Category: Design

Minimalissimo Magazine

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the first issue of Minimalissmo Magazine is out. Minimalissmo started in 2009 as an online publication championing the best of minimalism, touching on many areas including art, architecture, fashion, graphic, packaging and industrial design. The driving force behind the website and the magazine is Edinburgh-based designer and editor Carl MH Barenbrug.

As we read in the welcome note from the editor, “the first printed issue is dedicated to highlighting some of our favourite features over the past six years as well as exploring the minimalist design ethos and its influence on creativity”.

The first issue discovers, among others, Danish architecture studio Norm Architects, fashion designer Rad Hourani, director of Vitsoe Mark Adams and Swiss artist Zimoun.

www.minimalissimo.com

November 26, 2015
Enrich & Endure Aprons

We already introduced Enrich and Endure on our blog but since then Sarah and Lorcan Quinn have been rethinking their business. Formerly a homeware brand working with Irish linen and wool, Enrich and Endure now focus on creating artisan, made to last aprons.

While their direction changed slightly, the ethos ethos remains the same – quality materials, longevity, local craftsmanship and top-class design. Both Sarah and Lorcan are big foodies and their passion for the industry can be seen in their work.

“The apron idea first came about while we were still involved in the homewares. Basically we really admired and respected the work of our favourite coffee roaster/cafe in Dublin and had always wanted to collaborate with them and so designed them aprons for their baristas. Word of mouth soon spread that we were designing customised Irish linen aprons and so when more and more restaurants and coffee shops started to approach us about working together we began to think seriously about the idea of aprons” – says Sarah who is mostly involved in the design and production.

“After around 6 months of development we decided to go for it full steam ahead. We really love it. We are constantly on the road meeting restauranteurs, chefs and coffee shop owners, getting to see behind the scenes of what they do and seeing first hand the passion they have for their craft. I’m sure you will agree, working with like minded creative people is so much fun”.

www.enrichandendure.com

Photos courtesy of Enrich and Endure

November 18, 2015
Stephanie Specht

Stephanie Specht is a freelance graphic designer based in Antwerp, Belgium. Inspired by music, art and fashion, Stephanie describes her work as intuitive, abstract, typographic and minimalistic.

We chat with Stephanie to find out more about what made her become a graphic designer, her workspace and plans for the upcoming months.

www.stephaniespecht.com

Studio photographs by Christophe Derivière.

Please tell us a little about your background and education. The bio on your website mentions that you lived and worked in so many places before going back to Antwerp!

I was born in Antwerp and I studied Graphic Design at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts. I worked at a company for a year and quickly realized I didn’t belong in a structure like that. Also, the routine was killing my creativity. I wanted to do my own thing.

I became self-employed in 2007. Initially, my plan was to stay in Antwerp but, due to a past relationship, I moved to all those different places: Cape Town, Brussels, Princeton and New York. I was living a modern nomadic life which was really inspiring but at the same time exhausting. After a while I really felt I wanted to settle down somewhere. Suddenly I wanted the opposite lifestyle than the one I was living. I was used to working from ‘home’, wherever ‘home’ would be but, if I look back at those couple of years, I think I wasn’t really 100% focused on my work. There was too much distraction.

It’s only been since 2014 that things really started changing for me. I decided I would stay in Antwerp for a longer time. I did not plan on moving anywhere soon again. I became more focused on my work and somehow attracted more interesting clients.

What made you interested in graphic design in the first place?

Initially, I wanted to become an architect. In Antwerp, where I grew up, I started an architectural design course when I was 16. I didn’t know what graphic design was, but I’d always loved to draw. At one point, one of my teachers advised me to change direction since my maths weren’t good enough. So I started a more general art course, and instead of focusing on buildings, I began looking at the style of architectural movements (Bauhaus, Brutalism, De Stijl, Modernism). I became fascinated by the lettering on buildings. Only by looking at these typefaces, you could tell the years in which these buildings were built. During my last year in high school, a typography teacher introduced me to graphic design.

Tell us about your workspace, Studio Specht, and its uses.

I moved into my first real ‘office’ at the beginning of this year. I really dislike the word office – it’s more like a creation room, a work space, a studio! My studio is in an old building materials warehouse. There are 12 studios in total, all occupied by creatives. The interior was designed by Nicolas Petillon. The space is really rectangular and when he suggested to use a ceiling-high curtain line in the form of a wave through the space, my first reaction was ‘why break this space!?’ But he was right. The curtain gives the space even more ‘space.’ I can open the curtain wherever I want and change the whole room.

I also have a marble Knoll table in my meeting room. It belonged to my grandmother who passed away a few weeks before I opened up the studio and I inherited it. The curtain follows the shape of the table and this space now almost feels like a sanctuary. It’s beautiful. I decided to paint my floor apricot white which adds a certain warmth and feminine touch to the all concrete white space. I also have a lot of plants. It feels like a soft jungle. Every time I walk into the studio I feel inspired and happy. Nicolas did a great job, really.

The first couple of months I organized a few Open Days where people could just come, walk in and look at new works I produced. I have done some collaborations that I’m really happy with and those works are also on view here. From time to time, I get emails from people who want to make an appointment to come and have a look at my studio. Sometimes they are just curious to see where I work, sometimes they want to buy an illustration. It’s nice to meet people this way, because they are different to my clients.

