it.

What is it about the technique and look of Indian block printing that you find so captivating? Why have you dedicated so much of yourself to standing guard for this ancient technique? 

I find the element of imperfection to be really captivating. Each piece is a museum-quality mini artwork created by a master craftsman in their element. It’s the small details, the differences of mere millimeters, that have a huge emotional impact on the overall feeling and presence of a print. The entire process is so human, so flawed, and that is why I think I fell in love with it.

Why do you think Indian block printing has endured when other fashion trends and styles have not? What sets Indian block printing apart?

Indian block prints are timeless, and I believe that’s why their prominence and endurance are limitless. The prints and process both derive from a life source that is so personal to the people who played a part in the creation of the print— the artisan who carved the wood block, the artisan who mixed the dyes, printed on the fabric, washed the fabric by hand and foot, etc., etc. The popularity of Indian block prints isn’t driven by trend; it’s driven by the innate wondering and longing for person-to-person connection.

The popularity of Indian block prints isn’t driven by trend, it’s driven by the innate wondering and longing for person-to-person connection.

Do you see Indian block printing as a much-needed antidote to the ever-growing world of fast fashion? 

Absolutely. The fast fashion cycle is so careless and really skews the reality of what it means to select, purchase, and care for a garment. At SZ Blockprints, we are the absolute antidote to this harmful and destructive cycle and thrive on our distance from fast fashion.

What’s the most challenging part of the Indian block printing process? 

The most challenging part is it is a wild and unpredictable process and art form. I wouldn’t describe it as challenging per se, though; it’s more of a lesson in letting go. Weather, mood, health— it all plays an essential part in the dance of the actual printing.

How does it feel knowing you’re keeping Kitty Rae’s legacy alive? 

Firstly, I could never imagine taking credit for any of this, specifically keeping Kitty’s legacy (and prints!) alive, as any sort of solo mission. Every single part of the business and the design process is a collaboration. On an emotional level, Kitty’s family are my partners with whom I have grown the business, and we deeply trust one another. Our vision, which continues to refine and evolve, is symbiotic and flows together. There is an ease in these relationships, which can only be described as “meant to be.”

Having an appreciation for vehicles instilled in me at a young age by my father, I couldn’t help feeling a strong sense of deja vu when looking at the new logo and photos from CES. Where have I seen this before? Why does my mind automatically jump to my childhood watching Blade Runner, Tron, and Back to the Future? Visions of DeLoreans racing in my head …

Because I have seen this before.

Honda is attempting to marry cutting-edge electric vehicle technology with a nostalgic design philosophy, retrofuturism.

Retrofuturism is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. If futurism is sometimes called a “science” bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is remembering that anticipation. I’m still waiting on my flying car.

However, as the automotive industry is familiar with retrofuturism, the question arises: is Honda’s approach truly novel, or does it fall flat in pursuing innovation?

While Honda’s attempt to infuse the 0 Series with a sense of nostalgia is commendable (if it was indeed the strategy), it also raises questions about the originality of the approach. Numerous automakers have explored similar themes in the past, making it a somewhat predictable move in a landscape that often craves innovation.

Aesthetics vs. Practicality

The two concept cars, the Saloon and the Space-Hub showcase Honda’s commitment to marrying form and function. Saloon’s sleek and aerodynamic design and Space-Hub’s roomy rural-centric approach are aesthetically pleasing. Still, do these designs contribute meaningfully to the practicality and efficiency of electric vehicles, or are they merely a surface-level attempt to stand out in a crowded market?

A “New” Logo

Another blast from the past is the “new” logo. Honda states, “This new H mark expresses our corporate attitude of going beyond our origin and constantly pursuing new challenges and advancements.

This design expression, like two outstretched hands,
represents our commitment to augment the possibilities of mobility and face our users sincerely.” However, the rendition is eerily similar to Honda’s 1961-69 logo; one might argue that this new mark is a refinement rather than something entirely new. I say that there’s a certain irony in “going beyond our origin” by referencing a previously used logo unless that was an intended meta nod to their past.

In that case, Honda, I salute you.

The launch of Honda’s 0 Series electric vehicles presents an interesting blend of nostalgia and modernity. However, the inadvertent lean on retrofuturism raises questions about the originality of the approach, as this design philosophy is a familiar approach. While the Saloon and Space-Hub boast eye-catching aesthetics, the true measure of success for the 0 Series lies in its ability to deliver practicality, efficiency, and a genuinely innovative driving experience. Only time will tell whether Honda’s gamble on retrofuturism pays off or if it proves to be a stale attempt in a rapidly evolving electric vehicle market.

Traditionally filled with money and given as tokens of good wishes, red packets are integral to Chinese New Year celebrations. The Year of the Dragon holds special significance, symbolizing success, honor, and dignity — believed to bring growth, progress, and abundance.

The Secret Little Agency created the Long Bao to celebrate this auspicious year. A play on words, the name is derived from the pronunciation of the Chinese character for dragon, which is ‘lóng’ or ‘loong.’

This dragon year, we decided to extend the red packet and make it long-er.

The Secret Little Agency

Nodding to a rich tradition, The Long Bao also serves up some humor and a contemporary aesthetic, making the symbol of good fortune a unique gift.

This limited edition creation captures the Chinese New Year’s essence and exemplifies The Secret Little Agency’s commitment to creativity and innovation. Founded in 2009, The Secret Little Agency remains the only creative agency in Singapore to be named both Independent and Creative Agency of the Year multiple times in the last decade.

With only 1000 pieces available in this exclusive run, the agency plans to distribute them to friends and partners in Singapore and worldwide. Intrigued? Request your own Long Bao with an email to The Secret Little Agency.

In this dynamic landscape of digital tax filing, Taxfix has emerged as Europe’s leading mobile tax platform, alleviating people’s fears about taxes and finances while making complex tax systems accessible to everyone. With a proven track record of generating over three billion euros in tax refunds, Taxfix, founded in 2017, has transitioned from a disruptor to a market leader. This evolution prompted the need for a strategic rebranding effort undertaken by Kallan & Co — a Helsinki-based design studio for technology-driven businesses that transforms technology into meaningful brand and product experiences.

As Taxfix experienced exponential growth and strengthened its market presence through strategic acquisitions, including the notable Steuerbot, the company needed to redefine its brand from strategy to expression. Kallan & Co faced crafting a brand that asserted Taxfix’s ambitious leadership position and resonated with existing and potential customers and employees. The goal was to align Taxfix’s brand identity with its multi-product and multi-platform expansion, creating a brand that confidently communicated its mission to the world to build trust and inspire advocacy at every customer interaction point.

II had the opportunity to ask the Kallan & Co team to dig further into their process for Taxfix; Luca Picardi, Lead Strategist & Head of Brand Strategy, and Hannu Koho, Design Director, shared their responses with me below.

(Interview edited for clarity and length.)

The central idea of ‘Fix Finance for All’ is powerful. How did Kallan&Co ensure that the concept translated across the visual, verbal, and experiential elements of the Taxfix brand? Any specific design or communication strategies that played a crucial role?

Luca Picardi: At its core, ‘Fix Finance for All’ is an all-encompassing idea that drives everything Taxfix. This spirit informs the company’s culture and behaviour — reinforcing its role in the world to make the complex and messy financial world more accessible and approachable to anyone. Fixing taxes is just the start of their journey.

The primary creative challenge was to capture the invigorating feeling and benefit of customer empowerment that Taxfix provides while balancing it with the calm and credible reassurance of its financial expertise. The goal was to create a brand capable of being precise and pragmatic during taxing times and celebratory during customers’ more rewarding moments. This duality runs throughout the brand, from the tone of voice and photography to colour and typography.

With Taxfix evolving into a multi-product and multi-platform company, how did the design team address the challenge of maintaining a cohesive brand identity across different products and platforms while allowing room for individuality?

Luca Picardi: Taxfix’s expansion into a multi-product and multi-platform company is an ongoing and evolving process, with a long-term trajectory still unfolding. Numerous decisions are pending, and its final direction is yet to be determined.

We were at the beginning of this fast-changing journey during our project. We explored various brand architecture models to swiftly test scenarios within the Taxfix ecosystem. We simulated future products’ potential look and feel, experimenting with different colour schemes and fine-tuning visual elements. Each iteration allowed us to assess how individual products could maintain a distinct identity while remaining seamlessly integrated into the overarching Taxfix brand.

This future-proofing process helped define a really comprehensive and cohesive final brand system in everything from an extensive standardised colour palette range to a deeply responsive typeface choice that works hard in any and all marketing or product contexts.

The emphasis on simplicity, expertise, and user empowerment is evident in Taxfix’s rebrand. Can you share examples of design choices or elements you specifically incorporated to convey these brand values to users?

Hannu Koho: Each brand element was carefully selected to embrace varying levels of simplicity, expertise, and user empowerment. Our creative process began with the key signature financial motifs that served a dual purpose. These symbols provided diverse communication possibilities to simplify and guide people’s financial journeys, encompassing everything from taxes to savings; they also functioned as cropping devices, placing customers at the literal centre stage of the brand. All of this underpins a central value of Taxfix – making finance fit people, not the other way around.

The chosen typeface, ABC ROM, strikes a perfect balance of sturdy precision and expertise while retaining unique quirks and humane characteristics. It became a crucial tool in building customer confidence through the ‘Taxfix voice,’ which is approachable and expert. Additionally, ROM effectively addressed specific challenges in the German market, Taxfix’s largest, by accommodating the lengthy nature of German words, particularly in tax-related content. The diverse widths proved invaluable for clear communication, whether in prominent headlines on marketing billboards or detailed body copy within the app. When it comes to taxes, the fine print matters.

Colour emerged as another crucial element in conveying the brand’s values. We refined a warmer range of green shades — from more vivid to muted and darker tones. Our aim was to keep the ‘green thread’ from the original brand but embed it with more versatility, meaning, and, importantly, energy. To breathe more life into the brand beyond green, we introduced a set of secondary colours, enabling Taxfix the flexibility to speak to different mindsets, emotions, and needs. The palette was inspired by the various colours of the Euro cash notes, given Taxfix’s European roots, with its key markets currently in Germany, Italy, and Spain. These include hues of lilac, gold, and blue. Each colour adds a unique dimension to the brand — communicating everything from calmness and credibility to confidence.

Considering Taxfix’s commitment to putting customers center-stage, how did the design team ensure that the rebrand resonates with the diverse needs and preferences of the user base? Were there any user-centric design principles adopted during the process?

Luca Picardi: Many companies claim they’re all about their customers but fall short in practice. Taxfix, however, truly lives up to its commitment. Right from the initial pitch meeting to every subsequent project session, the customer consistently came first, serving as the guiding principle of our conversations and the structural foundation of the entire project process.

This customer-skewed approach lived through every aspect of our work, from the comprehensive customer research provided by Taxfix to the proactive customer testing embedded at various stages of our branding project. We ran customer testing for two of our brand prototype concepts and, eventually, the final concept, involving thousands of customers. These testing phases emerged as critical milestones, ensuring that our decision-making process wasn’t confined solely to internal perspectives but was also influenced by the external world.

This highly collaborative approach with end-users played a large role in refining our understanding of their needs and preferences, ultimately shaping a brand that resonates authentically with its audience.

With Kallan & Co’s strategic rebranding efforts, Taxfix has successfully evolved into a multi-product and multi-platform company, solidifying its position as Europe’s go-to digital tax platform. The new brand identity, centered around ‘Fix Finance for All,’ reflects Taxfix’s commitment to customer empowerment and sets the stage for continued growth and innovation in the financial technology space.

