Exhibition graphics for an extensive Frida Kahlo show at the V&A museum in London.
After suffering near fatal injuries in a bus accident in her late teens, Frida was bed-bound for a long time. During this period, she started painting and drawing, using a specially designed easel and a mirror suspended above her bed. Our design is referring to this unique mode of artistic creation through custom built angular exhibition panels with a reflective core.
Frida never fully recovered from her horrific accident and spent much of her adult life in a wheelchair. In an effort make the exhibition more inclusive to visitors with comparable disabilities, we collaborated with focus-groups and most exhibition panels and object labels were hung up below average height.
with BOB Design, Photography by Jack Hobhouse Lecture in progress Fonts in use
Business cards for a London-based architectural practice focusing on the theme of video game urbanism. The design incorporates small icons inspired by the depiction of movements and action in gaming classics.
‘The life of Iranian women is paradoxical. On the street, they are obliged to follow the laws of the Islamic Republic, having to wear headscarves, and not being allowed to shake hands with a man, for example. In private, many of them wear short dresses, have parties and boyfriends. The young generation wants to escape from this contradictory life, but is not convinced that another revolutionary movement would be of much use. Their protest manifests itself in daily life — they silently try to bring change.’
Larissa Holaschke’s research into those issues resulted in a book providing a new narrative on women’s issues in Iran beyond the veil of Islam and Western stereotypes. The book can be read from the back or from the front, in Western or Persian reading order, and offers varying insights depending on the reading direction.
185 × 260mm, 216 pages
Submission to abracradama’s open call for posters for a magazine about the zeitgeist of food. In the West, Asian and especially Chinese take away food is frequently framed as being dirty, unhealthy and causing headaches, nausea and food poisoning due to the common use of monosodium glutamate (MSG) in its preparation. In the 1960s, this racist trope even found its way into medical journals, where it was coined as Chinese restaurant syndrome. However, no serious scientific study has since been able to prove any link between the consumption of MSG and these symptoms. The continued popularity of this myth only becomes more questionable when one checks the labels of popular mass produced crisp brands or seasonings, such as Pringles or Knorr’s Aromat, which are full of MSG.
A1
A flickbook to show 39 weeks in the making: each week of growth is represented by a fruit or vegetable of the respective size.
with BOB Design, dandad
Pitch for a theatre in Notting Hill. The brief was to incorporate their existing colour palette, logo and a square as main design element. Their plays focus on people who are usually not featured in plays. Those who are forgotten, disconnected, and disenfranchised.
‘Suzy Storck’ is set in a forgotten rural region of France, and tells the story of a lonely and isolated housewife, who is surrounded by screaming children and an absent husband.
‘Trust’ depicts the breakdown of a relationship. As the couple tries to work out what might enable them to trust each other again, it gradually becomes clear that the play is also exploring our damaged and abusive relationship with the system we live in.
A3, with BOB Design
‘Rübis & Stübis’ is a restaurant located within a nature reserve in Flaach, Switzerland. The name stems from a Swiss German idiom used to describe when someone completely eats up everything on their plate. Applied to the restaurant, it refers to its approach to food: sustainable eating with as little food waste as possible.
with BOB Design
The Transcontinental Express was a one-day international arts event that took place on an abandoned train platform in the heart of Amsterdam–Oost. It explored the relationship that modern day man has developed to time, combined with the current possibilities for digital trans-time-zone connections. The concept for the identity found inspiration in symbols connected to railway sign language, international flag patterns and the notions of time travels. A choice for primary colors and classic printing techniques, such as risograph, evoked a nostalgic tone. Alongside paper folders and booklets, twelve oversized flags – representing different time zones – were silk-screened, to demarcate the exhibition space and to enhance the illusion of an outside theatrical space.
1200 x 1200 mm, Risographed and screenprinted, with Mainstudio, id pure
First iteration of a slow redesign for UK-based architecture practice Merrett Houmøller. The brief was to come up with a design surrounding the term ‘palimpsest’. Instead of scraping, washing off or printing on their existing business cards, which would have been a literal interpretation of the driving theme, we printed on paper that was made using process residues from organic products such as almonds or grapes. As their previous cards contained hand-written text we used a typeface which matched it very closely.
with BOB Design
Aiming to facilitate critical analysis on global issues, we created ‘Rather Read’, a self-publishing platform for aspiring researchers and writers. The visual identity is centred around three modified R’s and photographs of celebrities in the process of reading a book. The promotional posters, which are printed by risograph, are changing three times a year and never feature obvious words such as ‘read’ or ‘book’.
with Siiri Tännler
Design for a fictional stone sculptor Marc Arb. In german-language death notices, there is often the expression “aus dem Leben gerissen” which means that someone has been “torn” out of his life. Therefore, the visual elements feature torn images of stones, which are stacked to resemble real tombstone. To contrast these fuzzy elements, the font “Wide” has been created for his posters. It is very geometrical and varies in its width. This should represent the different stages of life which vary in their length, intensity, and importance.