How would you describe your work? Where do you draw inspiration from?

My work is intuitive, abstract, typographic and minimalistic. I love to find purity in lines and forms.

Music, art and fashion are a big source of inspiration for me – but it can be anything really; a conversation, a photograph…

Do you have a particular favourite piece of work or something you feel especially proud of?

I think the Up Up Up illustration is one of my favorite personal works now. I recently created the identity for this new music documentary television show called Off the Record. It was the first time I designed something for TV. I am very happy with the result. It’s great to see my designs moving on screen!

What are your plans for the upcoming months?

I just finished a really intense book project in New York. I was there for two months. I am really tired so I am working on just a few jobs – I need to relax a little. Right now I am working on a redesign for S Magazine. S is a deluxe art and fashion biannual committed to gorgeous fashion photography, intelligent long-form articles, and experimental visual art. The magazine often changes style (designer). They have an identity but they like to play around with different typography and layout within the magazine itself.

I’m also busy updating Belgian artist Leon Vranken’s website. His work is amazing – I love working with his beautiful images. I also might design some new book covers for Das Mag, a new young Amsterdam based publisher.

November 12, 2015
The City Works

Founded in 2015 by Sylvia Moritz and Rowan Ottesen, The City Works is an urban-themed brand of stationery, gifts and souvenirs. Paying incredible attention to detail, Sylvia and Rowan create meticulous illustrations that tell the stories behind the cities they use for inspiration, providing unique designs in which you can get lost for hours.

We spoke to Rowan about the beginnings of The City Works, their design process and future plans.

www.the-city-works.com

What made you start The City Works? Could you tell us a little bit about your backgrounds?

Both myself and Sylvia Moritz studied design at Camberwell College of Arts. After graduating, we worked in a few design agencies while Sylvia grew a career in printmaking, featuring complex cityscapes.

We founded The City Works together with the simple principal to draw the world. We wanted to combine the unique intricacy of Sylvia’s ‘citysphere’ prints with our love for travel and our obsession with paper, to make more affordable merchandise that anyone who loves cities could enjoy.

Why did you decide to focus on an urban theme for all your products?

Cities are obviously fascinating places, that grow and evolve over time. They’re immensely diverse and complicated, populated by millions of people who each have their own story and reason for being where they are.

We think there is a charming complexity to cities, and it’s frustrating for many souvenirs to focus on the typical skyline of famous landmarks. No city is complete without it’s people. When observed from afar, every city is a beautiful, unique living fabric.

Your illustrations are full of intricate details. Please tell us about the inspiration behind them and the process you follow to create them.

Of course the intricacy lies in the fact that, no matter how many times you walk down a street, you can always see something new. Be it a person, a vehicle, a piece of graffiti, a strange colour combination, or a lost architectural style. The city is a massive collection of details, little inspirations that many people may miss as they walk down the high street on their phone.

To create our designs a vast body of research is needed to inform what are essentially hand-drawings. There is something about drawing the designs by hand before digitally rendering them that adds a necessary human character.

An important element of your products is that they combine traditional and contemporary production methods. Could you tell us a little more about this?

We describe ourselves partly as a contemporary souvenirs brand. We feel that giving our products a sense of place. where possible, makes them more meaningful, especially as personal mementos for yourself or loved one.

As lovely and nostalgic as traditional methods are, it’s sometime impractical, so we have suppliers with the technology to produce our digital and lithographic prints, as well as the white ink printing for our ‘A5 London Notebooks’.

Sylvia’s background and knowledge of printmaking means we still enjoy the rewarding side of making things ourselves. Every greetings card we make is individually hand-printed in house, the covers for our ‘Debossed Minibooks’ are hand-pressed with a mangle, and our notebooks are hand-sewn and trimmed.

It’s a labour of love that we would love to do forever. As The City Works moves from city to city the level of quality and attention to detail in everything we do will always be a priority.

London, Vienna, Bethlehem…where’s next?

There’s endless possibilities but we haven’t settled on one. It’s important to us that places we depict aren’t always mainstream tourist destinations. There are incredible parts of the world that maybe don’t get the attention they deserve, but maybe that’s they way it’s meant to be.

Right now our focus is developing new ideas and expanding and establishing our ‘Lost in London’ and ‘Free in Vienna’ collections in their respective cities, while making ‘Bethlehem’ available for the busy Christmas period.

We have been approached a couple of times about the possibility of Scottish cities, and with so much history, Scotland will be a place we study eventually. Bath is also a stunning place that we’ve been meaning to draw for a while. It’s a favourite of ours because it’s a world heritage site with an interesting colour palette. Just like any new collection, we want to try to take our time and do every city justice.

When we feel our company has grown to a certain point, we’d like to open up the location of our future collections to our customers, and allow them to vote for a place that they wanted to see ‘cityworked’. After all, they live there.

All photos courtesy of The City Works.

November 2, 2015
Genevieve Sweeney

Genevieve Sweeney is a premium British knitwear label producing womenswear and menswear garments manufactured in the British Isles with fibres sourced from Italy, Yorkshire and small UK mills. In this video, designer Genevieve talks about her label and introduces the artisans and makers she works with to create Genevieve Sweeney’s unique pieces.

www.genevievesweeney.com

September 21, 2015