I took my first trip to Mexico at the end of last year, when my family and I went on a holiday vacation to the small coastal town of Sayulita. Roughly a 45-minute drive from the pulsing parties of Puerto Vallarta, Sayulita is a lesser-known Mexican gem along the western coast in the southern Nayarit region. Sought after primarily by wave-chasing surfers, Sayulita has a population of just about 5,000, though that number ebbs and flows in and out of the tourist season.

Upon arriving in Sayulita days before the new year, with my grandmother’s silver bracelets clanging around my wrists, I was immediately captivated by the small yet spirited fishing village.

Garlands of papel picado of all colors and designs were strung across each of Sayulita’s narrow, cobble-stoned streets. The papel picado motif, swaying softly in the wind with their thin plastic glinting in the sun, wove colorfully throughout the town, physically connecting each shop and restaurant with a celebratory flair.

Sayulita is saturated with bright colors, from the bold-hued stucco of buildings to the painted and mosaic-tiled murals peppering the walls, stairwells, and every other surface in between. As a sign painter myself infatuated by all things hand-painted, I moved through the town, taken by the signage and lettering clearly executed by a human with a paintbrush. I documented many of the hand-painted signs I encountered, like the facade of a custom boot shop and the enamel window sign adorning a golf cart rental service.

At the center of Sayulita sits a baseball field. Home of the Sayulita Jaibos (crabs), this field serves as an epicenter of commerce in the town, as merchants and vendors set up booths around the field’s perimeter each morning to sell their goods for the day. Beaded hummingbird ornaments, ceramic housewares, and embroidered tunics are among the merchants’ most popular items. As I made my laps around the field in search of the perfect trinket keepsakes, pawing through strands of beaded necklaces, haggling for a knock-off Lionel Messi jersey, accumulating abalone hair clips and other mementos, I started to recognize certain design elements and aesthetics I associated with my grandmother. The same penchant for jewel tones and beaded figurines I’d inherited from my mother, I was now tracing back to my grandmother and her time in Mexico.

There’s an abundance of tiles in Sayulita, with stairwells, sidewalks, and restaurant tables festooned with all sorts of these ceramic squares. I’ve been obsessed with tiles for as long as I can remember, and have the annoying habit of taking photos of any noteworthy tile specimen that crosses my path. I spent much of my exploration of Sayulita holding up my family as we walked to dinner or the beach, stopping dead in my tracks to capture the perfect angle of one of the many tiled staircases I came upon.

As a white American visiting Mexico with my white American family, I think it’s important to acknowledge my anxiety about the power dynamics we would inevitably bring with us during our stay. These sensitivities are inherent to traveling and the general concept of “going on vacation.” Maybe it was the baseball field in the center of town, or the local surfers scuttling around the streets barefoot with their boards held over their heads, or the squinty-eyed beach Chihuahua that befriended my dad at the water’s edge, but there was a refreshing integration of the tourists and the local Sayulita community that felt palpable to me. Of course, privilege imbalances will always be at play, and Sayulita is far from immune to that. Still, there was a sense of intimacy within the community we were visiting and a feeling of genuine welcoming from the town that I was grateful for throughout our visit.

As at the end of all great traveling experiences, I left Sayulita feeling as if I understood myself a little bit better. I was able to chart some of the origins of my interest in tiles, bougainvillea, and the color turquoise by spending a week in a little Mexican town that’s bustling with golf carts, fishermen, and sandy street dogs. I feel nostalgic for the trip already, missing the vibrant energy and aesthetic, the humble hum of the streets in the mornings, and the music spilling out from bars at night. Whenever I return from traveling, I question whether or not I imagined the whole thing; did I fabricate that place in my mind or create an alternate reality that I’ve suddenly snapped out of? The particular magic of Sayulita makes me even more dubious, but the newest treasures in my jewelry box give me hope.

BDW’23 aims to be not just an event, but a catalyst for change.

The 18th edition of the annual Barcelona Design Week is officially upon us, running from October 16 through October 28 throughout the city. BDW’23 is explicitly linked to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals by using the occasion of the event to launch a global initiative to promote Sustainable Development Goal number 18: “Design for the Human Future.”

With this theme as its guide, BDW’23 aims to promote a more humane and humanistic future through design to create a positive global impact for all. “Our mission is clear: to harness the power of design to address the most pressing challenges of our time, from climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence to promoting cultural and gender diversity and combating social inequality while promoting sustainable living and responsible consumption,” explained the BDW’23 curator, Alessandro Manetti, in a press release.

The event encompasses diverse activities, from interactive installations, stimulating exhibitions, lectures, practical workshops, roundtables, networking events, and more. Professionals, students, and the general public can engage in 100 activities at the local and international level.

Created by the Barcelona Design Centre in 2006, BDW is a member of the global network of World Design Weeks. This network comprises nearly 40 design festivals worldwide, each promoting and celebrating art, design, and creativity in all forms.

Snelling is an artist in the purest sense of the word. Like any true creative, her artistic practice is central to her soul and isn’t something she can just turn off at the end of a 9-to-5 work day. Each of her projects informs the rest and weaves into the next, creating an atmospheric body of work that feels like its own mini universe. While she has a particular affinity for constructing small-scale sculptures of buildings that often incorporate video, lighting, and sound, she’s also created life-size room installations that have shown at galleries around the world, along with her other work.

The Oakland, California native is presently based at the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She first moved to the city after falling in love with it when she was doing a project at the Frankfurt Historical Museum in 2015, and now much of her work is directly influenced by it. “It’s definitely been inspiring here,” she told me of living in Berlin. “The art scene here is amazing because it’s so international. The scene in the Bay Area is pretty quiet, it feels like, but here, there are artists from all over coming in; there are really big shows and really small project spaces. And then you can hop to Venice or London really easily.”

Snelling currently has sculptures featured in “Suddenly Wonderful,” a Berlinische Galerie exhibition about West Berlin architecture in the 1970s. As part of the show’s mission to preserve and protect these historic buildings, she’s recreated Mäusebunker and Bierpinsel from her unique lens. “These are buildings I look at and I fall in love with them, and want to make them,” she said. “It’s interesting to try to at least capture places that might disappear. It’s really amazing to me that I can have any kind of influence over the actual future of these beautiful buildings; that’s something I didn’t realize I could even be a part of before.”

While we chatted through our computers from across the world from one another, Snelling showed me around her studio space, carrying my floating head from project to project, each in various states of completion. She brought me over to a sculpture of a large industrial apartment building that’s used for social housing located just down the street from her studio. Its windows were filled with media players illuminated with videos, bringing the sculpture to life with an immersive color and movement. She had even considered the back of the sculpture and added visual elements to make it compelling from all sides. “I kind of made the back its own separate piece,” she said. “There’s little details I normally don’t put, like images, but for this one, I wanted to make the back as interesting as the front.”  

Wood and plaster are the fundamental materials in Snelling’s toolbox, along with wall putty, media players, LCD systems, and even a tiny saw which she held up to her screen proudly so I could get a good look at it. “I use this constantly to cut windows and stuff. I hope they never stop making it!” she said. While she primarily uses these building materials now, she cut her teeth as a photographer, studying at the University of New Mexico with a major in art studio and a minor in photography. 

“I was really experimental with photography,” Snelling elaborated. “I was cutting up the negatives, tearing them, taping them. I was influenced by the Starn twins, Joel-Peter Witkin, Cindy Sherman, all these people. Then I started doing a collage series using old Life magazines, and one of the pieces was an apartment building with the front wall missing. Even though it was a two-dimensional piece, I made the rooms look three-dimensional using collage, and that made me think to build a three-dimensional house.” This was the jumping off point for Snelling’s fascination with creating small-scale buildings in her sculpture practice, taking her eye as a photographer and building those images with her hands. 

Snelling is also heavily influenced by film, and some of her work draws on her experiences growing up watching horror movies with her dad. This impact is clear from the film noir energy that emanates from so many of her pieces. “I liked almost every movie I saw and continued being a film buff as a teen,” she said. “Then, when I went to school, I took as many film history classes as I could.” One of her sculptures, “Motel,” is loosely based on the motel from Psycho. “That one had a little pump room in between the two bathrooms, and if you pushed the button, the toilet would fill in one and the shower would go in the other. I really like experimenting and trying to figure this stuff out. Something that always seems to come back and forth in my work is changing skills.” 

While each of Snelling’s pieces is a stunning work of art in its own right, they’re often connected by repeating themes, motifs, and ideas. A particular image or visual element will capture her attention, and she’ll experiment with it in different ways throughout her work. “I like to play with scale with the same subject,” she explained. “Maybe I’ll shoot a real motel that exists, and then build that motel. Or I might take the photo of the motel and put it in a video, or I’ll shoot the motel and put that in a film, and then I might end up blowing up the motel sign and making it into a life-size sign. So the subject repeats often, but in different forms, and it’s all intuitive. When I look at something and think about it, it illustrates how everything in life is not a set thing. It’s fluid and changes depending on who’s looking at what.”

Chatting with Snelling even for just a half-hour offers a media-player-filled window into her kaleidoscopic perspective. Bopping around from thought to thought and corner to corner of her studio, she was eager to share anything she could with me within the limitations of our laptop cameras. As my Zoom meeting timer ticked down, she came upon a few figurines positioned on a table she told me she recently acquired while vacationing in Bangkok. “I loved Bangkok, but I also realized I can’t really take a vacation,” she admitted. “I went to an island nearby and it was pretty boring, so I did some kick-boxing; I went to fights and I took some classes, and I think I’ll do a project on it. Just because I like it.”

Even through the pixels, I could see Snelling eyeing the figurines on the table with intrigue, the gears in her head already spinning. “These are crazy, I don’t know what I’ll do with them…”

Something tells me she’ll figure it out.

In 2020, the racial and cultural reckoning that rippled across the globe snapped the importance of NCC’s mission back into focus. With renewed vigor and urgency, the organization reimagined itself as The Centre for Canadians of African Descent (CCAD). “We can no longer wait,” reads the CCAD website. “Canada can no longer wait, Quebec can no longer wait, Montreal can no longer wait, Little Burgundy can no longer wait for Montreal to have a Black historical site.”

In order to rise and meet the moment, CCAD needed a brand identity that honored the legacy of NCC while elevating it to new heights. Finding the right people for the task was a no-brainer— they tapped local Strategic Brand Consultancy Six Cinquième, helmed by Montreal natives Ash Phillips and Miro Laflaga.

“Working with the CCAD is an honor,” Laflaga told me. “To see an institution that you’ve been aware of since childhood and to have the opportunity to collaborate with them as an adult makes me feel extremely proud.” With creative director Phillips leading the way, Six Cinquième first helped define and align the CCAD’s vision for the future, then designed a new brand identity to bring those aspirations to life.

“Our team gets to become a part of and impact Montreal’s cultural history, which holds immense significance for our community and the creative ecosystem within our city,” Laflaga said of the experience working on a project so near and dear to him and his team. “Collaborating with an institution that stands for something gives the impression that our work carries a significant impact. In reality, we are contributing to the development of society.”

With this appreciation for CCAD fueling their fire, Phillips, Laflaga, and their team dug deep into the history of the organization to ensure they tackled the project with a greater respect and understanding. “There was so much rich history that we were unaware of,” said Laflaga. “It was crucial for us to uncover it if we truly aimed to bring this project to life. We wanted to ensure that the legacy they had built over the years would be reflected in the brand identity we were developing.”