Assisted Sara de Bondt Studio in designing and illustrating the first issue of Dirty Furniture, a design criticism magazine with each issue taking a different item as a springboard to explore related topics, more interested in the messy reality than the glossy lifestyle presentation.
165 × 230mm, 144 pages, with Sara de Bondt Studio, dezeen
Two Vietnamese Modernists exhibits the work of two masters of Vietnamese modernism, Bui Xuan Phai (1920 – 1988) and Nguyen Tu Nghiem (1919 – 2016). During and after the wars, there was a lack of materials and supplies for these artists to create their work. Canvases were often made from found materials such as text books, cardboard and cement bags. The cover artwork of this book has been screen-printed onto brown card to reflect the thriftiness these masters embraced when creating their work.
15 × 305mm, 108 pages, with BOB Design
First book in a minigraph series for London based AHMM architects. It provides an overview of the history of the building and the different stages of refurbishment. AHMM’s design for New Scotland Yard is a remodelling and extension of the Curtis Green Building, a 1930s building on the Thames Embankment, which was an earlier home of the Metropolitan Police Service.
148 × 217mm, 122 pages, with BOB Design
While studying graphic design in Lucerne, my classmate Siiri and I got the chance to design a book about our school’s traditional yearly field trip to Paris. The book is a collection of the best student works of the past ten years. It is split into three parts. The first and second one are printed by risograph and feature a study on semiotics and sketchbook material that our class collected during our stay in Paris. The last part presents finished layouts and descriptions of selected past projects.
190 × 260mm, 206 pages, with Siiri Tännler
Annual report for Ammodo, a Dutch foundation that promotes the arts and sciences in an international framework. The cover utilizes the logo on half of the available paper space; the other half is used for the content of the reports. In the reports, information about awarded projects is interspersed by photography of them; the foundation’s financial information is set in the identity’s typeface, Maax, and printed on a different paper stock, though also making use of the identity's trademark royal blue.
with Mainstudio
Visual identity for a web developer and interaction designer (website following soon). The client describes his practice as an intersection, an overlap between humans and technology. The same thinking is applied to the logo. A logo generator allows him to create a new, unique logo for each new application, such as invoices or business letters.
Submission for Furora Film Festival in Wedding, Berlin. Each designer was assigned to one of the female directed films shown at the festival. My poster design is based on a surrealistic German-Russian movie about a young man (LEV) who uses his imaginary world as an escape while his mother is trapped in the traditional gender stereotype. The lowercase ‘e’ in the centre of the poster combines latin and cyrillic script to reflect the bond and imaginary world that holds mother and son together.
A1
Tennis players tend to moan, groan, and shout loudly during matches. A Swiss Sunday paper called ‘Sonntagszeitung’ published a short article about this phenomenon titled ‘Soundtrack des Stöhnens’. The article referred to a website on which one could click on portraits of tennis stars like Roger Federer and listen to their moaning during a tournament. I decided to visualise these strange sounds within the basic structure of newspaper pages.
I was highly involved in redesigning the studio‘s website. We also made completely new photos of the studio’s projects for the site. As Mainstudio mainly concentrates on editorial design, the website’s structure resembles the one of a book.
photography by Sabrina Bongiovanni with Mainstudio, it’s nice that
In an effort to make academic content more reader friendly to both academic and non-academic audiences, I created and implemented a new editorial design for UCL’s School of Public Policy’s annual journal.
170 × 245mm, 128 pages
Concept and editorial design of the “Zurich Globalist”, a biannual student’s magazine on international politics, starting with their third issue.
We split the website of these Tel Aviv-based architects in two. The exterior projects are placed on the right side and the interior ones on the left.
with Mainstudio
Submission for Mut zur Wut 2013. On 24 April 2013, more than 1,100 people died as a result of a clothing factory collapse Bangladesh. I could not forget the photographs of the catastrophe and its victims shown in the media at the time. Especially the picture of a couple hugging each other while dying strongly touched me. Consequently, I started to think about our consumerism and the people working themselves to death for our lifestyle. My anger culminated in this poster.
A1
The weekly journal “Das Magazin” allowed us to use their articles and photographies for a typography project. I chose the transcript of a roundtable talk with some local celebrities from Berne, and focussed on the volume of the spoken words. At such informal gatherings voice levels are constantly changing. The bigger and heavier the font, the higher is the assertiveness of a certain speaker in the babble of voices. The original article was marked with detailed time data. Therefore, I replaced the page numbers with the specific time.
A4