In doing so, Six Cinquième interacted closely with those who held strong connections with the institution, such as the Vice President of the CCAD Andrea Este (the niece of NCC founder Rev. Charles H. Este). They also held workshops with members of CCAD so that the communities the organization serves directly had a voice in the process. “In these sessions, we collaborated with them and challenged their perspectives on the new vision of what the CCAD represents,” said Laflaga. “The outcome of this process allowed us to fully understand what the CCAD was and where it is going.”

The cornerstone of the new brand identity is a carefully crafted logo that highlights the unique and layered experience of Black Canadians, achieved primarily through the outlined patterns of the “C” and “A.” The logo also creates a pattern that serves as a modern-day twist on African prints. 

“I genuinely believe that we have constructed something of which the organization and the people can be proud and will support with pride. To me, that is extremely important in a project,” said Laflaga on the finished product. “We constantly strive to build brands that are reflective of the people behind it, and CCAD is no different. Our team was able to strike a balance between a classic yet modern design, which can be very challenging.”

Due in no small part to the power of Six Cinquième’s rebrand, CCAD has recently rallied around regaining the plot of land where the original NCC had once stood. Despite private developers’ plans to turn the area into condos, progress has been made to restore it to its former glory and put it back in the hands of CCAD.

Severin is a self-described color addict based in Stockholm, Sweden. As a multi-hyphenate colorist, designer, and photographer, her creative background is just as colorful as her aesthetic. She works across a range of disciplines, flexing her skills in interior design, set design, creative direction, and photography, with her love of color as the unifying factor in each.

After coming upon imagery of her recent exhibition “Dimensions of Colour” for FORMEX in Stockholm, I immediately gravitated toward Severin’s carefully considered, yet joyful aesthetic. I reached out to learn more, and Severin’s responses to a few of my questions are below.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

Where does your love of color come from? Have you always loved color?

Well, where do things really start? Everything in life brings us where we are today, right?

So did it start in my early childhood, with a powder pink, wall-to-wall rug? That’s when I unconsciously understood what color and texture could do for a space. Or did it start when I got bad escalating eyesight at age 9? I was devastated, and thought I might lose it. Was it then? I got so obsessed with everything that was visually appealing because it felt so precious. I’m not sure, but I think it definitely plays a part.

Can you walk me through your creative journey to where you are today?

I graduated from Konstfack University of Arts and Crafts in Stockholm, where I studied interior architecture and furniture design. Afterward, first I was an intern, and then an employee at a great architecture studio in Stockholm. I slowly learned the profession, how to run projects, how to deal with clients, and about drawing architecture in general.

But I felt something was missing. It wasn’t only the creative freedom from art school— it was the conformity that was bothering and boring me; the idea about the Scandinavian grace with white beiges and greys. I needed a creative space, and we had this amazing material library in the cellar with lots of materials and colors that were sadly hardly used.

I started to do some kind of visual notes for myself— still lives, testing different combinations of materials and colors, exploring other aesthetics. I captured it with a very early smart phone and put it out on that new app called Instagram. I hardly understood I was posting stuff, hilariously enough— I only wanted to take advantage of those vintage filters to save the pictures to my camera roll. 

But soon, I started to get in contact and connect with other creatives and brands around the world. I took many baby steps toward fully freelancing in 2015 and starting my multidisciplinary journey, first through photography, re-inventing, and discovering shapes and colors from scratch. 

One of my first commissions was creating content for a Canadian shoe brand, doing a photo series on the theme of domestic science where I made a triangle of red cabbage with a lilac background and a cube of meat with a pink background. They paid me in shoes!

So from these smaller scenes, I moved my camera toward architecture and interiors. I got a real camera, and for a few years, I only took architectural photography around the world: in Guadeloupe for Air France, in Mauritius for a hotel designed by Camille Walala, in Spain of the iconic La Muralla Roja by Bofill Architects. I thought it was really liberating to not have to care about function or construction as when designing it. I could just focus on strong visual elements, outtakes angle, shadow play, colors, etc.

But after a while, I wanted to be more and more involved in the design in front of the camera, so I slowly came back to interior design, first by doing set design. One of my first projects was for a color collaboration for Montana Furniture. Through this, I felt I could come back in a new way to interior design and be as free, deconstructed, and abstract as I wanted. 

From where do you draw inspiration? Are there other artists, people, places, styles, or time periods that you look to or who have influenced you? 

Anywhere and everywhere. I can get just as much inspiration from an unexpected detail on a backstreet as from fine art in a gallery. But in general, I’m inspired by modern and postmodern architecture, art deco, playgrounds and games aesthetics, surrealism, graphic design, sunlight, and shadow play.

What project of yours are you proudest of and why?  

I would say “An Apartment of One’s Own,” the exhibition design I did for Sancal during Milan Design Week last year. I enjoyed the creative vision from the company and total creative freedom for me. Also the context (Hey, Milan Design Week!) and the level of customized design. I designed special terrazzo, marbled tops, the kitchen, the book cases, etc. It’s also what I’m proudest of because I dared to be so decorative. 

Then there’s “Dimensions of Colour,” the 250 square meter exhibition design and curation I did myself for FORMEX, Scandinavia’s biggest fair for interior details in Stockholm in January. The challenge was to find, pick, and display 200 products from over 400 exhibitors. I’m very proud of how everything came together, space-wise, [and how] perspectives and framings worked throughout the whole space. Also, in terms of color, every facade, wall, and niche had different colors to create different combinations. It all illustrated my forever, ongoing investigation of color. In terms of color theory, I always say, “Color is always relative, never absolute. It’s what you put next to it that defines it.” 

How do you hope viewers of your work feel when experiencing it? 

Confusion. New dazzling perspectives. Playfulness and beauty.

What’s your favorite color? 

It changes all the time… right now, lime-ish yellow.

But an all-time favorite is peach— delicate, social, warm, playful, yet sophisticated. 

“By involving students from different universities,” says Tomislav Bobinec, faculty organizer of the Institute of Design and Communication at FH Joanneum Graz, “these workshops benefit from diverse perspectives and creative approaches. This collaborative effort enables students to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and gain insights from different cultures and customs, fostering innovative solutions to address tolerance and diversity-related issues.”

The “Students for Tolerance” initiative showcases the power of international collaboration and represents a step forward in harnessing the creativity and energy of the group to address pressing social issues.

The 2023 workshop and exhibition were organized by Bobinec, in collaboration with the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences in Salzgitter, Germany, and the University of Split, Croatia. This event brought together 30 students from 11 different nationalities, showcasing a collection of 32 thought-provoking posters.

In 2022, the workshop and exhibition were organized as a collaborative effort between FH Joanneum Graz, the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Germany, the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and the University of Zagreb in Croatia.

The exhibition has received invitations from various design festivals and shows across Europe, including Designmonat.at in Austria; Berlin Design Week; Universal Design Award Munich; Street Poster Initiative, Ljubljana, Slovenia; and the School for Applied Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. These platforms have recognized the significance and impact of the exhibition, providing a wider audience with the opportunity to engage with the students’ work and messages of tolerance.

Looking ahead to the future, students from Valencia, Spain, and Tel Aviv, Israel, are set to come together in an upcoming collaboration. This exciting development promises to continue the tradition of cross-cultural exchange and dialogue, fostering connections between young designers from different parts of the world.

Photos © Hannah Dornan, fidet

How many readers have even thought about what forms and styles of design, typography and illustration defined and conditioned Iceland’s commercial growth over the past century? I don’t see any hands raised!

Well, soon the chronicle of this deeply frozen history will be uncovered with the first of a two-part textbook, Íslensk Myndmals-Saga, by Gudmundur Oddur Magnusson (below).

Goddur, as he is known, has been a professor of visual communication at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik since 2002. As a scholar, he investigates the heritage of Icelandic imagery and symbols, putting them into context with imagery from other countries, finding connections and patterns. He also hosts regular shows about culture on national television. Alongside his interest in the past, his big heart, eyes and ears are always at the center of what is happening at the present. He has done this ever since he studied under Dieter Roth at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in the ’70s, and he still does it, as a friend and collaborator of artists of all ages.

First, can you tell me more about yourself? Where you were born, why you entered the design practice, and the kind of work you are doing today?
I was born in 1955 in Akureyri—a town in northern Iceland—population now around 20,000 people. I lived there until I was 21 years old. I then moved to Reykjavik to attend The Icelandic College of Art & Crafts in 1976. That school was established in the 1940s (since 1999 it has been known as The Iceland University of the Arts). It took some time to enter the design practice—I always intended to be a graphic designer because of vinyl album covers and posters. But after foundation courses I changed my mind because something exciting was happening. The spirit in the school was changing from being a hardcore modernist school into being post-modern, with heavyweight Fluxus artists on the international level. Swiss/German artist Dieter Roth moved to Iceland in 1957 (he was originally educated as a graphic designer). He did some major interior design inside my head. He was an alcoholic and changed the classroom into a pub. We also had a Fluxus artist from Vienna, Hermann Nitsch, and the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou—this was between 1976 and ’79.

I went through my first detox and rehab in 1984. After that I got a job as an illustrator in a graphic design studio and found out that I knew nothing about typography. So I thought I better change my path from dreaming more and more and doing less and less smoking pot, in the world of fine art, and go for what I always wanted—graphic design—and applied for school on the West Coast of Canada in Vancouver in 1986 (then the Emily Carr College of Art & Design). I met many good educators there; the one who influenced me most was Friedrich Peter (Vivaldi and Magnificat—in the Letraset catalogue). This was the time of the change from analog to digital. We got the first Macs in 1987. I graduated in 1989. I could work after school for one year but then immigration told me to get married or hit the road. I started to teach in this then-new environment for graphic designers and was part of the generation to change the Icelandic College of Art & Crafts to university level in 1999. I taught graphic design or visual communication until 2019, when I became a pensioner and freelance designer. I still keep the position of being research professor at Iceland University of the Arts.

When laying the groundwork for my research, I used Ways of Seeing by John Berger. That led me to Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) and later Alexandra Middle (Design by Accident / For a New History of Design, which changed my point of view a lot) and lots of other works, like Jan Tsichihold’s The New Typography from 1928. The interesting thing about that book is that the chairman of The Union of Icelandic Printers was at conference of unions in Leipzig in the late ’20s, and he got a copy in 1929 and translated some excerpts in the Printers union magazine in 1930—and that influenced at least one printer, who got [ennamored] by the idea of a new profession about to be born.

I had no idea that there was such a long history that at once expresses that graphic style and is consistent with current design styles. Who were these printers and designers looking to for inspiration?
This among other things gave me a pattern recognition of ideas. Then I started to collect examples from municipal archives around Iceland and slowly it started to make sense. The influences came also by type specimen catalogues from Germany and from the U.K. Other interesting influences came from Seventh-day Adventist who published a magazine in the beginning of the 20th century (1902) with Art Nouveau type and ornaments—the reason was they were vegetarians and loved these forms of flora. All basic form ideas are like throwing a stone into water, where the ideas are born, and they build a flow of circles around that place that will sooner or later reach other territories.

Were there many surprises for you?
Yes, there were many surprises, because art historians in a small country like Iceland almost ignored applied arts—they were not taken seriously as “real art,” so they did not see that most of the movement from the 19th century and along the 20th century came first in applied arts.

When and where will the book be available?
The plan for the publication is next winter—it could be late this year or early 2024. We have a local publisher ready and waiting for me to deliver.

Of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, I have the most fondness for bunnies. (I once failed to interest publishers in a book on graphic symbolism of the bunny.) So, I am certain that this Lunar New Year—the Year of the Rabbit—will bring us hope and fulfillment. In this respect I was happy to learn that one of my favorite illustrators, Emiliano Ponzi, has his first solo exhibition in China on display at the historic Sun Ke Villa in Shanghai.

The Dreamer: Stories From Another World gives bunnies their due. The exhibited work pays respect to Chinese culture with site-specific custom pieces, sharing space with Ponzi’s European and American archival output. “It’s the first Italian illustrator solo show in China,” he proudly told me. He’s right to be proud, “especially [given] the magnitude of the venue and the number of artworks displayed.” The show continues until March 5.

On view are over 60 artworks created throughout Ponzi’s career, including graphics, editorial illustration, animation and advertising. His first sculpture My Precious Pillow was designed specifically for the Year of the Rabbit.

The Dreamer is what gallery organizers call “a step-by-step travelogue that analyzes the core of creativity. This exhibition is an ensemble, for it bridges two macro worlds of mankind, an open and chaotic inner world in disorder and restlessness and a cold and orderly business world.”

The exhibition is sponsored by Marvis, a century-old Italian dental brand. Inspired by the Mad Hatter (“Reject banality; being crazy helps me keep my head”) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Ponzi’s fluffy wonderland (above) is decorated with imagined scenes for the brand.

His so-called dreamland includes surrounding mirrors and a fluffy meadow to “amplify the imagination.” Craziness in art is often not well-organized. “Mirrors in the space represent a reflection of the real and the imagined,” he notes. “The fluffy bunny guides the audience into the dreamland to explore the boundary between craziness and rationality.”

All this is housed in Sun Ke Villa, one of Shanghai’s most historic buildings in the European (in this case) Spanish Moderne style, which is also a blend Italian Renaissance and Baroque, designed in 1931 by Modernistic architect Laszlo Hudec, known for bringing Art Deco to Shanghai. The villa belonged to the only son of the “founder of modern China,” Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and is located in Columbia Circle on Yan’an Road; as a Western enclave, this district dates back to the 1920s and 1930s.

These elaborate folk alphabets are similar to other beautiful letter arts in many parts of Central and South America, from the street signs, rótulos, in Mexico, to the Fileteado storefront and street vendor signs in Argentina. Martins’ book traces the contemporary art and craft of Pará’s “master artists” of public art—the indigenous sign painters “who are identified by their own codes.”

“Envisioning boats as texts,” as stated in one of the book’s essays, “typical opened letters would be a boat’s informative illumination perceived as ornaments, arabesques, graphics. These letters bring to light an expressive dimension, they clarify meanings that would remain in the shadows, they are arts of light … aesthetic illustrations with a practical purpose.” The same essay uses the analogy of a tattoo: “They are engraved on the surface yet unveil deep contents. They provide native soul to the body of the letter.”

The Amazon floating letters are inspired by 19th-century wood types and metal engraved letterforms, but do not intentionally signal nostalgia. They imbue the waterways with a timeless and vernacular sense of color and form unique to their place in the world while being universal in decorative type design over history. Or, as the essayist notes: “Illuminated boats are like trees, wetlands, birds, the moon, and the stars; they are elements with strong visuality in the rivers of Pará, Amazon. Floating sociocultural centers for conviviality.”

Apparently, this style of hand-painted sign “can still be frequently found” in the streets of many Amazonian cities, and letters by sign-painters prevail over neon. However, the computer-generated variety are making inroads, too.

Last month, to the horror of many of her constituents, Sandra Cuevas, the now-deposed borough president of Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City, ordered her district’s street food stand owners to cover up or remove about 1,500 colorful hand-painted advertisements and replace them with her administration’s logo. She called it an effort to improve the urban environment.

The signs, known as rótulos are joyful. They are often tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes they are crude but mostly they are painted with precise techniques passed down master-to-apprentice through generations.

The highly-guarded methods combine know-how from muralism, typography, calligraphy, and color theory. Many are the result of scarcity and ingenuity. They include tricks like mixing car paint and white gas to get paint that glides smoothly or cutting paint brushes into specific shapes for certain types of lettering. Before graphic design services were widely accessible, business owners with few resources would go to rotulistas for a visual identity. They are ubiquitous in Mexico, a staple of the urban fabric, part of what earns Mexico its reputation for being so colorful.

It is fairly inexplicable that anyone would want to get rid of rótulos. But Hernan Cortés did not conquer Tenochtitlan alone and Sandra Cuevas did not decide to destroy the rótulos out of nowhere. Cortés’ right-hand woman––his enslaved, trilingual, indigenous translator––was known as La Malinche and her legacy has everything to do with the destruction of the iconic advertisements.

The erasure of rótulos can be found at the intersection of fascism, racism, and classism. People on social media have been lobbing these charges at Cuevas for weeks. She has basically responded, “no I’m not.” Either way, she is neither the beginning nor the end of the existential threat facing rótulos.

 “This is a question of cultural identity,” says Dayron Lopez, a designer, muralist and longtime scholar of Mexico’s identidad grafica popular. “The field of design can help us understand this well. We create visual languages as identities.” So the erasure of a visual language is the erasure of an identity. And when the government forcibly erases a culture’s identity… we call that… fascism.

And if we needed proof that Sandra Cuevas is a fascist…a City court decided this month to depose her for multiple counts of corruption and abuse of power, a surprise because you have to behave REALLY badly in Mexican politics to face any consequences. In one complaint, two policemen accused Cuevas of bringing them into her office, stealing their phones and radios, pushing and slapping them, calling them homophobic slurs, and then holding them hostage in her building where she had a group of men beat them for insubordination. She has so far refused to step down, first saying that she hadn’t been notified of the court’s decision and later that they’ll have to kill her to get her out of office. As justification for her white-paint campaign, she said it was an important measure toward “order and discipline.”

But it takes looking beyond Sandra Cuevas’ fascist tendencies to understand why the rótulos are gone.

While rótulos come from popular (as opposed to elite) culture in Mexico, the cultural elite loves rótulos. Within days of the destruction of the signage, art historians, muralists, journalists, comedians, designers, and others formed a group called Re.Chida (Red Chilanga en Defensa del Arte y la Gráfica Popular or “The Chilanga Network in Defense of Art and Popular Graphics”*) to fight the Cuevas administration on the issue. A media storm ensued. So many people in the creative sphere were posting about rótulos that there were memes about how many people were posting about rótulos. Many privileged people in and outside of the organization called for the protection and respect of arte popular and identidad cultural.

Critics have tweeted that hipsters fetishize the rótulos and that the activists rallying behind them are merely concerned with the kitschy aesthetic of their neighborhoods. There certainly is a lot of Instagramming going on––but plenty of activism that seems genuinely rooted in a deep love for rótulos and a desire to protect Mexican culture, too.

Still, the charismatic megafauna (i.e. save the pandas while the whole ecosystem is collapsing around them) phenomenon is at play here. While Mexico’s middle class and lower classes are experiencing rapidly accelerating precarity in all areas of life, why rally behind rótulos? (I was losing my shit about the rótulos on Instagram for weeks. I also direct this question at myself.)

I cannot speak for the people who produce and consume the most rótulos––la gente popular. There is no public opinion data about rótulos. I did not conduct a survey for this essay. But I can say from almost a decade of reporting and market research that in Mexico, the middle class more often grasps at a global culture than a Mexican one.

There’s a name for this in Mexico: malinchismo––named for the aforementioned La Malinche’s betrayal of her people to help the Spanish conquer Mexico. It means a rejection of what is Mexican and a preference for what is foreign. The legacy of colonization, of economic and cultural imperialism is white supremacy.

Malinchismo is why so many middle class Mexicans hate cumbia music and why there’s a discount department store here called Suburbia. It is why you’ll find Starbucks locations in places where most people live in self-constructed homes. It’s why my first roommate in Mexico asked me not to display Mexican crafts in the house.

And almost certainly, it is why rótulos are undesirable to Cuevas: they are too Mexican. Rótulos have been disappearing for a long time and while it’s in part because printed plastic signs are cheaper, that’s not the only reason. Sandra Cuevas is not an anomaly. She pointed this out herself in a press conference, showing images of government-destroyed rótulos in another borough and asking “Where were the classism charges then?” The difference was that the cultural elite lives in Cuauhtémoc. You usually need a lot of cultural capital to exist outside of and reject malinchismo or to have a working discourse of arte popular and identidad cultural.

In response to criticism that she destroyed arte popular, Cuevas has insisted that the rótulos are “not art… definitely not art.” Mexico’s tendency to look down on its own traditions is classist. But it is also classist to look down on people for their malinchismo. It’s a wound nobody should be blamed for having. Not even the very detestable and majorly creepy Sandra Cuevas. Cuevas is indefensible but she did not invent her politics.

The real threat to rótulos is the enormous gulf between those with cultural capital in Mexico and those without it. It would be nice to think that if Cuevas goes down, the rótulos will be saved. In reality, people who want to preserve rótulos are up against the entire legacy of colonialism. Mexico’s lower and middle classes outnumber its cultural elite by a lot. Mexican cultural identity won’t be safe until white supremacy and malinchismo are in check.

All over the world, cheap street markets sell the exact same clothes. Global capitalism ravages local identity everywhere. The more generous reading of the story of La Malinche is that she was a genius political strategist who was working to free herself and her people from the violent rule of the Aztecs. In the fog of war, it’s easy to misidentify the enemy. In the fight to save the rótulos in Mexico and local graphic identities globally, I hope we don’t make the same mistake.

*I worked with this group peripherally for a short time, but what I’ve expressed here does not represent their views.

I saw this firsthand last year when I visited Georgia, a country on the Black Sea with Russia to its north. As a traveler from the United States, it was easy to be fascinated by Soviet Architecture: a stark reminder of a time I didn’t have to live through, in a place I don’t reside. The people who live there have a more complicated relationship to these structures though. While certain buildings in these former Soviet Union countries may have architectural merit, and stand as a reminder of the past, others feel uncomfortably out of place. But what is that line between preservation of the past and perseverance towards a better future?

Soviet architecture refers to construction in the Russian-dominated USSR, which, at its height, controlled 15 republics. Generally, people recognize three main eras of Soviet architecture: avant-garde (from 1917, just before the USSR officially formed, to 1932), socialist realism or Stalinism (from 1932 to 1955), and late modernism (from 1955 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991).

While each era has its own unique elements brought on by various political shifts, Soviet architecture is often recognized by its harsh, brutalist style that liberally incorporates concrete and mosaics made from tiny pieces of tinted glass. Some are almost absurdly massive, while others look futuristic, or monolithic, but all of these buildings were built with a message in mind.

“Architecture can be a tool to direct people on how to live, to show them their importance, or completely disregard it,” said Ana Chighitashvili, an Architect at Tbilisi firm Khmaladze Architects. “In my opinion, it intentionally or unintentionally showed people the power that the state had over them.”

Chighitashvili admitted that she likes some of the architecture from this time period, and sees value in maintaining them. “If we take the famous building of the Ministry of Highways as an example of Soviet architecture, it is undoubtedly exceptional,” she continued. “The metro stations in post-Soviet countries are good examples of timeless and important architecture, and also the work of the famous Georgian architect Viktor Jorenadze is astonishing.”

While tourists will easily encounter these types of buildings on tours of the city, locals interact with Soviet architecture in much more personal locations: their homes. Many people in Tbilisi live in identical post-war apartment buildings (also called khrushchyovkas), many of which were built under communist chairman Nikita Khruschchev. “They wanted to build them quickly for a prompt solution,” Chighitashvili explained. “Today, even though they can be a little interesting because of their history, living in these buildings, especially in their original state, is not desirable. It shows people a power that the state had over them that, today, is not that relevant, but we’re still living in these buildings, so it still has an impact on us and how our community is shaped.”

Ia Gebrandze, a tour guide and tourism professional in the country of Georgia, lives in one of these apartment buildings with her family in Tbilisi. Her dwelling is 130 square meters, while the typical space usually measures to an average of 50-80 square meters. Her family, as well as the 64 others in her complex, have made the home their own, but the outside still appears basic and uninspiring.

“In regards to the Soviet period, they were trying to make the same standard of living for everyone; as simple as possible,” Gebrandze explained. “You’ll see it in all post-Soviet countries. And I honestly don’t think that people are really happy with the architectural style, or the standards of life from that period. And because of the ties to Russia, well, it’s a very unpleasant feeling. Or it’s also anger.”

Gebrandze explained that she and her family were refugees who arrived in Georgia because of Russian interference in the Caucasus region. When you take into account the 2008 invasion of Georgia, not to mention current events with Ukraine, it’s easy to understand why Eastern Europeans don’t exactly feel fond of their Russian neighbors.

But as Chighitashvili mentioned, some Soviet-era buildings are truly unique; if they were to be demolished, Georgia would not only lose a piece of history, but something of architectural value. Some should remain.

Some architects and designers are proving that it is possible to breathe new life into public structures without heavy interference. The firm Adjara Group partnered with MUA – Architecture & Placemaking to turn an old sewing factory into Fabrika Hostel, which has become a cultural hub and hangout for locals and visitors alike. Adjara Group also constructed the ultra-chic Stamba Hotel out of a Soviet-era print house that retains its original façade and incorporates salvaged printing equipment in the interior design. Tbilisi transport authorities recently initiated construction on an abandoned cable car, and the designer intends to refurbish the staircases inside, rather than destroy them completely.

But the question remains of what to do with the residential buildings. Concrete was commonly used to construct Soviet architecture, especially uniform housing structures. Nikita Krushschev actually used his first major speech after Stalin’s death as an opportunity to emphasize the benefits of concrete. The material didn’t cost much, its accompanying tools were readily available, and it was easy to prefabricate slabs of it, which meant even unskilled laborers could complete a given construction job.

But concrete ages poorly without proper upkeep, and it’s both incredibly challenging and costly to demolish. Funding issues aside, some residents like the renovations they’ve put into their space, and want to stay in the place where their family has lived for decades. Gebrandze said most buildings have at least five floors and up to sixteen, which raises the issue of where to house people waiting for apartment updates.

In 2014, the Georgian City Council announced a project to replace 800 Soviet-era apartment buildings, but Tea Tsulukiani, the country’s Justice Minister at the time, seemed skeptical of its merit. According to the Georgian media site Agenda, she said, “one of the hardest challenges for the ‘ambitious project’ would be to provide all residents of khrushchyovkas with new apartments.”

Tbilisi’s mayor, Kakha Kaladze, also announced a project that would gradually place residents in newer housing— with the keyword being “gradual.” While this sort of undertaking would certainly increase the quality of life for residents, it can’t happen overnight.

“I am sure that many of the owners who have those old apartments would prefer to have new ones, but it costs so much money to demolish it, and to bring the investors to build the new ones, that it seems impossible at the moment,” said Gebrandze. “I don’t know what the future will be like.”

For better and for worse, Soviet architecture is part of Georgia’s history. But while some buildings act as a testament to what a city or country has gone through, others represent an outdated way of life that somehow still affects people every day.

Chighitashvili reiterated that while some buildings should be preserved, others should be refurbished, transformed, or taken down entirely. Meanwhile, she hopes that the city can move on to build more new, modern buildings. “The aim of Tbilisi should be to move away from the Soviet Union as much as possible,” she said. “Going back to that, and having a sentimental approach towards it, would be devastating for this country.”

Ovidiu is also a maven for Romania’s design history, and shares his research in the Romanian design magazine FOI on the topic of the first 50 years of the Romanian poster (1880–1937) and agitation and political propaganda (1940s–1950s).

His motivation? “All the information is splattered all over the place through various books, magazines, reviews, articles, online archives from different time periods and countries—but there is no resource gathering all this input into one coherent view.” So, I asked him to provide a brief introduction to this wealth of little-known material.

What is the most important characteristic that distinguishes Romanian poster design from other European countries?
While trying to grow in tandem with other countries at the beginning of the 20th century, we have to take into consideration the fact that Romania was still a very new country with quite a lot of identity issues, which can be clearly seen throughout Romanian art, architecture, lifestyle and critical assessments of the times (1885–1930). For example, until the mid-’30s Romania was among the less-favored countries of the grand international exhibitions, where occasionally a journal would find its topics by searching for “extravagant” events happening in this “less-civilized” part of Europe. … But despite that fact, Romania still pleasantly surprised the world in 1937 at the Exposition Universelle de Paris. I think that a Romanian poster design style has still yet to be developed, as we have lost the good start we had in 1937 by being interrupted with WW2, after being bled creatively dry by one of the harshest socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. This is actually the drive behind my study, to see if there are some (minute) characteristics of the Romanian poster (old and new) which can be considered as authentic voice.

I notice in the examples you’ve sent me that there is a mixture of different continental design styles, from art nouveau to deco and lesser-known approaches. Was there a leader or grand master of Romanian design at that time?
Between 1890–1940, there were quite a few brilliant poster masters, but many of them worked outside Romanian borders, like Hugo D’Alesi, Jean de Paleologu (PAL), Michel Simonidi, Sigismund Maur. In my opinion the leader in Romanian poster design is Petre Grant (Pierre Grand)—a Romanian graphic artist schooled in engineering in Paris, who specialized in posters, graphics for books and advertising. He was awarded with gold medals at Bruxelles, Paris and New York exhibitions. It is his posters which won the Grand Prix at the Romanian Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

Is graphic design taken as seriously as a cultural resource in other Eastern European countries with a similar past?
East European countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia—where the poster is deeply engrained into the cultures—stand out, and I am afraid that the Romanian poster has yet to reach such a level of confidence. For example, at some point the Hungarian poster and the Romanian poster used pretty much the same visual language, but after the ’60s the Hungarian poster took a far leap into developing its own style (defined by photomontage most of the time, inducing a double-meaning visual language), and they managed to slowly set themselves apart from that raw, Communist-inherited, slightly amateurish afterwar communication style which the Romanian poster—generally speaking—still has. But I am hopeful for the next 20 years of the Romanian poster because people are becoming slowly interested in our graphic heritage. Initiatives like Graphic Front or FOI magazine are doing a great job in archiving and talking about these issues related to our past.

How did World War II change the look (and role) of the poster and graphic design in your country?
The Romanian poster was barely “starting to sing” with its own voice when it was short-circuited by the start of the war and everything else that followed. The postwar poster that was created until the mid ’50s usually revealed a general lack of innovation; graphic styles, themes and iconography followed almost blindly a simplified Soviet-induced style. The visual language spoken in those posters, which at its best can be classified as being on the verge of amateur, will become a second nature for generations to come, and had severe repercussions on the evolution of the Romanian poster.

What impact, if any, did the poster have on the politics of the era?
Posters were used intensively for propaganda means during and after the war. An interesting fact is that at the beginning of the war, Romania joined the Axis forces, so there were pro-German posters. After 1943 Romania joined the Allies and the posters were switched, inspired by (sometimes even copying) Russian propaganda visuals.

After the war, Romania was under Soviet occupation for several years. During this time, the party propaganda posters were heavily used—most of them used illustration, accompanied by simple and short slogans, as a high percentage of the population, mostly the peasants, was still illiterate. The posters—along with every form of art—were taken under state supervision and thoroughly controlled.

For 30 years, project teams have changed, but environmental and social issues have remained the triennial’s focus. Posters have repeatedly called attention to the problems of nuclear safety and security, environmental protection, alternative energy source development, and more. In 2019, the 30-year collection of triennial posters resulted in the creation of the 4th Block museum at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Currently, its collection includes approximately 11,000 posters.

4th Block Community posts design work on Instagram and Facebook to raise awareness of Vladimir Putin’s crimes against humanity and to raise funds to help Ukraine and Ukrainians fight the fascism of the 21st century. For more, head to the links above.

Sofia Romagnolo is an Italian illustrator who has mastered this style and made it uniquely her own with a brightly saturated color palette and exuberant inclusive depictions of women’s bodies.

Romagnolo attended the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan, where she studied illustration. She credits her professor Olimpia Zagnoli as being the most significant influence on her development as an artist, whose work is graphic, kinetic, and female-centric, much like her own. “She played a key role in my ‘transforming into an artist’ phase,” jokes Romagnolo. 

After graduating from IED Milan, Romagnolo worked as a character designer at the London-based animation studio Blue Zoo before transitioning to her current full-time freelance illustrator lifestyle.

“I know this is the lamest artistic advice ever, but my art style just came to me after an intensive trial and error session,” Romagnolo tells me when asked about her personal aesthetic. (Oh, if only it were that easy for the rest of us!) “I mainly focus on what I liked best: simple shapes, bold colors, and a direct message.”

There is peppy optimism that runs through much of her work. “For me, art is a form of therapy,” she shares. “Whether it’s mine or someone else’s, a painting or a song or a novel, it has the ability to make you dig deeper into yourself. It helps you understand and realize things right in front of you all along. I see artists as messengers of a greater good.”

Romagnolo appreciates the power she has as an illustrator and even sees that with her artistic ability comes a responsibility to make a statement. “Inclusive illustrations and art have the power to normalize and de-demonize diverse, queer, and transgender bodies to those less exposed to these realities,” she explains. “Everyone feels represented and supported, with no need to hide.”

“I truly enjoy when art gets political and controversial. I can proudly say that my illustrations raise questions about what society considers ‘normal.’ When I draw a woman with a bigger figure or body hair, I usually get asked, ‘But why?’ To which I reply, ‘Why not?’”

Romagnolo isn’t surprised to see this vibrant and joyful illustration style trend on the rise. “I think people nowadays are trying to find positivity, tranquility, and serenity wherever they can,” she says. “The times are pretty hard on all of us, and a more light-hearted illustration style brings people joy and helps artists convey a message more effectively. We want every category to be represented, and what better way to do that than in a colorful and happy illustration?”

A book of Romagnolo’s illustrations entitled Azzurroscuro came out last December from publishers Psicografici Editore, and she’s already looking forward to the next thing with her sights set on editorial work. “Illustrating magazines and articles about social themes would really be a dream come true,” she says. “Another goal is working on an illustrated clothing line—any sustainable brand that’s reading this, hit me up!”

Reflecting on his experiences commissioning kāvads, designer Ishan Khosla has created an art experience on what a global pandemic can teach us about new ways of working with craftspeople.

Commissioned by the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial in Australia, Khosla uses references to myriad visual and graphic art styles mainly from India—from vintage labels, calendar art, tribal and folk art to comic art and more contemporary graphic design.

The challenge of working during the global pandemic meant that except for a couple of initial meetings, Khosla never saw any of the artists face to face during the making of the artworks—”which has never happened before in all my previous engagements with craftspeople. This way of working was only possible due to the ubiquity of smartphones,” Khosla writes.

“The nine artworks were made in collaboration with some of the most renowned contemporary folk and tribal artists in the country,” he continues. “Most of them continue to work in their respective artistic traditions while addressing subjects that are pertinent today. While I have collaborated with most of the artists before, working virtually on physical, handmade objects that not only needed to tell a story in a certain sequence but were loaded with layers of symbolism, metaphors and puns, was arduous.” The kāvad sent to Bhajju Shyam was dismantled by the carpenter, which meant figuring out the correct sequence of panels for Bhajju to paint on.

“It became so complex to explain via a video phone call that I had to use a combination of WhatsApp videos and annotations to explain this to him. Works by Kiritbhai Jayantibhai Chittara were to be made on cloth, as is done in the craft of mata-ni-pachedi. In which case it was decided to measure each panel and send it to him, which in itself became confusing for him to remember which panel number corresponded to which artwork (see video and video). Similarly, various types of image references and digital mockups had to be created for Anoop Sharma to articulate the various visual references to be used in the artwork Băndar kyā jaane adrăk kā swād.”

Nonetheless, the results are amazing: beautifully crafted, witty, sardonic and unique—the perfect blend of design and craftsmanship.

I was blown away by the use of primary and secondary colors in the ultra-Modernist home and studio of Diego Rivera; the grand hacienda of Freida Kahlo; even the walled fortress of Leon Trotsky. Mexico City was filled with surreal and socially symbolic art in abundance. Coming by chance across a richly endowed exhibition of Miguel Covarraubias‘ original drawings at a museum near Chapultepec Park was the highlight of my trip. Then in Oaxaca, my joy from seeing all the Day of the Dead souvenirs (thousands of miniature skeletons that filled the streets with color and comedy), complemented by contemporary protest posters calling for equal rights and justice—evidence that design played a huge role in Mexican culture.

This past COVID year I was invited to write a foreword for the generously illustrated MEXICO: The Land of Charm (RM Publisher), with text by Mercurio López Casillas and James Oles. The book contains all the wonderful ephemeral artifacts that I was unable to locate on my own journey. The work proves that Mexico is a world capital of graphic exuberance—from vernacular to avant garde to Aztec-inspired art deco—and the book is an invaluable addition to the growing study of Latin American graphic design.

The following text is excerpted (and edited for space considerations here) by Irina Subotić, from the catalog of the exhibit Three Interwar Poster Artists: Janković, Petrov, Babić at The Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade, on view until Nov. 24.

In the period between the two World Wars, graphic design became a significant factor in creating contemporary applied art (design and illustration of all types of publications, design of letters, logos, signs, diplomas, greeting cards, invitations, stamps, banknotes, securities, packaging, advertisements, posters). It influenced the creation of visual codes of the broadest strata of everyday life. This happened in the capital of the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Yugoslavia, which was hastily changing following the Modernism that marked those two turbulent decades.

The work shown here includes some printed but mostly original comps designed for foreign printers to follow.

Dušan Janković

Dušan Janković, a student of architecture at the Belgrade Technical Faculty (1913–1914), was guided to Paris by the circumstances of the First World War. He continued his education at a private engineering and architecture School of Public Works (École des Travaux Publics, 1917–1918) and at the painting department of the National School of Decorative Arts (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, 1918–1921). This famous school set the course for Janković’s future. He became a decorative artist trained to create in a variety of applied and fine-art disciplines. During the 1920s, he occasionally turned to painting and, from the middle of the decade on, to graphics. He was also involved in the cultural life of Belgrade, where he was to return in 1935 to work as a technical editor at the National Printing House of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1935–1945). From that moment on, publication design and graphics became his principal activities. After the Second World War, Janković worked at the publishing enterprise Novo pokolenje (1945–1945) and at Jugoslovenska knjiga (1948–1950).

Janković’s early poster works show his interest in Cubism and African art, the futuristic tendency to depict movement and speed, the use of aerial perspective, modernization of folk ornaments, and new typography. … By adopting the contemporary poster-making approach, he set the subject of his advertisements, i.e., ornamental and/or figurative allusion to it, in the foreground, making his own artistic expression more moderate and abstract. His interest in movement and his choice of colors, which became richly nuanced owing to airbrush technique, remained unchanged. Experts working at the agency he collaborated with believed in representativeness of his work and included it in the exhibition staged at their London branch office in 1931. Meanwhile, Janković had no success in competitions staged by French car manufacturers and the Belgrade State Tobacco Monopoly Administration.

Posters re-emerged in Janković’s oeuvre during his final stage of creativity and life, after his return to his homeland. The works created for the exhibition activities organized by the Prince Paul Museum reveal that he continued to follow global standards.

Mihailo S. Petrov

Eight years Janković’s junior, Mihailo S. Petrov was fascinated by graphics as a visual medium, by German Expressionists, and was one of the first associates of the most Avant-Garde magazines of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, namely Zenit, Dada Tank and Út. Petrov departed from the Avant-Garde as early as 1925, got involved in mainstream painting and socially engaged and applied graphics, and became omnipresent in Belgrade cultural events through activities of the Association of Fine Artists as well as by staging exhibitions and publishing reviews. Graphics also became an area of his pedagogical work.

Absorbed by the ideas of Cubism, Kandinsky and the Constructivists, young Petrov … soon embraced generally accepted visual advertising schemes with marked expressive dynamics. Petrov himself highly valued his own posters and book illustrations, and included them, along with his other achievements in painting, in an independent exhibition staged in 1940. After the Second World War, he was one of the creators of political posters in Serbia, based on the ideas of Socialist Realism.

Miloš Babić

Miloš Babić was one of the rare interwar artists for whom commercial graphic design was a profession, and not only one of his activities. He arrived in Belgrade in 1923, at the age of 19, previously living in Subotica (1921–1923) and his hometown Novi Segedin, where he obtained his diploma at the Applied Arts School, Interior Architecture Department (1918–1921). He found a job at the painting, advertising, sign painting and decoration atelier Futur. Owing to its owners, the brothers Pavle Bihali and Oto Bihalјi Merin, it was a place where progressive ideas were discussed, particularly the mid-European art and political ideas, and a destination for publications adorned with the most modern graphic design, which remodeled the fine art solutions of the Avant-Garde movements to match the mass taste of the epoch. At that time, Babić embraced International Constructivism to produce his best posters around 1930, when he freely demonstrated his association with this progressive stylistic expression. It also affected his later design solutions. … Like many of his contemporaries, Babić felt deep respect for films as one of the modern technological and artistic achievements. His oeuvre was influenced by specific light effects occurring during film projection, like Metropolis, the cult film by Fritz Lang.

Babić took part in several national and international poster competitions. He was particularly emotionally inspired for the 1930 Geneva competition, when he produced the Flag of the League of Nations draft poster, pinning high hopes on success of this organization in preservation of world peace. It was a kind of introduction into a cycle of socially engaged paintings (1930–1937, kept in the National Museum in Belgrade and in the City Museum in Subotica) with extraordinary conceptual and stylistic expression, which were also based on his poster designs. Babić strived to become an associate of the Advertising and Publishing Office Sedma sila, founded in 1937 by journalists who were members of the Belgrade section of the Journalists’ Association of Yugoslavia. He most probably failed since the draftsmen who were eventually hired had already worked with other newspaper companies. After the Second World War, he did not return to his commercial design activities.

I should have been aware of him since I am a member of MoMA’s design and architecture acquisitions committee. My only excuse is that it was not presented under the the design or architecture banner. Whatever the jurisdiction, not to have known of Bodys Isek Kingelez is embarrassing, to say the least.

Kingelez is “one of the unsung visionary creators of the 20th century,” writes curator Sarah Suzuki of this native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Kingelez’s practice,” she continues, “though unquestionably appealing to curators, critics and art historians, has presented them a maddening challenge.” It is obvious on first glance to see why. “In collapsing the boundaries between sculpture, architecture and design, it eludes the categorization and classification on which institutional collections rely, and in its lack of known art historical precedents it evades the genealogy that we love to document and trace.”

One of the scholars who has studied Kingelez (1948–2015) recalls that on first seeing Kingelez’s work, he “was struck by its similarities to the architecture of Michael Graves.” He is totally Postmodern, which is interesting since he never ventured to another city besides Kinshasa and did not know what a city looked like.

He modeled his fantasies on the present and recent past, “and in the fabric of the city around him, inspired equally by colonial architecture, the ambitious buildings of post-independence Zaire, are idioms that typify national building styles.” His work—which uses the artifact/output of modern consumer culture, and points a way forward, aka Afro-Futuristic vision—explores if “new cooperative ways of living and working were possible, and the most mundane of materials could become technically precise, inventive and elegant objects.”

Of himself, Kingelez says a visionary is “someone who dreams of what doesn’t exist yet.” His work triggers many visions, and while the exhibit has come down, the catalog, from which these remarkable images are reproduced, is alive and available for the present.

An obsessive typographic illustrator, Petrantoni spent his childhood in Novi Ligure, so when he was asked to do a show, there was only one answer. “I proposed to do an open-air exhibition, which could be visited at any time without paying a single euro.” The idea is that the pieces are always in motion and will always be changing with the wind. The 53 flags are of different sizes and hang across the main street of the city, giving the sense of a celebration while projecting the illusion of drying laundry.

The shapely typeface Minérale was used for the title to reflect the creative uniqueness that Nkemdiche was known for. The cover’s secondary typeface is Kigelia, the first system of fonts for the most prominent writing systems throughout Africa.

I spoke with Nwazota about the book cover (which was selected as one of AIGA's 2021 50 Books | 50 Covers) and the tales that his Okpara press wants to bring into the world before they are lost forever.

You were born in Nigeria to a father who was a chief/judge and an agricultural scientist mother. This implies certain privileges. What inspired you to become an author/artist?Yes, I grew up privileged, but strict upbringing that curtailed life’s frivolities. As such, I sought solace in alternate spaces, forever lost daydreaming. I mainly lived in my head, dreaming up and creating escapes from the prison of my reality into imaginary worlds of freedom and play. In my teens, I left for America to study architecture and, in my practice, I naturally pushed against the restrictions and dictates of my discipline. I find no distinction between architecture, writing or being an artist. I find inspiration in the things I found to be necessary as compliments living and yet are missing from the world around me. The African (including all persons of African descent in the Diaspora) was once free both spiritually and materially. It is no secret that we as a people and race continue to be strategically miseducated. Our children are raised predominately in institutions dominated by a singular narrative. Our society lacks the inclusiveness of other narratives representative of the cultural diversity that is the Diaspora. In this case, the stories of my culture and traditions are not common knowledge to those that it concerns primarily.First off, I have to give special thanks to Nick Adam and Bud Rodecker of Span Studio for their submission and their excellent work on the cover and particular typesetting of Nkemdiche. I did not study graphic design and typography formally. However, I have practiced in this area since the beginning of my career under the tutelage of Eva Maddox. She instilled the seeds of incorporating a cross-disciplinary approach to design in me. My country of birth, Nigeria, is a melting pot of various tribes/mini-states with rich traditions and fascinating cultures. We have over 500 languages spoken in the country. For this book, I was interested in highlighting Igbo culture, and so began my 18-month extensive research into this vibrant culture. I aimed to distill my research into elements that would inspire a graphic style and language that our amazing illustrator, Lucie Van der Elst, then channeled into her vibrant illustrations. Later, when we began work with Span Studio, I encouraged Nick and Bud to go places unfamiliar to them and seek a language and style that was indigenous to the project. Inspired by the book mockup, storyboard, illustrations and research documents assembled, they proposed Minérale, designed by Lyon-based Thomas Huot-Marchand's 205TF studio, for the cover. For the body of the book, they presented Kigelia, designed by Neil Patel and Mark Jamra of JamraPatel. However, Kigelia wasn't yet available in the market, but we just had to have it, and JamraPatel was gracious to make it available for our use.

I come from the Igboland in Southeastern Nigeria. We are primarily an oral culture, although we had a writing system called Nsibidi, practiced by members of certain secret societies. Kigelia is a first-of-its-kind, 10-script, multi-style family developed to widen the accessibility of the internet and digital tools to African language communities. Beyond Fula visual languages like Adlam, Ajami alphabets, they designed a Latin alphabet that visually relates to Africa's most prominent writing systems. It contains a typographic richness and technical functionality previously unavailable for several languages on the African continent.

What was the motivation for creating this incredible book?A lack of representation of the African and, by extension, the right to define our image, has been the subject of sustained misrepresentation in literate history. As a result, I launched Okpara House publishing to create beautiful books that reimagine the vibrant Igbo folktales I grew up with in Nigeria. Spurred by a lack of representation, we create new narratives and assert control over our image and knowledge assets. We want to stimulate and normalize our story by connecting our present to our past. We are setting standards for African-inspired storybooks while making relevant our cultural assets on contemporary lifestyles.

Do you believe there is an increase in curiosity in the study of African culture and art that has spawned a book such as yours?I firmly believe that the world, and in particular the African Diaspora, has awakened to the idea that there is more to storytelling that goes beyond our current offerings.

Today, the Diaspora is at the vanguard of the Black mind's emancipation, and perhaps ultimately the instigator of any Black renaissance. The BLM protests in 2020 ripped the covers off and exposed a gaping hole in Black lives' concerns. A void created by a history of deliberate and institutional exclusion, normalized over time, continues to undermine our progress as a race systemically. This void should otherwise be the repository of our knowledge assets, spanning across time from our ancestral beginnings in Africa. There is a lot of work to be done moving forward. Institutionally, the right policies have to be in place to right the systemic wrongs against Black lives.

We have to be accountable and intentional in curating the quality of content we produce to address and fill this void of our life concerns. We have to create content that celebrates our beautiful essence, content that heals, nourishes and makes us stronger.

What was the
most challenging aspect, if any, of telling your story?

One of the significant challenges of telling this story was a simple question: Can a storybook about bearded women be accepted and considered beautiful? How does one illustrate this novel idea in light of the standardized and all-too-familiar and powerful Western beauty standards that are narrow in their perception?

As so many other trends in the West have been adopted or stolen from indigenous cultures, do you see women wearing beards as possible here?

The critical element stolen here is not the beard used here as a metaphor but the meaning of hair in the African community. This hairstory is about the vibrant culture of power, creativity, sacredness and beauty of the African woman and her cosmos. It took a bit of brevity and self-belief that we could present a compelling albeit otherworldly narrative about a topic that continues to be subject to persecution to this day. Think the persecutions instigated by the Tignon law and current efforts to right things such as the Crown Act, etc.

What do you have planned as your next project?

I am already working on four illustrated storybooks. Okpara House will be expanding beyond books as we reimagine various aspects of Igbo cultural and knowledge assets to create new and exciting content. We are thrilled to bring attention to Ikenga, a sacred object and a powerful masculine spirit force of the Igbo people, reimagined and designed for contemporary lifestyles.

Of that group, Attilio Rossi designed the first pocket-book collections in Latin America (and Spain): Austral and Contemporánea, the equivalent of Albatross and Penguin. Grete Stern and husband Horacio Coppola made beautiful photo books. Jakob Hermelin brought the calligraphic arts from Germany to Argentina. And Luis Seoane also designed several collections, such as Buen Aire, a series of pocket books on pre-Hispanic culture. They were all key artists during the birth of industrial book design in Argentina, and most of their jobs were printed by Imprenta López in Buenos Aires during the 1940s, a period known as the “golden age of publishing” in Argentina.

David Carballal notes: The exhibition and text are named after the photo book Cómo se Imprime un Libro, published by Imprenta López in 1942 as a present for its clients and partners. Designed by Rossi and including photographs and photomontages by Coppola and Stern, it shows the graphic art trades during this period through a dazzling informative sequence of text and images. It was an atypical publication in Buenos Aires at the time: standard format, asymmetric layout, large areas of white in contrast to solid blocks of text and full-page photographs. The keys of the New Typography from Europe had arrived in Argentina.

This little masterpiece of modern design landmarks the starting point of the new eponymous catalog. Featuring essays by Longueira, Carballal, Pablo Rossi and Horacio Fernández, the publication reviews the birth of modern book design in Argentina through publishing houses such as Espasa-Calpe Argentina, Losada, Emecé and Nova.

*(Un Mundo Feliz does not yet know the pub date of the book, but I'm too excited by its imminent availability to hold back from sharing some of the pages.)

Beltrán introduced this "simplifying idea" having been influenced by American Mid-century Modernism, which he became "acquainted with during the 1950s and '60s in the USA through abstract art or chromatic abstraction." Other trends of the time such as concrete art, optical art, minimalism and pop art were added to this. Below is a diagram of the influences that are evidenced in the forthcoming critical monograph:

As Diaz and Martinez write in their introduction to the monograph, "Photographism is a term chosen by Tobias M. Barthel to define graphic art that effectively evolves from photomontage and the photogram to endow design with a unitary and functional representative quality that we could call photo-typographic." Beltrán employs raw photography to provoke a sense of objectivity and applies techniques such as "photocontrast" in an intense black strongly contrasted with flat-colored backgrounds, all with the aim of simplifying as much as possible and "endowing the images with an intense dramatism" in the style of North American pop art.

In the work on the pages excerpted below, the predominant technique is the "cartel maqueta": modifying a photograph to achieve an idealized allegorical image, or "iconospheres" that project various contextual influences, including Communism vs. Capitalism. "His aesthetic is didactic and effective in the achievement of the symbol-space, and his design is the individual and collective manifestation of a pictographism that fuses "letragrafía" and photographism," note Diaz and Martinez.

Simply put, they are powerful graphic and typographic concoctions that project a political or social message. Effective, si!

Now, Gabriel Benderski's exhaustive archiving of Uruguayan graphic design, which The Daily Heller has covered with great interest and continues to do so later in this post, has added to the history. And starting tomorrow, a new initiative from the Society of Design Arts (SoDA) and AIGA Baltimore called "Latino Design Histories," with an online lecture featuring Rafael Cardoso, adds more to the richness of the Americas' design history. (Register here.)

In this era of inclusion, it is important to be aware of how the world of graphic expression was not born in Europe or the United States, although so much of these other styles and dialects were extensions of Western—American and European—design.

La Semana (The Week) is Benderski's and Rosana Malaneschii's latest focus; the publication was modeled after the classic Art Nouveau and Deco periodicals of turn-of-the-century Europe, notably the German Jugend and Simplicissimus.

From La Patria blog: "La Semana was a Montevideo weekly with wide circulation in the Uruguay of its time, the early years of the 20th century. Its contents, full of art and extremely popular, were humorous and critical of the events of the moment. It allowed the contribution, original and genuine, of many Uruguayans. This text highlights the circumstances, the aesthetic, symbolic, literary and communicational aspects, also through graphic design, of images and texts. The reading offers a vivid picture of an earlier era."

(Note the "obligatory vaccination" image below; Timely, but not. According to Benderski: "It's about politics. One gentleman is dressed in skyblue and the other one in red. These colours represent the Uruguayan parties, Partido Nacional and Partido Colorado, respectively. The bottle from where the doctors take the medicine reads us 'Caldo de la Cordura' or Broth of Sanity. The text that reads below says: 'With the noble aim of avoiding so many evils for the country, all Uruguayans should be vaccinated. And oh! if it could be killed, the partisan microbe with some anti-revolutionary serum.' ")

Who are the most significant Uruguayan poster designers?

Without a doubt, the benchmark for Uruguayan poster design is Imprenta AS. This design studio founded in 1954 worked in the same way that Pentagram works today where each partner designs independently with his team, but the works were signed as from the studio. This working system gives the independence that every designer wants and needs as well as makes it possible to produce more thanks to the shared prestige. Please notice that Pentagram was founded in 1972.

Curiously, Imprenta AS was also founded by five designers: Jorge de Arteaga, Ajax Barnes, Hermenegildo Sábat, Carlos Pieri, Nicolás Loureiro and Antonio Pezzino. This distinguished team designed and illustrated posters, disc covers, theater programs and books.

Nowadays, Sebastián Santana Camargo is the Uruguayan designer of my knowledge who designed with the greatest contiguity posters for the same event. Divercine is a film festival for children and adolescents that has relied on Sebastián’s proposals to promote the festival for more than 20 years.

Tell me about the donations and how the Uruguayan graphic design heritage has grown.

With regard to donations, I want to mention two cases that stand out. Designers Sebastián Santana Camargo and Eduardo Davit donated their posters to La Patria. Then, for example, during the month of January I was contacted by Pedro Peralta Duarte, a prominent Uruguayan painter, where he informed me about the possibility of photographing a large collection of posters. These actions generate a great emotional impact on the work done by the archive since it produces a motivation to continue growing as well as a validation of the project by colleagues.

Contributors may or may not be designers, but they’re people who have a special taste for graphic arts that led them to save or collect ephemera, tickets or theater programs. The link with the contributors is generally created thanks to their contact and willingness to share their belongings. After a first message, I offer to visit their home with a camera to record the various pieces of design.

Thanks to the Uruguayan personality, an instant trust is generated thanks to the mutual interest in the discipline as well as the courtesy in opening the doors of their homes to a stranger. I think that in other countries, due to various causes, people don’t invite a stranger to their own place to share their stories behind each object.

I see many cultural posters. What is the main theme of the posters in the online archive?

The link between cultural events and poster designers is nothing new. This relationship must arise from the mutual sensitivity of the parties in wanting to communicate an interesting visual message. Interesting suggests that something is captivating, attractive and seductive, exactly what cultural events need.

A large number of posters in our collection belong to plays and puppet shows carried out in ‘El Galpón,’ a theater in the center of Montevideo. Today, posters that promote plays are made with photographs of the cast, something that didn’t happen in the past. In my opinion, it is more inspiring to invite the audience to the theater through an illustration. This approach has as its main consequence the subjectivity of the poster designer to promote the events. Also, we have to have in mind how it was designed, and for this we have to know the reality of Uruguay where resource limitations are one of the main creators of the local style. In other places, designers have an abundance of resources, in Uruguay that isn’t the case. It’s not that we are underprivileged, it’s that the limitations are noticeable. For instance, while a magazine cover created elsewhere might use the services of a photographer, a lighting designer, a couple of designers and an art director, in Uruguay, one person is responsible for everything. I don’t see it as a disadvantage, but, on the contrary, as a great virtue that allows us to have control over all parts.

Regarding the printing technique, it was common to design directly on the offset plate. It was much more comfortable for the designer; the figures and shapes used don’t have to be redone and time was saved. This approach also brings a particular characteristic, the use of lettering for the texts; all the written language was made specifically for each job. It was done in this way to avoid making the work more expensive and slow, since the use of fonts meant that the poster had to go through a typographic printing press.

How many have you collected? And what is your timespan?

The collection of posters for the revaluation of my vocation in Uruguay started
a year ago, in which almost 150 posters were collected.

It is to my knowledge that this action is just beginning and today it has expanded to work done by students. The limitation of including professional works doesn’t bring more than restrictions, which the archive isn’t interested in, but on the contrary, La Patria wants to be the most comprehensive and demonstrative of the profession as possible. Why wait for design students to graduate? Why not create a space for all designers regardless of their position? It is expected to generate in students that their work is valued for belonging to a space where artwork of established designers is together with designers who are taking their first steps.

Who would you say is the strongest influence on the poster in Uruguay?

In conversation with Horacio Añón, this 80-year-old designer made special mention of a design magazine that came to this territory, Poland. This Polish design magazine proved that it is possible to design everything by hand and that you don’t need a large printing house to produce quality design.

The aesthetics of painting and a simple metaphor developed characteristics such as pictorial gesture, linear quality and vibrant colors, as well as a sense of individual personality, humor and naiveness. Precisely, these peculiarities are what can be found in the Uruguayan way of design.

Taking inspiration from the brand itself and putting that into a physical space led to the spatial design, furniture, and a fresh, dynamic graphic identity that fully represents the brand. Not only that, but the shipping boxes also became instant "accidental signage" that is a walking billboard with designs inspired by the king of pop-art, Andy Warhol. The entire identity is playful and adventurous, perfect for a chocolate brand that constantly pushes the limits.

As the first purpose-built Maison Marou, the Thao Dien location offers a fresh look at the brand. Architects HTAP proposed a 'floating-factory' concept, and Rice took the opportunity to streamline the identity, and interior design under this playful and liberating idea, as the most hands-on, educational, multi-functional, café / factory yet for the chocolate makers.

Rice deconstructed Marou brand assets—discovering new solutions that talked about process and making—this exploration directly informed spacial design, furniture, and a fresh dynamic graphic identity. Our approach to furniture design led us to Factory-like, Andy Warhol-inspired shipping boxes that stack, become partitions or arrange as 'accidental' signage.

We developed an interlocking modular card system that became a playful solution for larger furniture in plywood. The system lent itself to a Charles and Ray Eames inspired —Marou adventure card game for kids in the spirit of, MAKING—BREAKING—BUILDING—PLAYING.

Project Credits

Rice Studios

Identity and Spatial Design: Daniel Keeffe, Aprar Elawad

Production: Anna Dinh, Bang Lam, Hieu HuynhLocation Images: Ben NguyenStudio Images: Wing Chan

The design studio has released their latest designs for three Asian-based Adidas stores that tell a different story based on the culture, history, and arts of the specific city that the store is located in. Each store is decorated with large murals that implement striking designs and energetic colors, making the culture come to life originally and unexpectedly. It's always special when a brand uses inspiration based on its surroundings to create a one-of-a-kind experience for the consumer.

Name&Name boutique design studio, has been working hard to develop Asian focused visual design work, that is effective for clients. Creating design for retail environments, promotions, clothing and branding. Name&Name's team enjoys mixing cultural respect and modern forwardness, to create new visuals. One area Name&Name have been very busy in, is art and graphics for retail environments.

Adidas FTWR Stores (Shanghai and Hong Kong)

The FTWR/SneakerCollect design project for stores in Hong Kong and China, uses large playful hand drawn mural images that mix up all sorts of elements with a strong red-blue color palette that runs throughout the store. Each key store’s mural art is adapted with extra images to tightly fit that city. Fun image led design, creating strong retail environments.

Adidas Beijing Flagship store

Name&Name created graphic art for Aidas’s largest flagship store in Asia, in Beijing’s San Li Tun shopping district. Colorful graphics drawn from various aspects of Beijing’s cultural history decorate the store, clothing, stickers and video animations.

Adidas ChongQing Flagship Store ChongQing in China is known as the 8D city, due to its complexity of layers upon layers, with staircases, metro systems, roads and footpaths all crossing above and below each other. Our design team represented the cities dynamic structure in a modern “Escher-like” graphic style, creating landmarks in a 3D environment, where any way is up. Different strong colour combinations were used for various sections of the store.

Project Credits

Name&Name

The largest, indeed a honey of an international poster biennale fest in all Russia, the Golden Bee, was born in 1992. “Suddenly, unexpectedly and vaguely expected,” says founder and president Serge Serov.

In 1990 following the Iron Curtain collapse—and after glasnost ushered in a visual feast of graphic design —Serov recalls he “was abroad for the first time” at the hugely respected poster biennale in Brno, Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). He was instantly “plunged into its oversaturated and multilingual environment, which turned out to be native and understandable thanks to the universal language of graphic design.” He decided to found his own festival.

The Brno Biennale was an inspiring cultural model, and it was around this time that other biennales were hitting their strides in Warsaw (Poland), Lahti (Finland), Fort Collins (USA), Chaumont (France), Mexico City (Mexico), Trnava (Slovakia), Sofia (Bulgaria) and Kharkiv (Ukraine). The Golden Bee, Moscow’s pioneer biennale, attracted inspiring posters and designers.

“Today, despite all the talk about ‘death of posters’ in the world,” Serov asserts, one by one, hubs in Bolivia, Italy, China, Ecuador, Slovakia and elsewhere are forming “a kind of global network of design events that monitor visual culture and determine its development.”

From its earliest use, the poster has been the meeting place for art and design, for emotion and rationality, for an author’s uniqueness and universality and for its comprehensiveness. The beginning of the ’90s was a turning point not only for Russia, but the entire design world, which experienced a paradigm shift—the output of Postmodernism to the forefront of history; the computer revolution an onset of the digital era, contributed too. The poster tied it all together.

Serov asserts that the poster is “perhaps the most attractive genre for graphic designers today, as it works as a generator of professional innovations, as a space for plastic experiments and art’s development. For the audience the poster is increasingly becoming a tool for understanding of the time, a manual for creative thinking, a source of joy and inspiration.” Criteria for acceptance in the Golden Bee always considers “semantic expressiveness; the emotional content of the poster; its stylistic, genre and shape innovation; how it expands the boundaries of the profession; cultural identity; and ethical correctness,” he adds.

The Golden Bee is a gold standard of the poster’s ongoing relevance. The scale of the event, its timely categories and global outreach have grown over the years, making it the largest showcase of achievements in the field of posters and graphic design for the number of entries and the number of exhibits.

Designs are selected by an international jury based on relevant thematic categories. The 2020 Golden Bee 14 (un)Real, which continues on tour throughout Russia until April 2021, includes 14 nominations in the following buckets: Poster unlimited; Bauhaus 100/VKHUTEMAS 100; Russian seasons; Classics alive; Heavenly Jerusalem; Peace be with you!; Zero corruption; Design performances; Interactive video installations; Supershort video; Design-selfie; Graphic novels; Stickers; Children posters. At the last moment, owing to global events, two topics were unexpectedly added, which became special projects of the biennale: Coronavirus & we; and Long life Belarus!

Registration to the Golden Bee 14 (un)Real ended on April 15, 2020, as the pandemic raged. More than 30,000 entries from 88 countries were offered for the exhibition. The fourteen member Pre-Selection Committee chose more than 1,600 entries for the final exhibition.

The International jury consisted of Majid Abbasi (Iran-Canada), April Greiman (USA), Dirk Behaj and Evelyn ter Becke (Netherlands-France), Götz Gramlich (Germany), Radovan Jenko (Slovenia), Alex Jordan (Germany-France), Lars Muller (Switzerland), Kenya Hara (Japan), Jianping He (China-Germany), Nikolai Shtok (Russia), Istvan Oros (Hungary, jury chairman), Kari Piippo, (Finland), Jonas Vogeli (Germany) and Peter Javorik (Slovakia).

After the jury conducted its work online, the following prizes were awarded:

GRAND PRIX

Cybu Richli, Fabienne Burri, C2F (Switzerland)

POSTER UNLIMITED

Emran Abdollahi (Iran)

Zheng Bangqian (China)

Kashiwa Daisuke (Japan)

Rui Deng (China)

Detlef Fiedler, Cyan (Germany)

Fons Hickmann (Germany)

Patrycja Longawa (Poland)

Guanlin Mai (China)

Lech Majewski (Poland)

Dmitry Rekin (Russia)

Ralph Schraivogel (Switzerland)

Ariane Spanier (Germany)

Niklaus Troxler (Switzerland)

Martin Woodtli (Switzerland)

BAUHAUS 100 / VKHUTEMAS 100

Oleg Korytov (Russia)

Christoph Stettler (Switzerland)

Laze Tripkov (Macedonia)

RUSSIAN SEASONS

Dmitry Rekin (Russia)

CLASSICS ALIVE

Jouri Toreev (Belarus)

HEAVENLY JERUSALEM

Adan Paredes Barrera (Mexico)

PEACE BE WITH YOU!

Uwe Loesch (Germany)

Katalin Simo (Hungary)

ZERO CORRUPTION

Fabian Сarreras (Argentina)

Katalin Simo (Hungary)

DESIGN PERFORMANCES

Lampo Leong (Macao)

INTERACTIVE VIDEO INSTALLATIONS

Jeong Ji-young (South Korea)

Stefan Sagmeister (USA)

SUPERSHORT VIDEO

Mario Fuentes (Ecuador)

Maryia Hilep (Belarus)

DESIGN-SELFIE

Evgeny Taboriskiy (Ukraine-Russia-Germany)

Olga Synyshyn (Poland)

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Elmer Sosa (México)

STIСKERS

Maria Afonchikova (Russia)

Vanya Dudchenko (Ukraine)

CHILDREN POSTERS

Oleksandra Kutsyna, Aza Nizi Maza (Ukraine)

Anastasia Tron, Aza Nizi Maza (Ukraine)

CORONAVIRUS & WE

Damian Kłaczkiewicz (Poland)

Noordyanto Naufan (Indonesia)

Alain Le Quernec (France)

During this calamitous pandemic year, Serge Serov must also be congratulated. For owing to his indefatigable spirit, and devotion to the poster that kept the Golden Bee buzz, buzz, buzzy and buzzing.

All Good Springs' is the Lucky Envelope Collection with my intention of refreshing the cheerful traditional atmosphere of Vietnam's Tet holiday. In these overwhelming end-of-year days, I explore the peaceful and amusing spring mood within my home to illustrate the typical and familiar Tet image. The initial inspiration sparks from a familiar scene of Bat Trang ceramic flower vases with the light filtered by bamboo blinds, evoking a nostalgic yet delightful holiday spirit.

Staying away from the usual Tet animal mascots, I decide to invite people’s attention and concern to the fundamental of spring – nature. Arriving from folk paintings, the concept of four prosperity trees – “Tùng Cúc Trúc Mai” (pine, daisy, bamboo, and apricot blossoms) is reproduced in a minimal and symbolic aesthetic while pairing with fresh and colorful tints. The familiar vases in your home this year are no more filled with flowers but “luck – the money” that is ready to deliver to your beloved ones.

The cut-out structure of the envelope not only expresses the elegant curvy shape but also the inside greeting card. This design breaks the ordinary form of normal lucky envelopes and fully exhibits the main concept of Bat Trang ceramic vases. Moreover, the patterns of both outer and inner components promote the continuous yet illusory effect that engages more excitement.

To promote the idea of happiness and prosperity, I select the three most appropriate words to describe this Lunar New Year: Tết (Spring) – Tốt (Good) – Tất (All). The wordplay from the key message ‘Tết Tốt Tất – All Good Springs’ depicts the best of luck and happiness in Tet Holiday, recapturing the Vietnamese custom of wishing New Year greetings and giving lucky money. This project also determines my belief in this New Year's good fortune, prosperity, and health awaiting everyone after the previous catastrophic year.

Designed by Alex Dang

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